Just so I'm clear, because negative keywords have never played a big role in my past affiliate endeavors and I want to ensure I got this right.

If I enter a negative keyword into my campaign that just happens to be in some of my keyword phrases, will Google simply not trigger an ad display on those keyword phrases at all or what?

For example: if my keyword phrase is raging blue widgets online

And in my negative keywords I have: -raging -online

Would ONLY blue widgets trigger an ad display if I'm using Exact Match?

But in Broad and Phrase it would still trigger an ad display?

In the past I've always thought of myself as a get inside your head keyword guru so I never used Broad Match in search. But I wanna give it a try now after reading the modules, so I'm a little confused trying to grasp how negative keywords will effect the different match types

The idea behind negative keywords is to keep your ad from showing up if those negative keywords are used. Say for example you're bidding for 'blue widgets' You're add might show up for searches like

blue widgets
buy blue widgets
free blue widgets
cheap blue widgets.

The first two above are probably fine as far as your concerned, but assuming you sell your blue widgets you probably don't need your ad showing up for 'free blue widgets' so you'd list 'free' as a negative keywords. Depending on how much you sell your widgets for and the image you want to present you may or may not want to list 'cheap' as a negative keyword.

Just think of negative keywords as any word you don't want your ad showing up for when it's part of the search.

As you wrote the example here, you will finish not having traffic.
If your keyword phrase contain your negative keyword, than your ads will not appear.


If your keyword phrase is widgets online and you do not want your ads to appear when the word raging is associated with above phrase, than you should add raging as negative keyword. This assures you that your ads will not appear for widgets online raging... or some other combination.