Negative Keyword Management | Cut the Wasted Spend

Negative keywords are the list that decides where your ad will not appear. It sounds like a minor setting, but in accounts I take over I regularly find that a visible share of the budget goes to searches that will never convert.

Why it is necessary

However carefully your keyword list is chosen, Google also shows your ad on searches you never wrote down. Broad and phrase match do this deliberately — the point is to find new opportunities. But without protection, that means paying for irrelevant traffic.

The classic example: you sell a service, and your ad appears to people searching how to do it themselves. That person clicks, you pay, and the chance of a sale is zero.

Three main negative groups

First, searches with no commercial intent: free, how-to, job, internship and similar words. Second, products or services you do not offer — your ad can trigger on an adjacent category. Third, entirely irrelevant searches triggered by word similarity.

All three groups come out of the search terms report. The list is built from real data, not guesses; hypothetical negative lists written up front usually cut the wrong things.

Where the list should live

Negative lists can sit at campaign level or as a shared list at account level. Keeping the universally applicable ones (job, free and so on) in a shared list prevents repeating the same work in every new campaign.

Campaign-specific ones should stay in their campaign. A word that is negative in one campaign may be exactly your target in another — piling everything into one place destroys that distinction.

The match type trap

Negative keywords have match types too, and the logic works differently from regular keywords. Broad negatives block searches containing those words but do not treat word order and close variants the way regular keywords do. When this difference is not understood, either too few or too many searches get blocked.

Over-blocking can be more dangerous than under-blocking: you may unknowingly cut converting searches and lose volume. That is why, before adding a negative, I check whether that term has converted in the past.

How I make it sustainable

I run search term scanning with AI agents: the report is reviewed regularly, suspicious terms are surfaced to me, and I decide what goes on the negative list. Done manually, this work usually happens every few weeks and losses accumulate in between; automated scanning closes that gap.

How do we start? First I scan your search terms report and lay out concretely where the budget goes. I send you the terms to cut with the reasoning. You can reach me from the contact page.

Frequently Asked Questions

How big should the negative list be?

Size is not the goal. What matters is that irrelevant terms spending budget are cut. Lists with thousands of words are usually copied templates that do not reflect your own account’s reality.

Can I use negative keywords in Performance Max?

Account-level negative keyword lists apply to PMax too. Since in-campaign control is limited, the account-level list becomes even more important in accounts running PMax.

Should I add my own brand as a negative?

It depends. Because brand searches are cheap and convert well, they are usually kept in a separate campaign and negated in the others. That way the cost and return of brand traffic can be measured without contaminating the rest.