Negative keywords: the quickest way to stop your budget from running out

Negative keywords stop your ads for searches that cannot possibly end in a sale. This is the fastest saving in Google Ads, because it needs no new creatives and no new budget. In accounts I audit, between 10% and 30% of search spend typically goes to queries without a single conversion after them. The source is the search terms report: the real words you appear for. Queries for free, for jobs and for second-hand almost always get excluded. You add them at campaign or ad group level, and recurring themes go into a list for the whole account. Exact match excludes one query, phrase match a whole expression, and broad match any query containing all the words.

My name is Hristiyan Panov — a performance marketing consultant with over 5 years’ experience and over €2 000 000 Managed advertising budgets for over 90 companies on Google and Meta. Below is an explanation of how to identify negative keywords, at what level to add them, and the mistakes most accounts make.

Where do negative words come from?

From the report on search terms — Campaigns → Keywords → Search phrases. This is the only report that shows what people actually find you for, rather than what you think you’re advertising.

The method I use: filter for the last 30 days, sort by spend in descending order, then filter by the ‘Conversions’ column. Anything with a spend exceeding the value of a single order and zero conversions goes onto a review list.

Which categories are almost always eliminated?

• Enquiries of an informational nature — „how to“, „free“, „do it yourself“, „recipe“, „diagram“. People are looking for knowledge, not a salesperson.
• Job searches — „jobs“, „salaries“, „vacancies“. You pay for candidates, not for clients.
• Competitors by name — unless you have a deliberate strategy for this and track the results separately.
• Second-hand and repairs — at a shop selling new goods.
• Products that you do not stock — the most common source of leakage in the case of a broad overlap.

At what stage are they added?

On three levels, each with a different purpose:

• Account-level list — for the general categories: work, free, torrent, „second-hand“. This applies to all campaigns and is managed in one place.
• Campaign level — for things that don’t apply everywhere. For example, „cheap“ might be seen as negative in a premium campaign but perfectly appropriate in a sale.
• Group level — to distribute traffic amongst groups so that each one receives its own request, rather than competing with one another.

Which type of match should you use?

There’s a catch here. Negative keywords work according to different rules from ordinary ones — with negatives there is no expansion to similar variants. If you add „repair“ as an exact match, „repairs“ will still be accepted.

Therefore: for individual words, use broad matching; for phrases where word order is important, use phrase matching. Exact matching is rarely used with negatives and is almost always a mistake.

How often is this check carried out?

For active accounts — weekly for the first two months, then once every two weeks. The search report is not a one-off task; any change to the budget, bid or season triggers new requests.

Outside the schedule, the check is done immediately after:

• launching a new campaign or a new ad group;
• changing the match type to a broader one;
• raising the daily advertising budget, which brings the account into a new range of queries;
• changing the bidding strategy or the target CPA;
• a seasonal peak, when the wording of searches changes.

The check itself is short: the search terms report for the last 30 days, sorted by spend descending, a look at the rows with spend and zero conversions. Keep a record of what you excluded and on what date. If the volume drops later, that record shows whether the cause is the added negatives or lies outside the account. Without it, every explanation for the drop remains a guess.

When do negative words cause harm?

When they are applied too aggressively. Any filtering narrows the scope and reduces the amount of data the algorithm uses to learn. In a campaign with few conversions, this can cause it to revert to the training phase.

The working rule: cut queries with a proven zero result and sufficient spend. Do not cut on a feeling that “this word doesn’t sound right to me”.

The ways to harm yourself are specific:

• A negative that excludes your own keyword. An account-level list can block a word you are deliberately bidding on. Google flags such conflicts — review them before you apply a new list.
• A common word in broad match. “Price” or “quote” look harmless, yet they cut off exactly the commercial queries.
• An old list attached to a new campaign. It carries over decisions made for a different product and a different season.

The signs that you have gone too far: the campaign stops spending its daily advertising budget and the number of distinct queries in the report shrinks week after week.

What about Performance Max?

With Performance Max the control is more limited — negatives are added at account level or through a list applied to the campaign. This is one of the reasons PMax is launched after the Search campaigns have already been cleaned up, not before.

The difference is in the data too. PMax does not give a search terms report in the familiar form; queries are grouped by category and some of them stay hidden. That is why the clean-up there is coarser and rests on:

• An account-level negative list, which applies to both Search and PMax. It holds the universal themes: jobs, free, second-hand.
• Brand exclusion, when you want PMax to bring in new customers rather than collect your own branded searches and report their return as its own.

A cleaned-up Search account does a second job too: the list built from its search report is the ready-made negative list for PMax. That is why the order matters — first the report in Search, then the start of PMax.

FAQ — Frequently Asked Questions about negative keywords

How many negative words are normal?

There’s no set rule. A small account with a limited range of services might manage on 40. A shop with a wide range regularly exceeds 400. It’s not the number that matters, but how much expenditure they save.

Will my conversion rate drop?

If you’ve only removed bids that didn’t result in conversions — no. Your costs will fall whilst sales remain the same, which boosts your return on investment.

Can I add negative amounts all at once from the statement?

Yes, the search report allows you to highlight and add the selected phrases directly as negative keywords. It’s the quickest way to carry out a major clean-up.

Do negative keywords work for brand searches?

Yes, and that’s useful. Excluding your own brand from general campaigns shows what the actual cost of new customers is.

Is there a limit?

The lists can hold up to 5,000 words each, and the campaign accepts up to 10,000 negative entries. In practice, nobody comes close.

Conclusion

Negative keywords aren’t just a formality. They are the only change in Google Ads that delivers an immediate return on investment without compromising volume, provided it is based on data rather than guesswork.

If you haven’t looked at your search report for months, that’s probably where you’ll find the easiest money to make this month.

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