Stop Wasting Ad Spend With a Proper Negative Keywords Strategy

Every Google Ads account bleeds money to irrelevant searches. Someone looking for “free accounting software” clicks your ad for premium accounting services. A job seeker searching “digital marketing jobs” triggers your campaign selling digital marketing services. Each click costs you money and delivers nothing. Negative keywords are the mechanism that stops this from happening, and most accounts either don’t use them aggressively enough or set them once and never revisit them.

At Gorilla Marketing, we build negative keyword strategies into every Google Ads account before the first dollar gets spent, then refine them weekly based on live search term data. This guide walks through the full process: how negative keywords work, how to find the ones you need, how match types affect what gets blocked, and how to build a management system that keeps improving over time.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are terms you add to your Google Ads campaigns to prevent your ads from showing when those terms appear in a search query. Where regular keywords tell Google “show my ad when people search for this,” negative keywords tell Google “don’t show my ad when this term is involved.”

If you sell commercial HVAC systems and someone searches “how to fix my home AC unit,” that click is worthless to you. Adding “home” or “residential” to your negative keyword list keeps your ad out of that auction entirely. You don’t pay for the click. Your budget stays focused on commercial buyers. Your CTR improves because you’re only showing to people who might actually convert.

Simple concept. The execution is where most accounts fall short.

Why Most Negative Keyword Lists Are Too Short

Google’s default behavior is expansive. Broad match and phrase match keywords cast a wide net, and Google’s close variant matching has gotten more aggressive over the past several years. Your keyword “accounting software” might trigger searches for “free accounting spreadsheet templates” or “accounting degree programs.” Match type expansion means you need negative keywords to compensate for traffic Google is pulling in that you never asked for.

The typical account has a handful of obvious negatives added during setup and nothing else. Maybe someone blocked “free” and “jobs” on day one and called it done. That’s not a strategy. That’s a gesture.

A properly maintained account adds new negatives weekly. The search terms report generates fresh candidates every time you check it. Seasonal shifts, trending topics, new competitor activity, and changes to Google’s matching logic all introduce new irrelevant queries over time. An account running $20,000 a month with a stale negative keyword list is almost certainly wasting thousands of dollars on searches that never had a chance of converting.

How Negative Keyword Match Types Work

This is where most advertisers make mistakes. Negative keyword match types work differently from regular keyword match types. They don’t expand to close variants, synonyms, or misspellings the way positive keywords do. If you add “running shoe” as a negative, it won’t automatically block “running shoes.” You have to add both.

Understanding the three match types is essential for building a list that blocks what you need without accidentally suppressing valuable traffic.

Negative Broad Match

This is the default when you add a negative keyword without any formatting. Your ad won’t show when a search contains all the words in your negative keyword, in any order. But it will still show if the search only contains some of those words.

If your negative broad match keyword is running shoes:

Blocked: “blue running shoes,” “running shoes for women,” “shoes for running trails”

Not blocked: “running gear,” “basketball shoes,” “running”

Broad match negatives cast the widest net. Use them when you’re confident that any combination of those words is irrelevant to your business.

Negative Phrase Match

Added with quotation marks around the term. Your ad won’t show when a search contains the exact phrase in that exact word order, even if there are additional words before or after.

If your negative phrase match keyword is “running shoes”:

Blocked: “buy running shoes,” “running shoes discount,” “best running shoes 2026”

Not blocked: “shoes for running,” “running trail shoes”

Phrase match negatives are the workhorse of most negative keyword lists. They block the specific phrase while allowing queries where the words appear in a different order or context.

Negative Exact Match

Added with brackets around the term. Your ad won’t show only when someone searches for that exact term with no additional words.

If your negative exact match keyword is [running shoes]:

Blocked: “running shoes” and nothing else

Not blocked: “best running shoes,” “running shoes sale,” “buy running shoes”

Exact match negatives are surgical. Use them when you need to block one very specific query without affecting anything else.

Which Match Type Should You Default To?

Phrase match. In most cases, when you identify an irrelevant term in your search terms report, you want to block that phrase and any query that contains it. Phrase match does that without being so broad that it catches queries you actually want.

Google Ads defaults to exact match when you add negatives directly from the search terms report interface. Change it. Exact match only blocks that one specific query, while variations of the same irrelevant search keep coming through. Get in the habit of switching to phrase match unless you have a specific reason not to.

How to Find Negative Keywords

Reactive discovery through the search terms report is where most advertisers start and stop. That’s only one piece of the process. A strong negative keyword strategy combines proactive research before campaigns launch with ongoing discovery after they’re running.

Pre-Launch Research

Before you spend a dollar, you can predict many of the irrelevant searches that will trigger your ads. Pull up Google’s Keyword Planner, enter your core keywords, and scan the full list of suggestions. Look for terms that share your root keywords but target completely different intent.

Common categories to block before launch:

Job-related terms – “salary,” “jobs,” “hiring,” “career,” “resume,” “interview”

Educational/informational queries – “what is,” “definition,” “examples,” “template,” “course,” “certification” (if you’re selling a service, not education)

Free/cheap modifiers – “free,” “cheap,” “discount,” “coupon,” “open source” (if you’re selling premium products or services)

DIY intent – “how to build,” “DIY,” “tutorial,” “step by step” (if you’re selling a done-for-you service)

Wrong audience – “B2C” terms if you’re B2B, “wholesale” or “bulk” if you’re retail, “enterprise” if you’re SMB-focused

This isn’t guesswork. It’s pattern recognition. If you sell commercial plumbing services, you know before launch that “DIY plumbing fix,” “plumbing salary,” and “free plumbing estimate template” are waste. Block them immediately.

The Search Terms Report

This is your primary ongoing discovery tool. In Google Ads, navigate to Insights and Reports then Search terms to see the actual queries that triggered your ads.

Sort by cost first. The searches burning the most budget with zero conversions are your highest-priority negative candidates. Then sort by impressions to find high-volume irrelevant queries that may not have generated clicks yet but are diluting your impression share and dragging down CTR.

What to look for:

Queries with spend but no conversions over a meaningful time window

Queries where the intent clearly doesn’t match your offer

Queries containing competitor brand names (unless you’re intentionally running competitor campaigns)

Queries with absurdly low CTR, which signals the search didn’t match what your ad was offering

One important limitation: Google doesn’t show every search term that triggered your ads. Queries with very low volume get grouped into a “search terms (other)” bucket that you can’t see. This means the search terms report is your best source but not a complete one. Pre-launch research and ongoing vigilance fill the gaps.

Competitor and Industry Signals

If your sales team keeps fielding calls from people looking for something you don’t offer, those mismatches often trace back to ad queries you haven’t blocked. Industry forums and support tickets surface the same patterns. Also type your core keywords into Google and scan the autocomplete suggestions and “People also ask” boxes. These show the full range of queries people associate with your terms, and many represent intent you don’t want to pay for.

Structuring Your Negative Keywords: Account, Campaign, and Ad Group Levels

Google Ads lets you apply negative keywords at three levels. Using the right level for each negative prevents both wasted spend and accidental over-blocking.

Account-Level Negatives

These apply to every campaign in the account. Use them for terms that are universally irrelevant to your entire business. If you’re a B2B SaaS company, “free download” is never going to be a relevant query for any of your campaigns. Block it at account level and never think about it again.

Account-level negatives are managed under Tools then Shared library then Negative keyword lists, or directly under Account settings. Google rolled out account-level negatives more broadly in recent years, making it easier to set universal exclusions without maintaining separate lists.

Campaign-Level Negatives

These apply to all ad groups within a single campaign. Use them when a term is irrelevant to one campaign’s theme but might be relevant in another. If you’re running separate campaigns for “accounting software” and “payroll software,” you might add “payroll” as a negative in your accounting campaign and “accounting” as a negative in your payroll campaign. This prevents the campaigns from competing against each other for the same queries.

This technique, sometimes called campaign sculpting or traffic sculpting, keeps your ad groups tightly themed and ensures each query triggers the most relevant ad.

Ad Group-Level Negatives

These are the most granular. Use them when you need surgical control within a campaign. If one ad group targets “enterprise accounting software” and another targets “small business accounting software,” you’d add “small business” as a negative in the enterprise ad group and “enterprise” in the small business ad group.

Ad group negatives are powerful for single keyword ad group (SKAG) structures or any setup where precise query routing matters for ad relevance and Quality Score.

Building and Managing Shared Negative Keyword Lists

Shared negative keyword lists let you create themed groups of negatives and apply them across multiple campaigns at once. This is far more efficient than adding the same terms to each campaign individually, and it makes ongoing management dramatically easier.

How to Create and Organize Shared Lists

In Google Ads, go to Tools then Shared library then Negative keyword lists. Create a new list, give it a descriptive name, add your keywords, and apply it to the relevant campaigns.

Build your lists by theme rather than dumping everything into one master list. This makes it easier to apply the right exclusions to the right campaigns and to audit over time.

Useful list categories:

Universal exclusions – terms irrelevant to your entire business (jobs, careers, salary, free, DIY, tutorial)

Competitor brands – competitor names you want to exclude (unless running competitor campaigns intentionally)

Product/service exclusions – products or services you don’t offer that share keywords with what you do offer

Geographic exclusions – locations you don’t serve (if not already handled by location targeting)

B2B/B2C filter – consumer terms if you’re B2B, or wholesale/enterprise terms if you’re B2C

Five to eight themed lists will cover most accounts. Each list stays manageable, and when you need to add a new negative, you immediately know which list it belongs in.

Why Shared Lists Beat Individual Keywords

When you add negatives directly to individual campaigns, you create a maintenance nightmare. If you discover a new irrelevant term, you have to add it to every campaign separately. If you accidentally block something you shouldn’t, you have to find and remove it from every campaign separately.

Shared lists centralize everything. Update the list once, and every campaign using that list gets the change automatically. For accounts with 10+ campaigns, this is the difference between a manageable process and a full-time job.

The Weekly Search Term Audit

Negative keyword management isn’t a setup task. It’s an ongoing operational discipline. The accounts that perform best are the ones where someone is reviewing search terms every single week.

Here’s a practical audit workflow:

Step 1: Pull the search terms report for the past 7 days. Shorter windows show you what’s happening now, not what happened three months ago.

Step 2: Sort by cost, descending. The most expensive irrelevant queries get addressed first. You’re optimizing for budget impact, not completeness.

Step 3: Flag queries in three buckets:

Block immediately – clearly irrelevant, no chance of conversion

Monitor – ambiguous intent, might be relevant, needs more data

Keep – relevant queries, possibly candidates for new keyword additions

Step 4: Add new negatives to the appropriate shared list or campaign. Use phrase match as your default. Switch to broad match only when any combination of the words is irrelevant. Use exact match only when you need to block one specific query while keeping closely related queries active.

Step 5: Check for over-blocking. Look at your impression volume and impression share trends. A sudden drop after adding negatives means you may have blocked something valuable. Review recent additions and adjust.

This process takes 15 to 20 minutes per campaign once you have a rhythm. It’s one of the highest-ROI activities in PPC management.

Negative Keywords in Performance Max and Other Campaign Types

Negative keywords work differently depending on the campaign type, and some campaign types historically had limited support.

Performance Max (PMax)

Google added account-level negative keyword support that applies to Performance Max campaigns. You can also request campaign-level negatives for PMax through your Google Ads representative, though the self-serve interface has expanded over time. This is worth pursuing if you’re running PMax campaigns alongside Search, because PMax can match against very broad queries that your Search campaigns would never trigger.

Shopping Campaigns

Traditional Shopping campaigns support negative keywords at the campaign and ad group level. Since Shopping campaigns use product feed data rather than keyword targeting, negatives are your primary tool for controlling which searches trigger your product ads. If you sell high-end furniture and your Shopping ads keep appearing for “cheap furniture” or “used furniture,” negative keywords are the fix.

Display and Video campaigns use different targeting mechanisms (placements, audiences, topics), so negative keywords don’t apply there. Placement and audience exclusions handle the equivalent function for those campaign types.

Common Negative Keyword Mistakes

Getting negatives wrong costs money in two directions. Too few, and you waste spend on irrelevant clicks. Too many, and you suppress traffic that would have converted.

Adding Negatives at the Wrong Match Type

This is the most frequent mistake. Adding “repair” as a negative broad match when you sell both products and repair services means you’ve just blocked every query containing “repair” across the entire campaign. If your repair services campaign and your product campaign share a negative keyword list, you’ve got a problem. Match type selection requires thinking through every query pattern that keyword might appear in.

Set-and-Forget Lists

A negative keyword list built in January and never touched again is a liability by March. New products, seasonal trends, trending news events, and changes to Google’s matching algorithms all introduce new irrelevant queries over time. The list needs active maintenance.

Blocking Competitor Terms Without a Strategy

Some advertisers reflexively add competitor brand names as negatives. That’s the right move if you genuinely don’t want to show for competitor searches. But competitor campaigns can be highly profitable if your offering provides a clear alternative. Before you block a competitor name, ask whether appearing for those searches might be an opportunity you’re leaving on the table.

Not Adding Variations

Negative keywords don’t expand to close variants. “Running shoes” as a negative won’t block “running shoe” (singular). “Plumber” won’t block “plumbers” or “plumbing.” When you add a negative, think through the common variations: singular and plural forms, verb tenses, abbreviations, and misspellings. Add them all.

Over-Blocking with Broad Match Negatives

Adding broad match negatives for common words can suppress far more traffic than intended. If you add “software” as a negative broad match because you sell hardware, you’ll block every query that contains “software” anywhere, including “hardware vs software comparison” or “software-compatible hardware.” Phrase or exact match would be safer choices here.

Measuring the Impact of Your Negative Keyword Work

Negative keywords produce measurable improvements across several metrics. Track these to confirm your list is working and to justify continued investment in the process:

Click-through rate (CTR) – should increase as irrelevant impressions get eliminated

Conversion rate – should increase as clicks become more qualified

Cost per conversion (CPA) – should decrease as waste gets cut

Wasted spend – track the dollar amount spent on queries you later added as negatives. This is your baseline for improvement.

Impression share – may decrease slightly for broad terms (you’re choosing not to compete for those queries) but should increase for your core terms as budget gets reallocated

The biggest gains usually come in the first month of active negative keyword management. Accounts that haven’t been audited in a while often see CPA drop by double digits after the first round of cleanup. After that, improvements are incremental but compound over time.

Don’t confuse lower impression volume with lower performance. Fewer impressions from better-qualified searches is the entire point. If your impressions drop 15% but your conversion rate jumps 25%, you’ve won.

Building a Negative Keyword Strategy That Scales

For accounts with significant spend across multiple campaigns, ad hoc negative keyword management doesn’t hold up. You need a system.

Document your lists. Maintain a master reference that catalogs every shared list, its theme, and which campaigns it’s applied to. When someone new takes over the account, they should be able to understand the negative keyword architecture in 10 minutes.

Assign ownership. One person owns the weekly search term audit. Not rotating. One person builds the pattern recognition for what’s normal and what’s new.

Set thresholds. Any query with more than $50 in spend and zero conversions over 30 days gets added. Any query with a conversion rate below 0.5% over 60 days gets flagged for review. Documented thresholds remove guesswork and make the process faster.

Review quarterly. Audit the full negative keyword list set every quarter. Remove negatives added too aggressively. Check whether blocked terms now represent products or services you’ve started offering. A negative that was correct six months ago might be costing you money today.

Use automation carefully. Automated tools and scripts can speed up discovery, but never let automation add negatives without human review. A script that blocks every query below a CTR threshold will eventually block something valuable. Automation suggests. Humans decide.

When to Call in a Specialist

Negative keyword management sounds straightforward in isolation. It gets complicated at scale. An account with 50 campaigns, hundreds of ad groups, and thousands of keywords across Search, Shopping, and PMax needs a negative keyword architecture that’s designed, not improvised. When lists conflict across campaigns, when over-blocking starts suppressing core traffic, or when the search terms report alone can’t explain declining performance, that’s when experienced PPC management makes the difference.

At Gorilla Marketing, negative keyword strategy is built into how we structure and manage every Google Ads account. Not as cleanup. Not as a monthly checkbox. It’s part of the operational rhythm that keeps your budget working for you instead of against you. Senior strategists, not juniors. Continuous optimization, not quarterly reviews.

If your Google Ads spend isn’t delivering the returns it should, the negative keyword list is one of the first places we look.