Of all the ways to improve a Google Ads account without touching the budget, negative keywords are probably the most underused. They don’t need a bigger spend, a new landing page or a change of strategy — just a bit of regular attention to which searches your ads are actually showing up for. And yet when we take on a new account, it’s rare to find a negative keyword list that’s had any real thought put into it since the campaign first went live.
What negative keywords actually do
A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad for a particular search, even if one of your normal keywords would otherwise match it. Add “jobs” as a negative and your ad for “electrician Gloucester” won’t show up when someone searches “electrician jobs Gloucester” looking for work rather than hiring one. It sounds simple because it is — the difficulty isn’t the mechanism, it’s actually sitting down and working out which terms belong on the list.
Without them, campaigns built on broad or phrase match keywords will happily spend money on searches that were never going to convert. Google’s matching has got better over the years at understanding intent, but it still isn’t a mind reader, and it errs on the side of showing your ad rather than not, because that’s what earns Google money too.
The searches that quietly drain a budget
The obvious culprits are the ones most people already exclude: “free”, “jobs”, “DIY”, “how to”. But the ones that cause the real damage are usually more specific to the business, and they only become obvious once you actually look at what’s being spent on them.
A fencing contractor bidding on “fencing” can end up paying for clicks from people searching “fence panels for sale” who want to buy materials, not hire a fitter. A bookkeeper targeting “bookkeeping services” might be picking up “bookkeeping course” or “bookkeeping jobs near me”. A removals company running ads for “man and van” can find a chunk of their budget going to “man and van hire” searches from people wanting to drive the van themselves. None of these are careless keyword choices — they’re the kind of overlap that only shows up once real search data comes in.
Where to find them
The search terms report is the place to look. It shows the actual words and phrases people typed before your ad was shown, sitting underneath the keyword that triggered it, and it’s the single most useful report in the account for this. Most business owners we speak to have never opened it, which is understandable if nobody’s ever pointed them to it, but it’s where most of the wasted spend hides in plain sight.
Going through it doesn’t need to be a weekly ritual, but it’s worth a proper look every few weeks, particularly in the first couple of months of a new campaign when the account is still working out what it should and shouldn’t be matching. After that, a monthly check is usually enough to catch anything new before it costs much.
Building the list without guesswork
It’s tempting to sit down on day one and try to pre-empt every irrelevant search a keyword might pull in, but this usually does more harm than good. Overly cautious negative lists, built before any real data exists, tend to exclude searches that would actually have converted, simply because they looked risky on paper. It’s better to start with the genuinely obvious exclusions — “free”, “jobs”, “DIY”, “cheap” if that’s not your market — and then build the rest reactively from what the search terms report actually shows you.
This is also where match type matters. A broad match negative for “course” blocks anything containing that word, which is usually what you want. But it’s worth checking each addition doesn’t accidentally rule out a phrase you did want — “training course” might be irrelevant for a driving instructor, but “intensive course” almost certainly isn’t.
The mistake of copying someone else’s list
We sometimes see business owners download a generic negative keyword list from a blog or forum and add the whole thing to their account in one go. These lists are rarely wrong exactly, but they’re built for nobody in particular, so they tend to be either too aggressive or missing the terms that actually matter for that specific business. A locksmith and a driving school might both reasonably want to exclude “jobs”, but the rest of their lists should look nothing alike. There’s no substitute for building yours from your own account’s data.
Negative keywords and account structure work together
None of this replaces good campaign structure. A well-built account with tightly grouped keywords and sensible match types will generate far fewer irrelevant clicks in the first place, so negative keywords end up doing less heavy lifting rather than trying to patch over a structure that’s too broad. We covered the budget side of this in a previous post on how much you should budget for Google Ads — tightening up wasted spend through negatives is one of the quickest ways to make an existing budget stretch further, before assuming the answer is simply to spend more.
If you’re setting up a new campaign, it’s worth building negative keyword management into the account structure from the outset rather than treating it as an afterthought. Our Google Ads setup service includes this as standard, and for accounts that are already live, it’s one of the first things we look at as part of ongoing Google Ads management.
A quick way to check your own account
If you manage your own Google Ads account, it’s worth pulling up the search terms report this week and scanning the last thirty days for anything that clearly isn’t a potential customer. You don’t need to fix everything at once — even excluding the three or four most obvious offenders can make a noticeable difference to how far the same budget goes.
If you’d rather have a second pair of eyes on it, our free Google Ads audit will show you exactly where your budget is currently being spent, negative keywords included, or you can get in touch and we’ll talk through what we find.
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