Every time someone searches a term that is irrelevant to your business and clicks your ad, you pay for that click. It generates no value. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of irrelevant clicks per month, and the cost adds up fast. Negative keywords stop that from happening by telling Google which queries should never trigger your ads.
What Are Negative Keywords in Google Ads?
Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing for specific search queries. They are one of the most direct ways to control where your ad budget goes.
Here is a simple example. A B2B SaaS company selling project management software runs ads on the keyword "project management tool." Without negative keywords, those ads might show for "free project management tool," "project management tool template," or "project management tool for students." None of those searchers will buy enterprise software. Every click from them is wasted budget.
Key Point
The cost of not using negative keywords goes beyond wasted spend. Irrelevant clicks inflate your cost per click, drag down your click-through rate, hurt your Quality Score, and ultimately raise the price you pay for every relevant click too. Negative keywords are not a nice-to-have. They are a fundamental cost control mechanism.
If you are looking for a broader approach to reducing your Google Ads costs, negative keywords are often the first and highest-impact lever.
How Negative Keyword Match Types Work
This is where most marketers get confused. Negative keyword match types behave differently from standard keyword match types. Understanding the difference is critical to avoiding mistakes.
Negative Broad Match (Default)
When you add a negative keyword without specifying a match type, it defaults to negative broad match. This blocks your ad from showing when a search query contains all the words in your negative keyword, in any order.
Example: Negative broad match keyword: free software
Blocked: "free project management software," "software tools free download"
NOT blocked: "free tools," "software pricing" (because only one of the two words appears)
Negative Phrase Match
Negative phrase match blocks queries that contain your negative keyword phrase in the exact order you specify. The query can have words before or after the phrase, but the phrase itself must appear intact.
Example: Negative phrase match keyword: "free software"
Blocked: "free software download," "best free software for teams"
NOT blocked: "software free trial," "free project software" (the words are not in the specified order)
Negative Exact Match
Negative exact match blocks only the specific query you define. Nothing more, nothing less.
Example: Negative exact match keyword: [free software]
Blocked: "free software"
NOT blocked: "free software download," "best free software"
The Critical Difference from Standard Match Types
Important Note
Standard broad match keywords include close variants, misspellings, synonyms, and related terms. Negative broad match does NOT include close variants. This means if you add "running shoe" as a negative, it will not automatically block "running shoes" (plural). You need to add each variation separately.
This catches experienced marketers off guard. They assume negative keywords work symmetrically with standard keywords, and they end up letting irrelevant queries slip through.
| Match Type | Blocks Query If... | Includes Close Variants? |
|---|---|---|
| Negative Broad | Query contains all words (any order) | No |
| Negative Phrase | Query contains exact phrase in order | No |
| Negative Exact | Query matches exactly | No |
For a deeper look at how match types affect your cost per click, understanding this distinction is essential.
How to Find Negative Keyword Opportunities
Knowing what negative keywords are is the easy part. Finding the right ones to add requires a systematic approach.
The Search Terms Report
The search terms report is your primary tool. It shows the actual queries people typed before clicking your ad. Navigate to any campaign or ad group, click "Search terms," and you will see exactly what triggered your ads.
This report is where reality meets your keyword strategy. You might think you are targeting "marketing automation software," but the search terms report shows your ads appeared for "marketing automation jobs," "marketing automation certification," and "what is marketing automation." All irrelevant. All costing money.
For the official walkthrough of accessing and reading this report, see Google's search terms report documentation.
Sort by Spend First
Do not start at the top of the list. Sort by cost, descending. The queries spending the most money with zero conversions are your highest-priority negative keyword candidates.
A query that spent $0.50 with no conversions is annoying but not urgent. A query that spent $150 with no conversions is burning budget that should go to queries that actually convert.
Identify Patterns
Look for recurring themes rather than individual queries. If you see multiple queries containing "jobs," "salary," "certification," or "how to become," those are job seekers, not buyers. Add those root terms as negatives rather than blocking each individual query.
Common patterns to watch for:
- Job seekers: "jobs," "salary," "career," "hiring," "internship"
- Free seekers: "free," "free trial," "no cost," "open source"
- Students and researchers: "what is," "definition," "example," "thesis"
- Competitors: competitor brand names (unless you intentionally bid on them)
- Unrelated industries: terms from industries you do not serve
Use Conversion Data as a Filter
High clicks with zero conversions is a strong signal. If a query has received 50+ clicks and produced zero conversions, the intent does not match your offer. Add it as a negative or investigate whether there is a landing page mismatch worth fixing first.
Pre-Launch Research
You do not have to wait for wasted spend to find negatives. Before launching a campaign, brainstorm queries that contain your target keywords but indicate the wrong intent. Add those as negatives from day one. You will still find surprises in the search terms report later, but pre-launch research reduces the initial cost of discovery.
Building Your Negative Keyword Lists
Adding negatives one at a time to individual campaigns works, but it does not scale. Lists keep your negative keywords organized and consistently applied.
Shared Negative Keyword Lists
Google Ads lets you create shared negative keyword lists that apply across multiple campaigns. This is the most efficient way to manage negatives at scale.
Create lists organized by theme:
- Competitors list: competitor brand names you want excluded everywhere
- Job seeker list: employment-related terms
- Free seeker list: "free," "no cost," "open source," and variations
- Unrelated industries list: terms from industries irrelevant to your business
For detailed instructions on creating shared lists, refer to Google's shared negative keyword list documentation.
Starting with Universal Negatives
Some negatives apply to almost every B2B advertiser. Start here:
- "jobs," "careers," "salary," "hiring," "internship"
- "free," unless you offer a free tier (and even then, be selective)
- "how to become," "certification," "course," "training" (if you are not in education)
- "reddit," "quora," "forum" (if you want to avoid informational intent)
These universal negatives can prevent wasted spend from day one.
How Many Negatives Is Too Many?
There is a real risk of over-blocking. If you add negatives too aggressively, you suppress legitimate queries that would have converted. Start conservative. Focus on clearly irrelevant terms. Review the impact of your negatives on impression volume after adding them. If impressions drop more than expected, audit your list for terms that may be blocking good traffic.
Campaign-Level vs. Ad Group-Level Negatives
Where you apply a negative keyword matters as much as which keyword you add.
Campaign-Level Negatives
Use campaign-level negatives for queries that are irrelevant to the entire campaign. If no ad group in the campaign should show ads for "free," add "free" at the campaign level.
Ad Group-Level Negatives
Use ad group-level negatives for traffic sculpting. This means directing specific queries to the right ad group by excluding them from other ad groups within the same campaign.
Example: You have two ad groups in a campaign. One targets "project management software" and the other targets "task management software." Add "task" as a negative in the project management ad group and "project" as a negative in the task management ad group. This prevents the ad groups from competing with each other for the same queries.
Account-Level Negatives
Shared negative keyword lists function as account-level negatives when applied across all campaigns. Use these for terms that are universally irrelevant to your business.
A Simple Decision Framework
Ask these questions in order:
- Is this query irrelevant to my entire business? Add it to a shared list.
- Is this query irrelevant to this specific campaign but relevant elsewhere? Add it at the campaign level.
- Is this query relevant to the campaign but should be served by a different ad group? Add it at the ad group level.
Common Negative Keyword Mistakes
Even experienced marketers make these errors. Knowing them helps you avoid them.
Blocking relevant queries with overly broad negatives. Adding "management" as a negative broad match keyword would block "project management software," "management tools," and any query containing "management." Be specific.
Forgetting that negatives do not include close variants. If you block "running shoe," the plural "running shoes" still triggers your ads. Add both.
Never updating negative keyword lists. Negative keyword management is not a one-time task. Search behavior changes. New irrelevant queries appear. If you set your negatives once and never revisit them, gaps will develop.
Adding negatives reactively instead of proactively. Waiting until you see wasted spend to add negatives means you already lost that budget. Combine proactive research with regular reactive reviews.
Not using shared lists. Managing negatives campaign by campaign leads to inconsistent coverage. A shared list ensures every campaign benefits from the same exclusions.
Confusing negative match types with standard match types. This mistake costs real money. Review the match type section above if you are not clear on the behavioral difference.
Over-relying on automated suggestions. Google Ads sometimes recommends negatives, but automated suggestions lack context about your business. Review every suggestion manually before adding.
If negative keywords are one piece of the puzzle, understanding how they affect your Quality Score helps you see the broader impact on your account health.
Maintaining Your Negative Keywords Over Time
Negative keyword management is an ongoing practice. The marketers who treat it as a one-time setup task lose money every month to new irrelevant queries.
Weekly: Review Search Terms
Set a recurring weekly task to review the search terms report. Sort by cost, filter for zero conversions, and add new negatives. This takes 10-15 minutes and prevents wasted spend from compounding.
Monthly: Audit Your Lists
Once a month, review your shared negative keyword lists. Are there terms that no longer make sense? Have you added new campaigns that need different exclusion patterns? A quick audit ensures your lists stay relevant.
Quarterly: Review Shared Lists for Relevance
Every quarter, step back and evaluate whether your negative keyword lists align with your current campaign strategy. If you have expanded into new markets or launched new products, some previously excluded terms might now be relevant.
Track the Impact
Negative keywords should measurably improve performance. Track these metrics before and after making changes:
- Click-through rate (should improve as irrelevant impressions decrease)
- Conversion rate (should improve as irrelevant clicks decrease)
- Cost per conversion (should decrease as wasted spend is eliminated)
- Impression share (may change, monitor for over-blocking)
Track Your Budget
Adding negative keywords is one thing. Knowing whether they are actually keeping your budget on track is another. Tools like marketingOS's Budget Checker give you real-time visibility into spend pacing across channels, so you can see whether your negative keyword efforts are translating into better budget control.
Measuring the Impact of Negative Keywords
You added negatives. Now how do you know they are working?
Before and After Comparisons
In Google Ads, set up a custom date comparison. Compare the two weeks after adding negatives to the two weeks before. Look at:
- CPC change: Did cost per click decrease as irrelevant auctions were eliminated?
- CTR change: Did click-through rate improve as fewer irrelevant impressions diluted your ads?
- Conversion rate change: Did conversion rate increase as the proportion of relevant clicks grew?
- Wasted spend reduction: How much less was spent on zero-conversion queries?
Isolating the Effect
If you made other changes during the same period (bid adjustments, new ads, budget changes), it becomes harder to isolate the effect of negative keywords. When possible, add negatives as the only change for a week, then measure.
Monitoring Impression Share
After adding negatives, your total impressions may decrease. This is expected and usually a good sign. You are removing impressions that were not serving your goals. But if impression share drops significantly for your core keywords, you may have over-blocked. Check that your negatives are not suppressing relevant queries.
Reviewing search terms manually works, but it is hard to see the full picture across campaigns. marketingOS's Google Ads Manager surfaces which campaigns have the highest wasted spend, giving you a clear starting point for your negative keyword work.
A Practical Negative Keywords Workflow
Here is a step-by-step workflow you can follow every week. This is the same process used in real client accounts managing significant ad spend.
Open the search terms report
Filter by cost (descending) and look for queries with zero conversions.
Categorize irrelevant queries by theme
Group them into patterns: job seekers, free seekers, wrong industry, wrong intent.
Choose the right match type for each negative
Use broad match for general themes, phrase match for specific phrases, exact match for individual queries you want to block precisely.
Decide where to apply each negative
Shared list for universal exclusions, campaign level for campaign-specific issues, ad group level for traffic sculpting.
Add the negatives and document your changes
Keep a log of what you added and why. This helps when reviewing later.
Monitor impact over 7-14 days
Check whether CPC, CTR, and conversion rate moved in the expected direction.
Repeat weekly
Make this part of your regular optimization routine. New irrelevant queries will always appear. Consistent maintenance prevents them from accumulating.
Negative Keywords by Campaign Type
Not all campaign types handle negative keywords the same way.
Search Campaigns
Search campaigns are the primary use case for negative keywords. You have full access to the search terms report and can add negatives at every level (ad group, campaign, shared list). This is where negative keywords have the most direct impact.
Shopping Campaigns
Shopping campaigns do not use traditional keywords, but they do support negative keywords. You can add negatives to control which product queries trigger your Shopping ads. This is especially useful for excluding irrelevant product searches, competitor brand names, or low-intent queries like "review" or "comparison."
Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max has limited negative keyword support. Google introduced account-level negative keywords that can be applied, but direct campaign-level control is restricted. You may need to work with your Google representative or use brand exclusion lists as a workaround. This is an evolving feature, so check the latest documentation for updates.
Display and Video Campaigns
Display and video campaigns use content exclusions (topics, placements) rather than keyword negatives. You can add negative keywords, but they function more as content signals than direct query blocks. For these campaigns, placement exclusions and topic exclusions are usually more effective.
Adapt your negative keyword approach based on the campaign type. Search campaigns get the full benefit. Other campaign types require alternative methods for achieving similar control.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Resources
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