Negative keywords
What are negative keywords?
Negative keywords are the words and phrases you tell an ad platform not to show you for, so the budget stops paying for clicks from people who will never buy. Free, jobs, second-hand and a competitor’s name are the usual ones. They sit on an ad group, a campaign or the whole account, come in broad, phrase and exact match, and cover misspellings but not close variants — a plural needs its own entry.
Example
An office furniture shop advertises on “office chairs”. In a month the account records 1,100 clicks at €0.45, or €495, and twelve enquiries. The search terms report shows 240 of those clicks came from “office chairs second hand”, “office chair repair”, “office chair drawing” and the name of a large retail chain.
That is €108 a month spent on people who are not buying new chairs. Once those phrases go in as negatives, the same budget buys roughly 240 more clicks on searches with intent to purchase. Nothing else in the campaign changed.
Why it matters for a business
Broad match and automated campaigns widen the net by themselves; negatives are the brake. Beyond the budget they protect the account’s quality: impressions on unrelated searches pull the clickthrough rate down, and with it the quality Google assigns to the ad.
They can be set on an ad group, on a campaign and across the whole account, directly or through a shared list, and in three match types. A broad negative blocks searches containing all the words in any order; a phrase negative blocks the exact sequence; an exact negative blocks only that one query. Beware of blocking too much: a word like “cheap” also excludes buyers who are simply comparing prices. Misspellings and casing are handled for you; close variants are not — exclude “chairs” and a search for “chair” still runs.
What to ask
- Who reads the search terms report, and how often?
- Is there a shared list of the phrases that never produce an order?
- Are we bidding on a competitor’s name, and do we want them doing the same to us?
- Which keywords have been excluded by mistake, and what does that cost?
- Do the exclusions apply to the automated campaigns as well?
We review the exclusions weekly as part of Google Ads.