Every paid search account has a slow leak.
Not a dramatic one. A steady drip of clicks from people looking for jobs, free versions, tutorials, or a completely different product that happens to share a word with yours.
Individually they are trivial. Cumulatively they are often the difference between a campaign that works and one that does not — and unlike most optimisation levers, closing them costs nothing but attention.
Why the gap exists at all
You do not buy keywords. You tell Google what kind of query you want to compete for, and it decides which real searches are close enough.
That interpretation is generous by design — Google's incentive is to find more auctions you can enter. Broad match especially will surface queries you would never have chosen.
Negatives are how you push back. They are the only direct control you have over the interpretation.
How match types govern the inclusion side is covered in Google Search Ads. This is the exclusion side.
The starter list for an Indian account
Add these before you launch, not after you have paid for them.
| Category | Terms | Who they are |
|---|---|---|
| Job seekers | jobs, salary, vacancy, internship, career, hiring, recruitment, fresher | Looking for work, not services. The most expensive single category in Indian accounts. |
| Free intent | free, cheap, download, crack, torrent | People who intend not to pay you |
| Learners | course, tutorial, training, certification, how to, DIY, PDF, notes | Want to learn it, not buy it — unless you sell training |
| Wrong geography | Cities and countries you do not serve | Location targeting is not airtight; back it up with negatives |
| Competitors | Named competitors | Unless you have deliberately chosen to bid on them and accepted the cost |
| Adjacent products | Terms that share a word but not a meaning | Account-specific. The search terms report will find these for you. |
The weekly routine
- Open the search terms report weekly. Not monthly. Four weeks of a bad query is four weeks of spend you cannot recover.
- Sort by cost, not clicks. You are hunting expensive irrelevance, not popular irrelevance. A query with three clicks and a high CPC matters more than one with thirty cheap ones.
- Add negatives in the same session. A list of terms you meant to add later never gets added.
- Watch for intent drift. "How to do X yourself" and "X services near me" are different people. One of them is not your customer.
- Promote the winners too. A query converting repeatedly deserves its own exact-match keyword and tailored copy. The report works in both directions.
- Maintain a shared negative list applied account-wide, so every new campaign inherits everything you have learned.
Twenty minutes. Every week. Forever. That is genuinely the whole discipline.
Match types for negatives — and the trap
Negatives have match types too, and they behave differently from positive keywords.
- Exact negative blocks only that precise query. Safest, most surgical.
- Phrase negative blocks any query containing that phrase in order. The usual choice.
- Broad negative blocks queries containing all the words in any order. Powerful and easy to over-apply.
The trap: broad negatives blocking more than you intended. Add "free consultation" as a broad negative and you may lose "free audit consultation for enterprise", which you wanted.
Default to phrase negatives. Use broad only when you genuinely want to block a concept, and check impressions afterwards.
When negatives start hurting
Over-blocking is a real failure mode, and it is less obvious than under-blocking.
Smart bidding needs conversion volume to learn from. Strip too many queries out and you starve the campaign of the data it needs, which shows up as unstable performance rather than as an obvious drop.
Signs you have gone too far: impressions collapsing after a cleanup, a campaign limited by low search volume, or a bid strategy that suddenly cannot hold its target. If you see those after a big negative-keyword session, review what you added — the same volume dependency described in bidding strategies.
Negatives in Performance Max
Account-level negative keywords apply to Performance Max, and they matter more there than in a standard campaign — not less.
Performance Max gives you very little query visibility, so you cannot see most of what you are buying. The account-level negative list is one of the few genuine controls you retain, and the main way to stop it eating brand traffic you were already getting for free.
This is not SEO keyword research
Worth stating because the two get conflated.
SEO keyword research chases volume you can rank for over months. Paid keyword work chases intent you can afford today — and half of it is deciding what to refuse.
There is no negative-keyword equivalent in SEO. It is a paid-only discipline, and it is where the difference between a well-run and a badly-run account is most visible.
Frequently asked questions
What are negative keywords?
Terms you tell Google not to show your ads for. They work in the opposite direction to keywords — instead of asking to enter an auction, you are refusing to. They are the main control you have over the gap between the keywords you bid on and the queries people actually type.
How do I find negative keywords?
In the search terms report, which shows the real queries that triggered your ads. Sort it by cost rather than by clicks, because you are hunting for expensive irrelevance rather than popular irrelevance. Anything that is clearly not a buyer becomes a negative in the same session.
How often should I review negative keywords?
Weekly for any account with meaningful spend. A bad query left running for a month has already spent the money, and no amount of later optimisation recovers it. Negatives are maintenance rather than setup — the list is never finished.
Can negative keywords hurt performance?
Yes, if you are too aggressive. Broad-match negatives can block queries you wanted, and over-blocking starves campaigns of the volume smart bidding needs to learn. Add negatives deliberately, prefer phrase or exact match for them, and check that impressions have not collapsed after a big cleanup.
Do negative keywords work in Performance Max?
Account-level negative keywords apply, and they are one of the few real controls you retain in Performance Max. Given how little query visibility that campaign type gives you, a well-maintained account-level negative list matters more there than in a standard search campaign, not less.
We run the weekly job nobody else wants to
Search terms reviewed every week, negatives added the same day, and a shared list that keeps every new campaign clean from launch.