The Negative Keyword List Every Advertising Account Needs

Negative keywords are the cheapest optimisation in paid search and the one most often neglected. Every term you exclude immediately stops money leaking towards clicks that were never going to buy, and the freed budget flows to searches that already work.

Start with the universal list

Regardless of industry, these categories waste money in almost every account. Add them before your first campaign goes live:

• Free intent: free, cheap, discount, coupon, giveaway, trial.
• Do-it-yourself intent: DIY, how to, homemade, tutorial, guide, step by step.
• Employment: jobs, salary, vacancy, career, hiring, internship, apprentice.
• Research and education: what is, definition, meaning, wikipedia, statistics, examples, template.
• Second-hand and wholesale: used, second hand, refurbished, wholesale, bulk, supplier, distributor.
• Media: images, photos, video, youtube, pdf, download.

That list alone typically removes between 10% and 25% of wasted impressions in a new account.

Then build the list only you can build

The valuable negatives are specific to your business, and nobody else can guess them. Three sources:

• Products you do not sell. A shop selling only espresso machines should exclude every other appliance name it might match on.
• Locations you do not serve. Even with tight geographic settings, people search for services in cities you do not cover.
• Adjacent services you do not offer. A dental practice that does not do orthodontics should exclude braces and aligners early, before it pays for the education of somebody else’s future patient.

Match types, briefly

Use broad negatives for genuinely irrelevant concepts such as jobs or free. Use phrase or exact for anything that could appear in a query you want to keep. Blocking the broad negative “free” will also block “free delivery on orders over $50”, which may well be a query worth having.

The weekly routine that keeps it working

Open the search terms report, sort by cost descending, and read the top fifty queries. Add anything irrelevant as a negative and note anything unexpectedly good as a candidate keyword. Fifteen minutes a week is enough once the account has settled, though a new account deserves this daily for the first fortnight.

This single habit does more for cost per acquisition than bid adjustments, ad copy tests and audience layering combined. It is also the first thing a competent specialist checks when taking over an underperforming Google Ads account, because a stale negative list is the clearest sign an account has been running unattended.

Three mistakes to avoid

• Blocking your own brand. Adding a competitor’s name as a broad negative can accidentally block queries that also contain your own.
• Adding negatives at the wrong level. A negative added to one ad group does not protect the others. Shared lists applied at account level solve this.
• Over-pruning. An account with 4,000 negatives and 30 keywords has usually been strangled. If impressions collapse after a cleanup, you cut too deep.

Keep the list in a spreadsheet outside the ad platform as well. Accounts get rebuilt, agencies change, and a five-year negative keyword list represents real institutional knowledge that is painful to recreate from scratch.