Every time someone clicks your ad while searching for something you do not offer, Google takes money from your pocket. Negative keywords are the only way to stop it.
Imagine you run a hair salon and your ad for 'men's haircut' shows up for someone searching 'men's haircut for dogs'. You pay for the click, that person leaves immediately, and you are nowhere near a sale. This is not a made-up scenario. It happens every day in Google Ads campaigns without properly defined negative keywords. The problem is especially pronounced in campaigns using broad match or phrase match types, where Google interprets relevance quite loosely. Negative keywords are the list of terms for which you do not want your ad to appear, and this is one of the most important settings in any serious budget.
Why negative keywords cannot wait
New accounts and new campaigns are especially vulnerable. While Google Ads accumulates data about your business, the algorithm often serves ads for searches that are semantically close but commercially miles away. An ad for 'web design' can appear on 'web design course free' or 'web design definition'. Both clicks cost money and neither has any chance of leading to a sale.
Without negative keywords from day one, you can burn up to 30 percent of your budget on irrelevant clicks in the first month alone. That is not a guess. It is a consistent finding that experienced Google Ads managers encounter when they take over accounts that have never been properly optimized.
Where to find terms worth blocking
The starting point is the Search Terms report inside Google Ads. This report shows you exactly which words and phrases triggered your ads and led to clicks. These are not the keywords you added yourself, they are the real queries users typed. Filter by clicks, identify every term that has nothing to do with what you sell, and add them as negative keywords.
Beyond that reactive approach, there is a proactive one: before launching a campaign, build a list of words that are logically close to your keywords but describe something completely different. For a hair salon that might include: 'school', 'course', 'job', 'equipment', 'wholesale'. For a legal firm it might be: 'free', 'template', 'DIY', 'self-help'. Every business has its own version of this list, and time spent on it before launch directly cuts waste from the start.
- Check the Search Terms report at least once a week for the first month
- Filter for terms with clicks but no conversions and examine the user intent
- Add generic educational terms ('what is', 'how to', 'definition', 'free') if you sell premium services
- Do not overlook common misspelling patterns if you spot them in the report
A negative keyword is not a restriction. It is a filter that keeps every euro of your budget away from the wrong hands.
Match types for negative keywords
Negative keywords work on the same match type logic as positive ones. Broad match negative will block any search that contains the term in any order. Phrase match blocks searches that contain that exact phrase. Exact match blocks only searches identical to the term you enter.
For a list of protective negatives that nearly every campaign needs, broad match is usually ideal. For example, adding 'free' as a broad match negative ensures your ad does not show for 'free trial' or 'free download'. Be careful though, because broad match negatives can also exclude searches you actually want, so always double-check the logic before finalizing your list.
Account, campaign, and ad group level negatives
Google Ads lets you add negative keywords at three levels. Account level (a shared list applied across the whole account) is right for terms you never want to trigger any ad, such as 'jobs', 'employment', 'company for sale'. Campaign level is for terms irrelevant to one specific campaign but possibly relevant to another. Ad group level is the most precise and is used when a term makes sense in one group but not another within the same campaign.
A best practice is to build a Shared Negative List in the Shared Library section of Google Ads. You can apply this list to multiple campaigns at once, and every new term you add automatically propagates everywhere the list is attached. This saves time and prevents you from solving the same problem repeatedly across campaigns.
- Create a master negative keyword list for the entire account from day one
- Every new campaign should inherit the master list before launch
- Revisit lists quarterly because search behavior shifts over time
- Use Shared Negative Lists to avoid duplicating the same work across campaigns
Negative keywords in Performance Max and other campaign types
Negative keywords matter even more in Performance Max campaigns, where Google autonomously decides where to serve ads and the algorithm has significantly more freedom. Without clearly set negatives, PMax campaigns regularly spend part of the budget on competitor brand searches, informational queries, or terms that describe a completely different product than yours.
In Demand Gen and video campaigns the mechanism differs because exclusions work at the audience and placement level rather than the keyword level. For search and shopping campaigns, however, your negative keyword list is one of the most important documents on your entire account.
The real impact on cost
Results vary by industry, but in accounts that have never had a serious negative keyword list, removing irrelevant clicks typically cuts wasted spend by 15 to 25 percent. That same budget then shifts toward searches that actually convert, meaning the cost per conversion falls twice as fast as it would from cutting waste alone.
The izreklamiraj.me team runs regular Search Terms analysis as part of monthly account management, and this intervention is almost always one of the first to produce visible results within the first month.
If your Google Ads account runs without a regular review of the Search Terms report and without an up-to-date negative keyword list, you are almost certainly spending a significant portion of your budget on people who will never become customers. The izreklamiraj.me team has more than ten years of experience managing Google Ads campaigns and we know exactly where money gets lost. We offer a free consultation where we analyze your account and show you concrete savings opportunities. Contact us through the website.
