How often should I review my search terms report for negatives?

Weekly is common for active, higher-spend campaigns; at minimum, a regular biweekly or monthly cadence keeps irrelevant spend from accumulating unnoticed. It's routine work for performance marketers running search accounts.

Can negative keywords hurt my campaign if used too aggressively?

Yes, an overly broad negative can accidentally block genuinely relevant searches. Negatives should be added based on clear evidence of irrelevance from the search terms report, not guesswork.

What's the difference between a negative keyword and a negative keyword list?

A single negative keyword is added to one campaign or ad group; a negative keyword list is a reusable, saved set of negatives (like job-seeker terms) that can be applied across many campaigns at once, saving repeated manual entry.

Do negative keywords cost anything?

No, adding negative keywords doesn't cost anything itself, it prevents spend rather than incurring it, which is part of why it's considered such high-leverage, low-cost account maintenance.

Can negative keywords be shared across multiple accounts?

Not directly between separate ad accounts, but negative keyword lists can be built once and applied across every campaign within the same account, which is the closest equivalent to reuse at scale.

Should exact match campaigns still use negative keywords?

Less critically than broad or phrase match campaigns, since exact match is inherently tighter, but they can still be useful, particularly at the campaign level to prevent overlap or unwanted cross-matching between similar keywords.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are terms or phrases an advertiser explicitly excludes from triggering their ads. They prevent an ad from showing for searches that are technically related but not actually relevant to what's being sold, protecting budget from being spent on traffic that was never going to convert.

Why Negative Keywords Matter

Negative keywords are one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort account hygiene tasks in PPC. Regularly reviewing the search terms report and adding negatives is often the fastest way to lower cost per acquisition, since it removes spend on searches that were never going to convert, without touching bids, budgets, or targeting at all, making it one of the first places to look when trying to improve efficiency quickly.

How It Works

Negative keywords work as a filter layered on top of a campaign's positive keyword targeting, especially important for broad and phrase match keywords, which by design can match a wider range of related searches than an advertiser actually wants to pay for. When a search query matches a negative keyword, the ad simply doesn't enter the auction for that search, regardless of how well it might otherwise match a positive keyword.

Negatives are applied with the same three match-type logic as positive keywords, negative broad blocks any search containing all the words in the negative term in any order, negative phrase blocks the exact phrase in that order, and negative exact blocks only that precise query. They can be set at the ad group level for narrow exclusions or the campaign level for broader ones, and grouped into reusable negative keyword lists applied across multiple campaigns at once.

Examples & Use Cases

A premium mattress brand adds "cheap" and "free" as negative keywords, preventing its ads from showing to searchers looking for budget options that don't match its positioning.
A company hiring for a "marketing manager" role notices its unrelated marketing services ads showing for job-seeker searches, and adds a negative keyword list covering "jobs," "hiring," "salary," and "resume" across every relevant campaign.
An ecommerce account selling only new products adds "used" and "refurbished" as campaign-level negatives after noticing wasted spend from searchers looking for secondhand items.

Negative Keywords Example

Negative keywords are the direct counterpart to match types: match type decides how broadly a keyword can match, while negative keywords carve out specific exceptions within that broad match. The two are typically managed together, a broad match strategy is only sustainable with active, disciplined negative keyword upkeep alongside it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should I review my search terms report for negatives?: Weekly is common for active, higher-spend campaigns; at minimum, a regular biweekly or monthly cadence keeps irrelevant spend from accumulating unnoticed. It's routine work for performance marketers running search accounts.
Can negative keywords hurt my campaign if used too aggressively?: Yes, an overly broad negative can accidentally block genuinely relevant searches. Negatives should be added based on clear evidence of irrelevance from the search terms report, not guesswork.
What's the difference between a negative keyword and a negative keyword list?: A single negative keyword is added to one campaign or ad group; a negative keyword list is a reusable, saved set of negatives (like job-seeker terms) that can be applied across many campaigns at once, saving repeated manual entry.
Do negative keywords cost anything?: No, adding negative keywords doesn't cost anything itself, it prevents spend rather than incurring it, which is part of why it's considered such high-leverage, low-cost account maintenance.
Can negative keywords be shared across multiple accounts?: Not directly between separate ad accounts, but negative keyword lists can be built once and applied across every campaign within the same account, which is the closest equivalent to reuse at scale.
Should exact match campaigns still use negative keywords?: Less critically than broad or phrase match campaigns, since exact match is inherently tighter, but they can still be useful, particularly at the campaign level to prevent overlap or unwanted cross-matching between similar keywords.

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