Paid ads guide
Negative keywords, and how to find the waste already happening
The search terms report is the only place Google tells you what it actually charged you for. Most accounts have never had it read properly, which is why the same categories of waste show up in almost every audit.
9 min read · 7 steps · By Aman Mishra · Written August 2026
What you end up with
A shared negative list applied across the account, a weekly ten minute routine for the search terms report, and a record of what you excluded and why.
Have these ready
- Access to the search terms report
- At least thirty days of spend to read
- A note of what you do not sell
What it takes
9 min to read
7 steps, in the order below. Skip to the one you are stuck on.
There is one report in Google Ads that tells you what actually happened, as opposed to what the account was configured to do. It is the search terms report, and in most accounts nobody has read it properly.
Keywords are what you asked for. Search terms are what you got. The gap between the two is where the money goes.
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Open the search terms report and set a real date range
Thirty days minimum, ninety if the account spends slowly. Anything shorter and you are reading noise rather than pattern.
It sits under the keywords section of the campaign view.
Set the range to at least thirty days. Ninety is better on an account that spends slowly, because you need enough volume for a pattern to be distinguishable from a few odd searches.
A week is not long enough. You will see twelve strange terms, add twelve negatives, and learn nothing about what is systematically wrong.
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Sort by cost rather than by impressions
You are looking for money already spent. A term with two thousand impressions and no clicks cost you nothing and does not matter yet.
Sort descending by cost.
You are looking for money that has already left the account. A term with high impressions and no clicks has cost you nothing, and while it might indicate you are matching too broadly, it is not the urgent problem.
Work down from the most expensive. In most accounts the top thirty rows contain the majority of the recoverable waste, which is why this takes ten minutes rather than an afternoon.
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Mark every term that could never have been a customer
Go down the list and make a binary judgement on each: could this person conceivably have bought from us. Most accounts have a surprising amount that fails this test.
Go down the list making one binary judgement per row: could this person conceivably have bought from us.
Not would they have. Could they. Somebody searching for the salary of a job you hire for, a free version of a thing you sell, a competitor by name in a comparison, a course teaching people to do it themselves, or the thing you sell in a country you do not serve. None of them could have become a customer at any price.
Be honest at this step and do not rescue borderline terms because they look related. Related is not the test.
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Group the waste into categories before adding negatives
Individual terms are endless. The categories are few, and one negative on the category stops the whole class of search rather than the one phrasing you saw.
This is the step that turns an endless task into a finite one.
Individual bad search terms are infinite. There are always new phrasings. The categories behind them are few, and in almost every account they are the same ones.
Free and cheap. People looking for a free version, a template, a DIY approach.
Jobs. Salary, vacancy, hiring, apprenticeship, career.
Learning. Course, training, certification, how to, tutorial.
Competitors and comparisons. Sometimes worth bidding on deliberately, almost never worth catching by accident.
Wrong product. Adjacent things you do not actually sell, which is usually the largest category and the one specific to your business.
Wrong place. Cities, states and countries outside your service area, which slip through even with location targeting because people include place names in the search itself.
One negative on the category stops the entire class of search. Thirty negatives on thirty phrasings stops thirty searches and lets the thirty-first through.
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Add negatives at the right level
Account level for things you never sell, campaign level for things one campaign should not have, ad group level for steering between your own groups.
Three levels, three purposes.
Account level, through a shared negative list, for things you never sell anywhere. Jobs, free, courses, the countries you do not serve. Apply it to every campaign.
Campaign level for things that should not be in this campaign but are fine elsewhere. If you have a separate campaign for installations, repair terms are negative there.
Ad group level for steering traffic between your own groups, so a search that could match two of them lands in the one with the right ad.
Getting the level wrong is how a term you deliberately target in one campaign gets blocked across the account.
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Choose the match type for the negative carefully
Negative match types work differently from positive ones, and a broad negative applied casually can block far more than you intended.
Negative match types do not behave like positive ones, and this is the source of most accidental damage.
Negative broad blocks any search containing all the words, in any order. It does not match close variants, so it will not catch plurals or misspellings, which means you need more of them than you expect.
Negative phrase blocks searches containing the exact sequence. This is the safest default for most category exclusions.
Negative exact blocks only that precise search. Use it when a term is genuinely useful in one form and waste in another.
The classic self-inflicted injury is a negative broad on a single common word that also appears in your best converting searches. Before adding a one-word negative, search your own report for how many good terms contain it.
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Make it a weekly ten minute habit
The waste regenerates. New phrasings appear constantly, and an account audited once is clean for about a month.
The waste regenerates. Language changes, competitors launch things, and matching finds new ways to be creative.
Ten minutes a week, sorted by cost, last seven days. Add anything obvious, note anything interesting.
The interesting ones matter as much as the negatives. Search terms you did not expect to see are free market research, and some of them belong in the account as keywords in their own right rather than as exclusions. An account audited once a year and an account read for ten minutes a week are different accounts within a quarter.
When you have done all 7
A shared negative list applied across the account, a weekly ten minute routine for the search terms report, and a record of what you excluded and why.