Negative keywords in Google Ads, explained.
Senior Google Ads operator with 8+ years of experience, spent the last years almost entirely inside DTC eCommerce accounts. Small number of accounts, no juniors, no handoffs.
- A negative keyword blocks your ad from showing for a specific search. The opposite of a regular keyword.
- Broad match without negatives is the single most common way budget quietly leaks.
- Negative broad, phrase and exact genuinely behave differently.
- A short starter list catches most of the damage before you've even looked at your own data.
This topic already came up twice on this site. Once in the match types section of the guide on how Google Ads work, where broad match without exclusions was called the most common way people pay for irrelevant clicks, and once in Bleed 3 of the money bleed post, where brand and non-brand searches fight each other in the same campaign. Both times it got a paragraph. It deserves its own post, so here it is.
Negative keywords are the seatbelt for broad match. Not an advanced feature. A basic one that most accounts get wrong, or skip entirely.
What a negative keyword does
A regular keyword tells Google: show my ad when someone searches something like this. A negative keyword is the exact opposite. It tells Google: never show my ad when the search contains this. That's it. Every negative keyword is a filter that keeps a click away.
Concrete example. You sell premium leather bags. "Leather bag" is one of your regular keywords. Someone searches "leather bag repair". They don't want to buy a bag, they want their old one fixed. Someone else searches "leather bag factory jobs". They're looking for work, not shopping. Your ad shouldn't show for either. Both clicks cost real money and neither person was ever going to buy. Negative keywords are what stop it.
Without them, your match type decides alone what counts as "close enough" to your keyword. And on broad match, close enough can be very far away.
Negative match types, with real examples
Negatives come in three match types too, and they work differently than people expect. Negative match types are stricter than regular ones: Google does not expand them to close variations the way it does with normal keywords. A negative blocks what it covers, and nothing more.
Because negatives don't expand, most accounts need more of them than they think. Blocking "repair" as a negative broad keyword is usually the simplest way to cover "repair", "repairs" and "repairing" territory in one move, since every search containing that word gets filtered.
The starter list almost every account needs
Some negatives are safe starting points for almost any advertiser, and some depend entirely on the business. Treat these as starting points, not universal rules. If your brand competes on being cheap, "cheap" is not your negative.
- free
- jobs / careers / hiring
- DIY / how to make
- reviews / complaints
- cheap / discount (only if it doesn't match your actual positioning)
- [competitor names]
- refurbished / used (if you only sell new)
This list catches the obvious waste. Your own Search Terms report catches the rest, which is the next section.
Where to check this
In Google Ads, the Search Terms report shows the real searches that triggered your ads. Not your keywords, the actual things people typed. You find it under Insights and reports, then Search terms.
What you're looking for is simple: searches that triggered your ad but clearly don't match the intent of someone about to buy from you. Job seekers, DIYers, people hunting for free versions, people researching products you don't even sell. Every one of those is a negative keyword waiting to be added.
And this is a recurring five-minute check, not a one-time setup task. New irrelevant searches appear as language and trends shift, so the list that was clean in January is leaking by June if nobody looks.
Negatives are one piece of a clean account. The fuller picture, where money bleeds across bidding, tracking and structure, is in the money bleed audit post, and the mechanics underneath all of it are in How Do Google Ads Work.
Negatives are step one of a much longer list.
97 items, the exact sequence I run on every new account, feed setup through bid strategy. One-time, lifetime access.
Senior Google Ads operator with 8+ years of experience, spent the last years almost entirely inside DTC eCommerce accounts. Small number of accounts, no juniors, no handoffs.