The negative keyword audit that pays for itself in a week

Of all the work available in a Google Ads account, this has the best ratio of time spent to money saved. It is also the work most often skipped, because it is tedious and produces no screenshot worth sending anyone.

The report, set up correctly

Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms. Then, and this matters:

• Date range: last 90 days. Shorter and there is not enough signal per term.
• Add columns: cost, conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate.
• Sort by cost, descending.
• Read the top fifty. Not the top five.

That sort order is the whole trick. Sorting by impressions shows you noise. Sorting by cost shows you where the money went.

The five categories worth negating

1. Research intent

Someone learning, not buying: how to, what is, diy, tutorial, guide, template. Genuine traffic, wrong stage. Some of these deserve a blog post rather than an ad.

2. Job seekers

jobs, salary, career, vacancy, hiring, internship. Pure waste in a lead-gen account, and surprisingly expensive in competitive categories.

3. Free and cheap

free, cheap, discount, coupon, second hand, used. Add these thoughtfully — if you genuinely run a free consultation offer, "free" is a term you want.

4. Competitors and adjacent brands

Competitor bidding is a legitimate strategy but a separate, deliberate campaign with its own budget and messaging. Letting it happen accidentally inside a generic campaign is expensive.

5. Wrong location, wrong service

Cities you do not serve, and adjacent services you do not offer. Both are common with broad match, and both look plausible enough to survive a quick skim.

Match types for negatives — the part that catches people out

Negative keyword match types do not behave like positive ones. Two differences matter:

Worth knowing: negative keywords do not match close variants. Add job and you have not blocked jobs. You must add plurals, misspellings and variants explicitly — this is the single most common reason a negative list "isn't working".

Use negative lists, not per-campaign negatives

Tools → Shared library → Negative keyword lists. Build two:

• Universal waste — jobs, research, free. Apply to every campaign.
• Account-specific — services you do not offer, areas you do not serve.

Maintaining one list beats maintaining the same fifty terms across nine campaigns and forgetting three of them.

Do not over-negate

The opposite failure is real. Strip out too much and you starve the campaign of the volume Smart Bidding needs to learn, and performance degrades for a reason that looks nothing like its cause.

Two guardrails:

• Do not negate a term that has ever converted, even once, unless the cost is clearly unjustifiable.
• Do not negate on a single expensive click. Wait for a pattern — three or four clicks with no conversion.

Make it a habit

• New account: weekly for the first month.
• Established: monthly.
• Broad match or PMax: fortnightly, without exception.

On a packers-and-movers account I rebuilt, disciplined negative work alongside a restructure took cost per lead down 84% while monthly lead volume went up 8.3×, inside the first ninety days. The restructure got the credit in the report. The negatives did a great deal of the actual work.