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10 October 2026

Stop paying for the wrong searches with negative keywords

“Why are we paying for people looking for free will templates?” A solicitors’ practice tends to ask that the first time somebody opens its search terms report, and it’s a fair question. Google Ads doesn’t only show your ad for the exact words you picked. It shows it for searches it reckons are related, and some of those will never turn into work. Negative keywords are how you tell Google to leave those searches alone. The search terms report is where you find them.

In brief

The search terms report lists real searches that triggered your ads. It won’t show every one, only the ones enough people typed.
Anything irrelevant can go on as a negative keyword straight from the search terms page.
Shared lists save you adding the same junk words to every campaign.
Overdo it and you’ll block good enquiries as well, so check what you’re excluding before you save.

What the search terms report actually shows

Keywords are the words you add to your account. What people actually typed into Google before your ad appeared can be quite different, and that gap is where budget tends to leak.

The report lists searches that a significant number of people used and that got your ad shown. Quieter searches get left out for privacy reasons, so you’ll never see the whole picture. It’s still the best window you’ve got. There’s a match type column too, showing how closely each search related to the keyword that caught it. Performance Max campaigns have their own version of the report, aimed at showing which searches led to conversions.

To find it, open Campaigns, go to the Insights and reports menu and choose Search terms. Never looked before? Set a long date range first. It can be an eye-opener.

Spotting the searches you don’t want

Go down the list and ask one blunt question of each line. Would we be glad to get a call from this person? Most rows will be fine. A few won’t.

The rogue ones fall into familiar groups. Job hunters are a big one, so a training provider bidding on first aid courses may find ‘first aid trainer jobs’ turning up. DIY is another. A heating engineer whose ad shows for ‘how to bleed a radiator’ is paying for someone who wants to fix it themselves. Then there’s the wrong product altogether. An online furniture shop selling new oak tables has no use for ‘second hand’ or ‘free to collect’ searches, however close they look on paper.

‘Free’ is a tricky word. For the solicitors it’s usually a mismatch, because someone after a free will template has decided not to pay a solicitor. A physiotherapy clinic offering a free first chat might want exactly that search. Don’t copy someone else’s negative list without thinking about your own business.

Look for good searches too. If one keeps cropping up that you’re not bidding on yet, it may deserve a keyword of its own, with an ad and a page that fit it. Our piece on how match types and close variants work explains why those surprise searches appear in the first place.

Adding negative keywords straight from the report

No copying and pasting needed. Tick the boxes next to the searches you want gone and click ‘Add as negative keyword’. Google then asks where they should go. You can add each one to the ad group it came from, to the whole campaign, or to a negative keyword list.

One default catches people out. Negatives added from the report to a Search campaign go in as negative exact match. So excluding ‘boiler repair course’ only blocks that precise search, in that order, with nothing added. ‘Boiler repair courses near me’ could still get through. Often you’ll want something looser. Change the match type, using quote marks or square brackets, before you save.

A quick reminder of how the three negative match types behave. Negative broad blocks any search containing all of its words, in any order. Phrase is fussier. The words have to appear in the same sequence, though extra words around them don’t matter. With negative exact, only that precise search gets blocked. For most junk words, a single-word negative broad like ‘jobs’, with ‘job’ alongside it, does the trick.

Ad group, campaign, list or account level

Where you add a negative matters nearly as much as the word. Ad group level is the narrowest. It suits a search that’s right for one part of your account and wrong for another, so an accountancy firm might block ‘payroll’ from its tax return ad group because payroll has an ad group of its own. Campaign level covers everything in that campaign.

Negative keyword lists are for words you’ll want blocked in lots of places. You build the list once and apply it to several campaigns at once. Add a word later and every campaign sharing the list picks it up. Google allows up to 20 lists in an account, each holding up to 5,000 negatives. Most smaller accounts won’t get anywhere near that.

There’s an account-level list as well, tucked away under Admin and Account settings. It applies to search and Shopping inventory in Search, Performance Max, Shopping, App, Smart and Local campaigns, and it’s capped at 1,000 negatives. That makes it a good home for the handful of terms that are wrong for your whole business. Performance Max campaigns can take campaign-level negatives too, though they only apply on Search and Shopping inventory. Display and Video campaigns handle negatives differently again.

The traps that block good enquiries

Negatives are blunt instruments. Use too many and your ads may reach fewer customers, which Google spells out in its own help pages. The classic mistake is a negative that clashes with one of your keywords. A clinic that blocks ‘cheap’ while bidding on ‘cheap sports massage’ has just stopped that keyword showing. Google’s keyword diagnostics can flag this with the message “A negative keyword is preventing your ad from showing.”

Negatives don’t stretch to close variants either. Block ‘course’ and ‘courses’ can still slip through. Plurals and synonyms have to be added separately.

Two odder ones. A negative only works where it’s applied, so a list sitting in the Shared library, under Exclusion lists, that’s never been attached to a campaign does nothing at all. And on very long searches, a negative word that comes after the 16th word may not block the ad. That’s rare. Still, if something gets through that shouldn’t, check when you actually added the negative, because the report’s date range may start before it. Change history will tell you.

A simple routine that keeps waste down

Once it’s a habit, this doesn’t take long. For a smaller account a skim every week or two is usually plenty. Busier accounts need looking at more often. Clearing out junk searches also makes it far easier to set a Google Ads budget that makes sense, because the money’s going on people who might actually buy.

Sort by cost so the expensive mistakes show up first.
Exclude anything that clearly isn’t a customer, loosening the match type where it makes sense.
Put words that are wrong for every campaign on a shared list or at account level.
Make a note of good searches that deserve their own keyword and a proper page.
Check that nothing you’ve added blocks your own keywords.

The click is only half of it. A well-targeted search still won’t become an enquiry if it lands on a weak page, which is why landing page design deserves as much attention as the keyword list. Our article on service pages that turn visitors into enquiries covers what those pages need. If you’ve ever used the Queries tab in Search Console, you’ll know the same jolt of seeing what people really type. There’s more on that organic side in our piece on how Google uses title tags and meta descriptions.

Want someone to go through your search terms?

Wasted spend rarely arrives as one big bill. It drips out a few clicks at a time, and nobody notices for months. Going through the search terms report and keeping negative lists tidy is a standing part of our Google Ads management. For the auction, bidding and tracking side of things, see our wider guide to how Google Ads works for a business. Or just get in touch and we’ll tell you in plain English what your account is paying for.

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Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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