Negative Keywords
Everything about excluding the searches that spend without converting: when to use exact versus phrase, how shared lists behave across campaigns, and the mistakes that quietly cost you conversions.
Add Negative Keywords From Search Terms Without Guessing
Your search terms report shows one query per row, but a negative keyword blocks every query that contains it. Here is a simple rule for deciding between a single word, a phrase and an exact match, based on what the negative would block across your whole account.
Negative Keyword Conflicts Google Ads Won't Flag
A negative keyword can quietly cancel a keyword you are paying to target, and Google's conflict warning only catches the obvious cases. Here is how to find the rest, by match type, by level and by campaign type.
Account-Level Negative Keyword Lists vs Campaign-Level
Google Ads has four places to put a negative keyword, and they do not override each other — they stack. Here is what each layer actually covers, where Performance Max breaks the pattern, and how to decide which layer a block belongs in.
Blocking "Free" and "Cheap" Searches Without Losing Buyers
Most accounts add "free" and "cheap" as broad negatives on day one and never look again. One of those words almost always deserves blocking; the other one is frequently sitting on real revenue.
Negative Keyword Lists by Industry: Where to Start
Generic 500-term negative keyword lists are mostly padding, and the padding is where the damage happens. Here are shorter starter lists built for specific industries, with the traps each one hides.
How to Undo Negative Keywords in Google Ads
Deleting a negative keyword takes four clicks. The hard part is finding the one that is costing you, because Google keeps no history of who added it, when, or why. Here is what you can recover, and what you have to record yourself.
Managing Negative Keywords Across Client Accounts
Roughly a third of your negative keyword work is identical in every account you manage. The rest is client-specific, and copying it between accounts is how you block a client's best-converting term.
Negative Keywords Hurting Performance? Six Signs
An over-excluded account looks efficient right up to the point you check the revenue. Here are the six signs, the arithmetic that exposes them, and a batch-by-batch way to walk a list back.
Competitor Searches in Google Ads, Block or Keep?
Every article on competitor searches in Google Ads tells you how to target them. Almost none tells you when to block them — which is the decision most accounts actually face, and it changes from account to account.
Job Seekers Clicking Google Ads? Block These Terms
Almost every Google Ads account pays for three kinds of people who were never going to buy: applicants, students and freebie hunters. Here are the terms they actually type, and why the standard "add jobs as a negative" advice misses most of them.
Shopping Campaign Negative Keywords Work Differently
Standard Shopping has no positive keywords, so negatives are not a trim — they are the only keyword-level control you have. It also accepts shared lists, ad group negatives and priority tiers, none of which Performance Max will give you.
How Many Negative Keywords Are Too Many?
Google does not punish long negative keyword lists, and a 4,000-line list of exact negatives is usually safer than thirty broad ones. The number that hurts you is not the count — it is how many words each negative can swallow.
Negative Keyword Match Types Don't Work Like Positives
A broad negative keyword is nothing like a broad keyword: it blocks word sets, not meanings. Here is what each of the three negative match types actually blocks, and the mistakes that cost the most money.
Clean your search terms. Save time and money.
Every night, PPCleaner reviews the searches your campaigns actually paid for, groups them by intent, and excludes the ones that never convert. No spend threshold to wait for, nothing touched but negatives — and one click undoes any of it.
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