If I had to pick one task that separates well-run Google Ads accounts from neglected ones, it wouldn't be bidding strategy or ad copy. It would be whether someone looks at the search terms report every week and does something about what they find.

Negative keywords are how you tell Google what you don't want to pay for. In a world of broad match, close variants and automated matching that gets looser every year, they're the main control you have left over which searches trigger your ads. Skip the habit for a quarter and you'll be funding an impressive range of searches that have nothing to do with your business.

This is how to do it properly, in a way that takes twenty minutes a week rather than a painful afternoon every few months.

Why it matters more than it used to

A few years ago, exact match meant exact. Today, exact match includes "same meaning" variants decided by Google, phrase match has absorbed what used to be modified broad, and broad match is actively encouraged alongside Smart Bidding. Performance Max barely lets you see search terms at all, and its negative keyword controls are limited.

All of this means Google decides more of your targeting than you do. That's not necessarily bad - the matching is often sensible - but it means the search terms report is where you find out what the system actually thinks your business is. Regularly, it's wrong in expensive ways.

The weekly review, step by step

1. Pull the right report

Search terms, last 7 days, sorted by cost. Not by impressions - impressions tell you what people searched; cost tells you what you paid for. Start with the most expensive terms and work down.

2. Sort every term into one of three buckets

  • Irrelevant - wrong product, wrong intent, wrong location, competitor names you don't want, jobs, free, DIY, definitions. Add as negatives.
  • Relevant and performing - leave it, or consider adding as a keyword if it's not one already and volume justifies it
  • Relevant but not converting - the hardest category. Don't block it on one week's data. Note it, and act if the pattern holds over a month.

3. Add negatives at the right level

Not everything belongs in the same place. Account-level lists are for things that are never relevant anywhere: jobs, careers, free, salary, the names of places you don't serve. Campaign-level negatives are for traffic that belongs in a different campaign - a "repair" search hitting your "new installation" campaign. Ad group negatives are for fine-tuning which ad shows for which phrasing.

4. Choose the match type deliberately

Negative match types don't behave like positive ones - there are no close variants, so plurals and misspellings need adding separately. Broad negatives block any search containing all those words in any order. Phrase negatives block the exact phrase. Exact negatives block only that exact query. Most of the time phrase match is the right default; use exact when you want to block one specific query without catching anything else.

5. Record what you did

Keep a simple log or use change history. When performance shifts, you want to know whether a negative added three weeks ago is responsible.

Build lists, not piles

Hundreds of ad-hoc negatives scattered across campaigns are impossible to maintain. Build shared negative keyword lists by theme and apply them where they belong:

  • Universal - jobs, careers, free, cheap (if you're not), course, training, DIY, how to, what is, definition, meaning
  • Competitors - the brand names you don't want to bid on (and a separate campaign for the ones you do)
  • Locations - areas you don't serve
  • Products or services you don't offer - the adjacent things people assume you do
  • Brand protection - your own brand terms as negatives in generic campaigns, so brand searches go to the brand campaign where they belong

Lists mean a new campaign starts protected from day one rather than re-learning every expensive lesson the old ones did.

The mistakes that quietly cost you

  • Blocking too aggressively on thin data. One click, no conversion, added as a negative - repeat that a hundred times and you've strangled a campaign.
  • Adding broad negatives that catch good traffic. A broad negative for "free" blocks "free delivery" searches for your products. Think about what else contains that word.
  • Forgetting plurals, misspellings and variants. Negatives don't expand the way keywords do.
  • Negatives that conflict with keywords. Google flags these, but only if someone looks.
  • Never reviewing the lists. A term that was irrelevant two years ago might be a product line now.
  • Treating "didn't convert" as "irrelevant". Some of your best terms will have off weeks.

Negatives and Performance Max

Performance Max has historically offered very little negative control, and that's improved only gradually. Where account-level negatives are available, use them - they're your best protection. Brand exclusions let you keep your own brand searches out of PMax so it isn't credited for conversions your brand campaign would have won anyway. And review the search terms insight section, limited as it is, so you at least know the themes it's matching to.

Make it a habit, not a project

The reason this task gets skipped is that it's unglamorous and nobody notices when it's done well. Nobody emails to say "great news, we didn't pay for 300 searches about job vacancies this week". But it's the kind of discipline that compounds: a few hundred pounds a week redirected from irrelevant searches to relevant ones, every week, adds up to a materially different account by the end of the year.

Put it in the calendar. Same day, same time, twenty minutes. It's the weekly habit I keep for every account I manage, and it's a reliable indicator of whether an account has been looked after - which is why it's one of the first things I examine in a free PPC audit.

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