Negative keywords are where the money leaks
You do not buy keywords, you buy searches that resemble them. The least interesting hour in the account is usually the most profitable one.
Negative keywords are the least interesting part of search advertising and usually the most profitable hour you will spend. Every account that is quietly wasting money is wasting it here, on searches nobody chose and nobody looked at.
The gap between keywords and searches
You do not buy keywords. You buy searches that the system thinks resemble your keywords. The search terms report shows what people actually typed, and the first time anyone opens it they find something that makes them wince.
The usual discoveries: people looking for a free version, people looking for a job rather than a service, people researching how to do it themselves, people who wanted a different product with a similar name, and an entire category of searches aimed at your competitor.
A session with the report, start to finish
The habit is worth describing as a procedure, because "read the search terms report" is advice people nod at and never do.
- Open the search terms report and set the range to the last thirty days. Sort by cost, highest first.
- Read down the list until the costs become trivial. This is usually the top twenty to forty rows and takes about fifteen minutes.
- For each row make one of three decisions, out loud if it helps: this is my customer, this is not my customer, or I cannot tell.
- Everything in the second pile becomes a negative. Decide the level as you go, using the next section.
- Everything in the first pile that is converting and is not already a keyword becomes one, in the group where it belongs.
- Leave the third pile alone and look again next month. Uncertainty is not a reason to cut; four clicks is not evidence.
Weekly for the first month, monthly once it is stable. That is the whole discipline, and it is the difference between an account that improves and one that drifts.
The three levels, and when to use each
- Shared list, applied across campaigns. For the obvious global ones: free, jobs, DIY, your competitors if you are not bidding on them. Add once, protects everything, and new campaigns inherit it.
- Campaign level. For things wrong for this campaign but fine elsewhere, which matters once you have a discovery campaign running beside a tight one.
- Ad group level. The use people miss: stopping your own groups competing for the same search. If two of your groups can both be triggered by one query, the system picks, and you lose control of which advert and which page the visitor sees. An ad group negative is how you decide instead.
Negatives have match types too
Almost nobody knows this and it causes two specific problems.
- A negative added as exact blocks only that exact search. Adding free as an exact negative does nothing about free stock template, which is the search you were trying to stop.
- A negative added as broad blocks any search containing all those words in any order, which is usually what you want for a word like jobs.
- Negative phrase sits between the two and is the right choice when the word order matters.
- Negatives do not match close variants the way positive keywords do. Plurals and misspellings are separate negatives, which is why one-word negatives at broad match do most of the work.
The practical rule: add single words as broad negatives and multi-word problems as phrase negatives, then check next month whether anything slipped through.
The negatives worth adding before you start
- Free, cheap, discount, if you are not the cheap option.
- Job, jobs, salary, career, vacancy, hiring, which arrive whenever your service is also a profession.
- DIY, how to, tutorial, template, course, if you sell the doing rather than the teaching.
- Competitor names, unless you have deliberately decided to bid on them and have a page that earns the click.
- Anything that shares a word with your product but means something else entirely. You will know yours.
Do not over-prune
It is possible to go too far. A search that has not converted after four clicks is not proof of anything; it is four clicks. Cut the searches that are clearly wrong in kind, not the ones that are merely unproven. The first group is obvious from reading them, which is why reading them is the job.
A useful threshold: do not cut a search for underperformance until it has cost you more than a customer is worth. Before that you are not pruning, you are guessing with scissors.
Work to do
- Open the search terms report for the last month and sort by cost.
- Work down the top thirty rows making one of the three decisions on each, and add the clearly wrong ones as negatives.
- Build one shared negative list from the categories above, add single words as broad negatives, and apply it to every campaign.
- Check whether any two of your ad groups can be triggered by the same search. If so, add ad group negatives so you decide which one serves it.