Negative keywords stop your Google Ads budget funding irrelevant clicks. With Google's AI expanding match types further than ever, leaving negatives unmanaged means paying for competitor searches, DIY queries, and wrong-intent traffic — waste that compounds every day the account runs without a review.
Start a conversationIf you’re running Google Ads and not actively managing negative keywords, you’re bleeding budget.
Google’s business model is built on impressions. The wider they show your ads, the more revenue they generate. Your goal is conversions — and those two objectives are not the same thing.
Negative keywords are the mechanism that closes the gap. Without them, Google’s AI will happily spend your budget on searches that have essentially zero chance of converting, because those searches are technically related to what you sell.
Think of every search term as carrying a conversion probability. “Window installers Lincoln” — high odds. “Climadoor Chesterfield” (a competitor brand) or “how to install a window yourself” — near zero. Google will bid on both at similar CPCs unless you explicitly tell it not to. That’s the problem negative keywords solve.
Performance Max campaigns give Google almost total control over where your ads appear. That’s a feature if the targeting is good — it’s a disaster if you haven’t built proper exclusions first.
The most expensive mistake I see in PMax accounts: failing to exclude brand terms. The campaign then cannibalises existing customers and branded search traffic, spending budget on people who were already going to convert. You’re essentially paying Google to take credit for sales you’d have made anyway.
Fix: add your brand terms as negative keywords in every Performance Max campaign before it goes live.
Beyond brand terms, PMax can also serve on competitor names, category-adjacent queries, and wholesale or trade searches — none of which are likely to convert for most businesses.
Let me give you a real example. In one doors campaign I reviewed, the account had spent £653.83 over 30 days — 101 clicks, 7 conversions. Buried in the search terms were competitor brand names receiving clicks at £6.03 and £3.40 CPC. Expensive, irrelevant, zero chance of converting.
Across an entire account, this kind of waste adds up fast:
— Small accounts (£500–£2k/month): typically £50–£200/month wasted on irrelevant terms — Medium accounts (£2k–£10k/month): £200–£1,000/month — Large accounts (£10k+/month): £1,000–£3,000+/month
That’s budget that could be funding genuinely interested prospects — instead it’s funding Google’s revenue.
Negative keyword management is invisible when done well. You never see the irrelevant clicks that didn’t happen. That makes it easy to deprioritise.
In-house marketers often have broader responsibilities — social, email, content, website. Google Ads is one task among many. Negative keywords are time-consuming, unglamorous, and produce no visible output to show a manager.
Professional PPC managers build negative keyword reviews into their regular account rhythm. It’s not exciting work. It is, however, one of the highest-ROI activities in the account.
Most accounts I audit have at least one obvious negative keyword problem visible within five minutes of looking at the search terms report. If you haven’t reviewed yours in the last 30 days, the waste is almost certainly there. This is the fastest budget improvement available to most Google Ads advertisers.
There’s no target number — quality matters more than quantity. A small, well-managed account might have 50–100 negatives across shared lists. A larger account with broad match or Performance Max campaigns could need several hundred. Start with what the search terms report shows you, then build from there over time.
Yes, and it happens more than people realise. The most common mistake is adding a broad negative that’s too general — for example, adding ‘cheap’ as a negative when some customers do search ‘cheap double glazing Lincoln’ with genuine buying intent. Always review negatives carefully and check for conflicts after adding new ones.
Performance Max now supports shared negative keyword lists, the same as Search campaigns, plus self-serve campaign-level and account-level negatives — no need to go through a Google rep any more. Brand exclusions are the most critical — add these before any PMax campaign goes live.
Indirectly, yes. By stopping your ads appearing on irrelevant queries, you improve overall click-through rate (CTR) — because you’re only showing to people with genuine intent. Higher CTR is one of the signals Google uses in Quality Score calculations, which feeds into Ad Rank and ultimately your CPC.
Monthly as a baseline, weekly for new campaigns or high-spend accounts. The first 30–60 days of a campaign are especially important — Google is still learning and will test a wide range of search terms, many of which will be irrelevant to your business.
Yes — download your search terms report, sort by spend, and look for anything that couldn’t realistically convert. It takes time to do properly, but it’s not technically complex. The risk with in-house management is that it slips down the priority list. If your account has been running for three months or more without a thorough review, the budget lost to irrelevant clicks could more than cover the cost of professional management.
I review Google Ads accounts and find the search terms draining budget without converting. If your account hasn't had a thorough negative keyword audit recently, it's likely costing you more than you realise. PPC management from £300/month.
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