Negative keywords are terms you exclude from a Google Ads campaign so your ads do not show on searches containing them. They filter out wrong-intent traffic — like "free", "jobs", or "DIY" for a paid B2B product — protecting budget for searches that can actually convert.
Every keyword you bid on matches a cloud of real queries, and part of that cloud is always wrong for your offer. A plumber bidding on "plumber" will match "plumber salary", "plumber jokes", and "how to become a plumber". Negative keywords carve those out. Accounts that never add negatives routinely waste 10–25% of search spend on traffic that cannot convert — it is usually the highest-ROI hour of maintenance in the platform.
Negatives have their own match types, and they behave more literally than positive keywords: negative broad match blocks any query containing all the negative words in any order; negative phrase blocks queries containing the exact sequence; negative exact blocks only that exact query. Crucially, negatives do not expand to close variants or synonyms — blocking "cheap" does not block "affordable", and blocking "job" does not block "jobs". You must add plurals and variants yourself.
Universal candidates for commercial campaigns: free, cheap, jobs, careers, salary, course, training, DIY, how to, template, download, login, support, reviews of competitors you don't want, and informational modifiers like "what is". But never add negatives blindly — "free" is a conversion killer for a paid tool yet essential to keep if you offer a free tier, and "reviews" signals late-stage research you may want.
Workflow: check the Search Terms report weekly, sort by spend, and add anything irrelevant as a negative at the right level — campaign level for things wrong for the whole campaign, shared negative lists for things wrong for the whole account. Build the first list before launch from brainstormed wrong intents; refine from real query data after.
A law firm bidding "personal injury lawyer" adds negatives: salary, jobs, "how to become", school, pro bono, free consultation (if they don't offer one), movies. Result: the ad stops matching "personal injury lawyer salary" and "how to become a personal injury lawyer" — queries that spent budget but could never become clients.
No — negatives are more literal. They don't match synonyms, misspellings, or singular/plural variants automatically. To block both "job" and "jobs" you must add both. Positive keywords expand to close variants; negatives never do.
Match the scope of the problem: ad-group negatives for steering traffic between ad groups (e.g. blocking "running" in a hiking-shoes ad group), campaign negatives for irrelevant intents, and shared lists applied account-wide for universals like jobs and salary.
Yes, accidentally — audit lists before applying account-wide. A broad negative like "login" can block "yourbrand login" searches that you may prefer to capture with a cheap brand ad rather than lose to a competitor.