How a negative keyword actually works
Google checks each query against your keywords to see whether you're eligible, and against your negatives to see whether you're disqualified. One match on the negative side and your ad never enters the auction.
Which explains what people misunderstand. A negative can't lower a bid or improve a position — it only removes you. And because removal happens pre-auction, the impression never occurs, so negatives protect your click-through rate and through it your Quality Score.
Negative match types and their one dangerous quirk
Negatives have their own match types, and they don't behave like the positive ones.
- Negative broad — blocks only if every word appears, in any order.
free trialblocks "free software trial" but not "free demo". Narrower than people assume. - Negative phrase — blocks queries containing those words in order.
free trialblocks "best free trial software" but not "trial for free". - Negative exact — blocks that precise query, nothing else. For when one search is expensive and its neighbours are valuable.
- The quirk: unlike positive keywords, negatives have historically not matched close variants. Plurals and misspellings aren't covered, so
jobmay not blockjobs. Google has been changing this — check current documentation, and add the plural meanwhile.
A starter negative list for Indian advertisers
Add these at account level before your first campaign goes live, then delete anything that's genuinely part of what you sell. If you run free trials, keep "free". If you're a training institute, "course" is your entire business.
| Group | Terms | Why |
|---|---|---|
| No-budget | free, freeware, no cost, muft, cheapest | Converts near zero unless free is your model |
| Job seekers | jobs, job, vacancy, vacancies, hiring, recruitment, salary, internship, naukri, resume, fresher | Huge query volume in India, zero commercial intent |
| Learners, not buyers | course, courses, training, certification, tutorial, how to, kya hai, meaning, syllabus, notes | They want to do it themselves |
| Asset hunters | pdf, ppt, download, template, sample, format, images, torrent, crack | They came for a file, not a quote |
| Marketplace, second-hand | used, second hand, olx, quikr, amazon, flipkart, refurbished, wholesale | The click ends at someone else's checkout |
| Support and complaints | complaint, scam, fraud, customer care number, track order | Support traffic on a sales budget |
| Wrong geography | near me (national campaigns), cities you can't serve | Pulls local intent a national page can't satisfy |
The weekly search terms routine
Twenty minutes a week. On a ₹1,00,000 budget, cutting 10% of waste is ₹10,000 — a better hourly rate than most things you'll do that morning.
- Open the search terms report for the last 7–14 days and sort by cost, highest first. Not impressions — what you paid.
- Give each term one of three fates: keep, negative, or promote to its own keyword and ad.
- Block the pattern, not the term. If "salary" showed up once, block the whole job-seeker family.
- Check Shopping and Performance Max separately — they leak differently and people forget they exist.
- Quarterly, review what you've blocked. A negative added eighteen months ago may be excluding a product you launched since.
Account, campaign or ad group?
Put each negative at the highest level where it's universally true, and no higher.
Account level — never relevant to any campaign you'll run: job seekers, complaints, file hunters. Powerful and slightly dangerous, since one careless entry quietly suppresses a campaign you launch six months from now.
Campaign level — where most of the work happens, via shared lists applied to several campaigns at once. Build one universal-junk list and one per product line. Performance Max now accepts campaign-level negatives too; if you last checked in 2023, that answer has changed.
Ad group level — for steering, not blocking. With separate ad groups for "running shoes" and "running shoes for women", add "women" as a negative in the first so the query lands in the second. Routing, not excluding — the only job ad group negatives are right for.
Our performance marketing runs from ₹40,000/mo, media billed separately with no markup — pricing here.