Negative keywords: stopping wasted spend

Part 5 warned that broad match can drift toward searches with nothing to do with the actual product. Negative keywords are the direct fix — explicitly excluding specific terms or phrases from triggering an ad at all, closing the exact gap broad match opens.

A real Search Terms report, and what it reveals

Search term                        Clicks   Cost    Conversions
"coffee subscription"              45       $94.50   6
"best coffee subscription box"     22       $41.80   3
"coffee subscription jobs"         8        $16.20   0
"free coffee subscription"         14       $29.40   0
"how to make a coffee subscription business"  6   $11.40   0

This is a realistic Search Terms report for Bright Leaf Coffee's broad-match "coffee subscription" keyword — three of the five search terms shown converted well, and three others cost real money with zero return: someone searching "coffee subscription jobs" is looking for employment, not a product to buy; "free coffee subscription" signals a searcher looking for something at no cost, unlikely to become a paying customer; "how to make a coffee subscription business" is someone researching starting a competing business, not buying from one.

Adding negative keywords directly from this data

Negative keyword: jobs
Negative keyword: free
Negative keyword: "how to make"
Negative keyword: business

Each of these, added as a negative keyword, prevents the ad from showing again for any search containing that term — directly closing the exact leaks the Search Terms report just revealed, with real cost data behind each one rather than a guess made in advance.

Negative match types work the same way as positive ones

Negative broad:   jobs              → blocks any search containing "jobs"
Negative phrase:  "how to make"      → blocks any search containing that exact phrase
Negative exact:   [coffee subscription jobs]  → blocks only that specific exact search

The same broad/phrase/exact distinction from part 5 applies to negatives — a negative broad match on "jobs" blocks every search containing that word anywhere, which is usually the right level of aggressiveness for a clearly irrelevant term like this one.

Shared negative keyword lists: applied account-wide

Shared list: "General Exclusions"
  - free
  - jobs
  - "how to"
  - reviews (if not specifically targeting review-intent searches)
  - diy

Rather than adding the same obvious negative keywords to every single campaign individually, a shared negative keyword list applies one master list across every campaign in the account at once — the standard, efficient way to maintain terms that are irrelevant regardless of which specific campaign or ad group is running.

Negative keywords as an ongoing habit, not a one-time setup

The real Search Terms report from earlier in this part didn't exist before the campaign had real traffic — negative keyword lists genuinely improve over the first several weeks of a live campaign as more real search data accumulates, and reviewing the Search Terms report on a regular cadence (weekly, early in a campaign's life) is one of the highest-value, lowest-effort recurring tasks in ongoing account management, covered again directly in part 18's budget management routine.

Next: campaign and ad group structure, in full — how the account hierarchy from part 1 should actually be organized as it grows past two ad groups.