Negative Keywords.

Negative keywords are the counterpart to ordinary keywords: instead of triggering an advert for a search term, they prevent it from being served. They filter out queries that do contain your keywords but do not match your audience — the ones where a click costs money with no realistic prospect of a conversion. In most accounts they are the fastest available saving, because they cut wasted spend without touching bids, budgets or ad copy at all.

The classic case is excluding 'free', 'gratis', 'jobs', 'used' or 'tutorial' for a business selling a paid product or service. Anyone advertising 'legal advice' probably does not want to pay for 'legal advice degree' or 'free legal advice'. Negative keywords remove exactly that waste. The same applies to competitor names you do not want to bid against, cities and cantons you do not serve, and any term that signals research rather than an intention to buy.

Like ordinary keywords, negatives can be defined with match types (broad, phrase, exact) and managed at campaign or ad group level as well as in reusable lists. The most important source of new exclusions is the search terms report: it shows which actual queries triggered your adverts, and you filter the unsuitable ones out of it continuously. Shared lists are worth setting up early, because they keep every campaign in the account consistent instead of drifting apart.

An example: a premium furniture manufacturer notices in the search terms report that many clicks arrive via 'cheap furniture' and 'used furniture' but never lead to a purchase. It adds both as negative keywords — from then on the adverts appear only for higher-intent queries, waste falls and profitability rises. Click volume drops, which looks like a loss in the dashboard, while the cost per acquired customer improves. That trade-off is the whole point.