A negative keyword strategy that scales

Negative keywords are the highest-ROI maintenance task in most accounts. The problem is that doing them by hand does not scale. This is a strategy that does.

Level one: account-level shared lists

Build shared negative lists by theme and apply them across campaigns:

• Free / DIY intent — free, cheap, diy, template, download, pdf
• Job intent — job, jobs, salary, hiring, career, resume, internship
• Research intent — what is, definition, meaning, wikipedia, reddit, quora
• Competitors — names of competitors you do not want to bid on
• Irrelevant categories — products or services you do not sell

Shared lists mean you add a negative once and it applies everywhere.

Level two: campaign and ad-group negatives

Use these for narrower terms that should be excluded only from specific campaigns — for example, excluding “enterprise” from a startup-focused campaign.

Handling DSA and Performance Max

DSAs and PMax generate targeting from your site and signals, so they surface junk fast. Two rules:

1. Apply the account-level shared negative lists to every DSA and PMax campaign.
2. Review their search terms more often than search campaigns — weekly at least.

Use a page feed to control which URLs DSAs target, and keep exclusion lists tidy.

The maintenance loop

1. Export the search terms report weekly.
2. Group queries by intent, not by exact text.
3. Add broad-match negatives for intent groups.
4. Add exact negatives for one-off bad queries.
5. Re-check that no negative is blocking a valuable query.

That last step matters more than people think: over-aggressive negatives can quietly suppress good traffic.

Measuring success

Track wasted spend as a percentage of total spend over time. A healthy account trends toward a stable low single-digit percentage. If it climbs, your negatives are falling behind your keyword expansion.

Automating it

Manual review does not keep up with broad match and PMax. MyAd mines search terms continuously and proposes negatives with the projected savings, so you approve rather than hunt. See negative keyword automation.