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How to Use Negative Keywords in Google Ads

August 14, 2025

Google ads is an imperative tool for use in digital marketing – especially when it comes to negative keywords. If you are a small business owner, or are managing your own ad campaigns, learning the importance of (and how to effectively use) negative keywords is one of the easiest ways to improve your ROI, avoid wasting spend and make sure your ads are shown to the right people.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are the kind of search term that you don’t want your ads to appear for – the things that might have similar phrasings but aren’t relevant to what you’re offering. When you add negative keywords, your ad won’t show into Google for those words or phrases.

For example, maybe you are a local clothing store in Nottingham, you wouldn’t really want to pay for clicks from people who are searching “clothes shops Leicester” or “second-hand clothes” – in such cases, you would add “Leicester” and “second-hand” to your negative keywords list so that you are maximising the use you get for your spend.

Why Even Bother?

It’s a question as old as time – the short answer is simple: they save you money and improve your results. How? Well: 

  1. They help you avoid irrelevant clicks, therefore avoiding wasted spend
  2. They will assist with improving your click-through rate (CTR), because the right people are seeing your ad
  3. You’ll get a higher Quality Score from Google, which can lower your cost-per-click.
  4. You would be spending less on the wrong traffic, and more on the people who are actually likely to follow through.

How to Determine and Add your Negative Keywords

Figuring them out and adding them to your campaign is pretty easy once you know where to look.

  1. Firstly, you can look into your “Search Terms” report, under Insights & Reports in Google Ads. This will show you a list of what search terms are most commonly searched for people to find you on Google. If you scroll through and see anything that is not relevant or shows low intent then that should be selected to add as negative.
  2. You can also use the keyword tools – such as Google’s Keyword Planner or other such tools to help you spot terms that don’t fit what you are trying to offer.
  3. Think, yourself, like a customer that would be a bad fit. Who don’t you want seeing your ads?

 

As mentioned, you can add negative keywords directly from the Search Terms report (select irrelevant terms and select “add as negative keyword”), or you can also manually add them in the Keywords tab by going from Keywords to Negative Keywords, and inputting them there.

Some Key Take-Aways

Negative keywords are a big part of what we do with Digital Marketing – especially with eCommerce. If you are going to take anything away from this blog, keep these things in mind:

  1. Review your keywords regularly – regardless of the size of your business, the CPC values can and will add up with a low follow-through rate if you are not on top of it.
  2. Build a go-to list – you can save significant time on negative keywords if you already have a list of industry-relative common negatives to add straight away.
  3. Use match types – “broad match” blocks anything that includes that word, “phrase match” blocks a phrase in the exact order and “exact match” blocks only that term exactly.

Final Thoughts

Negative Keywords might sound scary and technical, but really they are quite simple, and a very smart way to stop your ad budget being wasted on the wrong consumer. Whether this is your first time running ads or you are a veteran, regularly checking and updating your negative keywords is always one of the easiest ways to improve your ad performance.

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