Negative Keywords
Terms you exclude so your ads never show for searches that waste budget.
Negative keywords are terms you add to a campaign or ad group to stop your ads showing for searches you do not want. They are the counterpart to the keywords you bid on: one says show here, the other says never here.
They are the main defence against wasted spend, because broad and phrase match pull in a wide range of queries and most of them never convert. Mining the search-terms report and adding the irrelevant terms as negatives is ongoing work, not a one-off, which is what our wasted-spend playbook and the iceberg effect are about.
Placed well, negatives also lift relevance, which helps Quality Score and lowers your cost per click.
Put the number to work: the break-even ROAS calculator turns your margins into the ROAS you need, and a free Due Diligence Audit checks whether the figures you see are the ones you are getting. Back to the glossary.