Some of the money you spent on Google Ads last month went to people trying to sell you something.
Not customers. Salespeople. Subcontractors looking for work, suppliers hunting a new account, someone putting together a tender list. They typed something close enough to what you sell that Google showed them your ad, and you paid for the click.
They are not the only ones. Job seekers click. Students click. People shopping for software click. None of them were ever going to call you, and every one of them costs the same as a real enquiry.
A negative keyword list is how you stop paying for them. Most advice on this topic gives you an alphabetical dump of words to block. That is not much use, because you cannot tell which ones apply to you. This is organised a different way: by who the person clicking actually is.
Before you block anything, read your own data. Every account has a search terms report showing the actual phrases people typed, as opposed to the keywords you bid on. The two are rarely the same.
Sorting by cost rather than clicks is the part people skip. A term that got four clicks at a high cost per click is doing more damage than one that got forty cheap ones.
Read that list properly and you will usually recognise the categories below within about ten minutes.
We built the grouping below after going through 90 days of live search terms across Australian service accounts. It is not a theoretical list. Every category came out of an account where somebody was paying for those clicks and had not noticed.
This is the least obvious one and often the most expensive, because these searchers use the same industry vocabulary you do.
Someone searching “commercial cleaning tender” is not looking to hire a cleaner. They are looking for work. Same with “become a supplier”, “subcontractor opportunities”, “how to win facilities contracts” and anything with an RFQ or expression of interest attached.
Terms to block: tender, tenders, RFQ, RFT, EOI, expression of interest, subcontractor, subbie, supplier, vendor, procurement, prequalification, panel contractor, supplier portal, contractor registration, “become a”, “work with”, “partner with”, “how to win”, “how to start”.
If you sell to businesses or government, this category on its own can justify the whole exercise.
People looking for work in your trade search almost exactly what your customers search, plus one word. “Electrician” and “electrician jobs” sit next to each other, and a broad match keyword will happily serve your ad to both.
Terms to block: job, jobs, career, careers, salary, wage, hiring, vacancy, vacancies, recruitment, apprenticeship, traineeship, resume, CV, Seek, Indeed.
The Australian platform names matter here. Most published negative keyword lists are American and will not have Seek on them.
Anyone studying your trade is researching, not buying. They cost the same per click as a customer.
Terms to block: course, courses, certificate, certification, diploma, degree, TAFE, training, qualification, “how to become”, “what is”, “meaning”, “definition”, “explained”, template, example, examples, PDF.
Watch the information-seeking words in that list. “How to unblock a drain” is a person about to have a go themselves, not a person about to ring a plumber.
If your category has software attached to it, some searchers want the software rather than the service. Facilities management, project management, bookkeeping, scheduling and dispatch all have this problem.
Terms to block: software, system, systems, platform, app, tool, dashboard, licence, subscription, plus the acronyms specific to your sector.
Two different problems in one bucket. Competitors researching you, and people searching for a large national brand who land on your ad because your keyword was broad enough.
Block your competitors’ brand names, and block the big national operators in your category. Leave your own brand alone. Branded searches are usually your cheapest and highest-converting traffic.
The most common leak in local accounts. Your radius targeting says Brisbane, but someone in Brisbane searching “plumber Sydney” is still eligible to see your ad, because location targeting covers where the person is, not what they typed.
Block the cities, states and suburbs you do not service. If you cover the north side only, the south side suburbs belong on the list.
This is the difference between doing this once and doing it every time you build a campaign.
Google Ads lets you create a shared negative keyword list and apply it across the account. Do that. If you add your negatives inside a single campaign, the next campaign you build starts from zero, and so does every automated campaign type that gets added later.
Account level also matters for Performance Max, where you see far less search term detail than you do in a standard search campaign. You cannot review what you cannot see, so the defensive list has to be in place before the spend starts rather than after you have spotted the problem.
| Match type | How to write it | What it blocks |
|---|---|---|
| Negative broad | plumbing course | Any search containing all of those words, in any order |
| Negative phrase | “plumbing course” | Any search containing that exact phrase in that order |
| Negative exact | [plumbing course] | Only that exact search, nothing more, nothing less |
Here is the part most guides leave out. Negative keywords do not match close variants. Positive keywords do. Google will match your keyword to plurals, misspellings and near variants, but it will not extend your negatives the same way.
Block “course” and you have not blocked “courses”. Block “job” and “jobs” still gets through. You have to add the variations yourself, which is why phrase match is usually the safest default for a negative list.
Google’s own documentation on negative keywords is the reference to check when you are unsure, and it is worth checking, because this behaviour has changed before.
Copy the terms from the six categories above into a shared list, in phrase match, and you have a reasonable starting position for most Australian service businesses.
Two things to do before you paste:
Read every term against your own business. “Repair” is a waste of money for a business that only does new installations, and it is the main service for the business next door. Nobody can hand you a list you should apply blind.
Keep the bare category nouns for later. Blocking a broad term like “cleaning” at exact match will stop close-variant bleed, but it can also cut real traffic if your account structure is not ready for it. Add those once the rest is running.
It stops you paying for the wrong people. That is all it does.
If your enquiries are low because the offer is weak, the landing page takes six seconds to load, or nobody answers the phone between twelve and one, negatives will not help. You will simply spend the same budget on a smaller, better-qualified group of people who still do not convert.
The honest sequence is: fix the tracking so you can see which clicks become jobs, cut the clicks that never will, then work on the ones that should have converted and did not.
How many negative keywords should I have? There is no right number. A single-service local business might run a list of eighty terms. A business selling into several sectors might run several hundred. What matters is whether the list reflects what is actually in your search terms report, not how long it is.
How often should I review the search terms report? Monthly for most accounts, fortnightly if you are spending heavily or you have just launched. New wasted terms appear constantly, particularly after Google changes how a campaign type matches.
Can I add too many negative keywords? Yes. Over-blocking is a real risk, and it is harder to spot than over-spending because the damage shows up as impressions you never got. Be careful with single common words, and check your impression volume after a big addition.
Will negative keywords lower my cost per click? Not directly. They lower your wasted spend, which usually lowers your cost per enquiry. Those are different numbers, and the second one is the one that matters.
Do negative keywords work in Performance Max? Account-level negative keyword lists apply across campaign types, which is the main reason to set yours up at account level. Search term visibility in Performance Max is still more limited than in standard search campaigns, so the list does more of the work.
If you would rather someone went through your search terms report with you, that is part of what we do in Google Ads management. If search is the longer play you are weighing up alongside it, start with Brisbane SEO, and if you are comparing agencies, we wrote down the questions to ask on our SEO agency Brisbane page. Tradies specifically might want how Brisbane tradies get more jobs online.
