Paid ads. Reviewed October 29, 2026
Negative keywords
Also called: Negatives, Exclusion keywords
Negative keywords are search terms an advertiser tells Google Ads never to show ads for, such as jobs, salary, DIY, free or school, so the budget is not spent on people who will never hire.
In practice
The search terms report shows every query that triggered an ad. Read it weekly for the first two months and add every irrelevant term as a negative. A new account without negatives commonly wastes a third of its budget.
Start with a list of 100 standard negatives for the trade before the first dollar is spent.
Related terms
- PPCPPC, pay per click, is advertising where the business pays only when someone clicks the ad, and Google Ads search campaigns are the main form of it for contractors.
- Quality ScoreQuality Score is Google Ads' 1 to 10 rating of how well a keyword, its ad and its landing page match each other, and a higher score lowers the price paid per click.
- Cost per leadCost per lead is total marketing spend on a channel divided by the number of calls, forms or chats it produced, and it is the number to judge a campaign on rather than cost per click.
Go deeper
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