Negative keywords tell Google what not to show your ad for. Without them you are paying for searches from people who were never going to ring you.
On a trade account with broad match running, this is usually where a serious share of the budget goes.
The categories that waste money
People looking for a job, not a tradie
The biggest one by a distance. Someone searching electrician apprenticeship is not a customer and the click costs the same.
- jobs, job, hiring, vacancy, vacancies, career, careers
- salary, wage, pay, rates of pay, how much do ... earn
- apprentice, apprenticeship, traineeship
- course, courses, training, school, tafe, qualification, licence, license, certificate
People wanting to do it themselves
- diy, how to, how do i, tutorial, guide, youtube
- repair myself, fix myself
- bunnings, hardware, supplies, buy, kit, tool, tools, parts
People wanting it free or cheap beyond use
- free, cheapest, cheap, bargain, discount
- second hand, used, gumtree, marketplace, facebook
Research rather than buying
- what is, meaning, definition, wiki, wikipedia
- reviews of, vs, versus, compare, comparison
- complaints, scam, sue, legal, ombudsman, fair trading
Wrong location
Add the major cities and states you do not serve. Location targeting helps but people include place names in the search itself, and those still get through.
Wrong business entirely
- Other trades that share vocabulary with yours.
- Brand names you do not work with.
- Commercial or industrial terms if you only do residential, and the reverse.
Then build your own list from real data
The pasted list is a starting point. The valuable list comes out of your own account.
- Open the search terms report. This shows what people actually typed, not what you bid on.
- Set the date range to the last 30 days.
- Sort by cost, highest first.
- Work down the list. Anything that was never going to be a customer becomes a negative.
- Do it weekly for the first month, then monthly.
The first pass on a neglected account usually finds a meaningful chunk of spend going somewhere obviously wrong. It is the fastest improvement available in most accounts.
Where to put them
Build a shared negative keyword list in the account and apply it to every campaign, rather than adding them campaign by campaign. Then there is one place to maintain and nothing gets missed when you add a campaign later.
Want it run for you? Our Google Ads management is built around tracked calls, not clicks.