Boost PPC with negative keyword lists in 2025

In the competitive world of paid search, every click counts. But what about the clicks you're paying for that will never convert? Irrelevant search queries are the silent budget killers in most PPC accounts, driving up costs and dragging down return on investment. The solution lies in a proactive, strategic defense: negative keyword lists. These aren't just simple lists of 'don't-show' terms; they are powerful tools that refine your targeting, protect your brand, and ensure your budget is spent only on the most qualified, high-intent audiences.

This comprehensive guide provides 8 downloadable, ready-to-use negative keyword lists and resources, complete with expert guidance on implementation, maintenance, and avoiding common pitfalls. We'll move beyond the basics, offering actionable strategies to transform your account from a leaky bucket into a high-efficiency conversion machine. Mastering this process is a core responsibility for anyone managing ad campaigns, from a small business owner to a dedicated Paid Search Account Manager.

This resource is designed to be your one-stop shop for building a robust negative keyword strategy from the ground up. We will cover everything from foundational templates provided by Google to advanced automation scripts that actively manage your exclusion lists. By applying these resources, you can stop wasting money on searches for jobs, free alternatives, DIY solutions, or unrelated products, and start focusing your ad spend exclusively on users ready to engage and convert.

1. Google Ads Negative Keyword List Templates by Google

When building foundational negative keyword lists, the best place to start is often with the source itself. Google provides official templates and best practice guides designed to help advertisers avoid common pitfalls like showing ads on irrelevant or low-converting search queries. These resources are an excellent starting point for anyone new to paid search or looking to standardize their account structure.

The core idea behind these templates is to provide a pre-vetted list of common negative terms tailored to specific industries or campaign goals. For instance, an e-commerce store can use a template to exclude terms like "free," "jobs," or "reviews" to focus its budget on users with clear transactional intent. This prevents wasteful spending on clicks from users who are not looking to make a purchase.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Google's templates are most effective when used as a launchpad rather than a final solution. They provide a strong base that you must customize to fit your unique business needs and target audience.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Start with Industry Specifics: Select the template that most closely matches your business model. A SaaS company will need to exclude terms like "open source" and "free alternative," while a local service provider will want to filter out "DIY" and "how-to" queries.
• Customize and Expand: Treat the template as a dynamic document. Regularly review your Search Query Report to identify new, irrelevant terms that are triggering your ads and add them to your list.
• Leverage Match Types: Use phrase match for terms where the order matters (e.g., "free trial") to block a wider range of irrelevant searches. Broad match negatives should be used cautiously for single-word exclusions like "jobs."
• Analyze Your Competition: While Google provides a solid foundation, understanding what your rivals are doing can uncover more opportunities for refinement. Using essential tools for Google Ads competitor analysis can reveal irrelevant queries they are bidding on, which you can proactively add to your negative lists.
• Separate Lists by Campaign: For maximum control, create distinct negative keyword lists for different campaign types (e.g., Brand, Non-Brand, Shopping). This ensures that a negative keyword from one campaign doesn't accidentally block relevant traffic in another. For an in-depth guide on structuring these lists, you can find more information about optimizing paid search campaigns.

2. SEMrush Negative Keyword Tool & Lists

While platform-provided templates offer a solid foundation, leveraging a competitive intelligence tool like SEMrush takes the creation of negative keyword lists to a more strategic level. Instead of just blocking generic irrelevant terms, SEMrush allows you to analyze what keywords your competitors are bidding on and, more importantly, identify overlaps where you might be unintentionally competing for the wrong traffic. This data-driven approach helps refine ad targeting and prevent budget leakage with surgical precision.

The core strength of this tool lies in its ability to uncover negative keywords from your competitors' ad campaigns. For example, by analyzing a rival's keyword profile, you might discover they are bidding on "reviews" or "vs" terms that you want to avoid. This insight allows you to proactively build negative lists that steer your budget toward high-intent search queries, effectively carving out your niche in a crowded market.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

SEMRush is most powerful when used for offensive and defensive keyword strategies. It helps you not only block irrelevant traffic but also understand the search landscape to better position your ads away from low-value clicks that your competitors may be attracting.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Analyze Competitor Overlap: Use the Keyword Gap tool to compare your keyword profile with up to four competitors. Identify keywords they rank for that are irrelevant to your offerings and add them to your negative lists. A local service business, for instance, can exclude competitor brand names to avoid paying for clicks from users loyal to another provider.
• Filter for Intent Modifiers: Dive into competitor keyword data and specifically look for modifiers indicating poor commercial intent. A SaaS company can filter for terms like "free," "crack," or "open source" within a competitor's keyword set and add them as negatives to protect its ad spend.
• Combine and Customize: SEMrush often provides extensive lists. Don't import them blindly. Combine suggestions from multiple competitor analyses and tailor them to your specific campaign goals. An e-commerce store might combine a list excluding informational terms with another excluding competitor brand names.
• Set a Review Cadence: The competitive landscape is always changing. Schedule a monthly or quarterly review of your competitors' keyword strategies to identify new negative keywords. New product launches or marketing campaigns from rivals can introduce new terms you'll need to block.
• Export and Test: Before applying a large new list to your main campaigns, export it and test it in a smaller or staging campaign. This helps ensure you don't accidentally block valuable, long-tail keywords.

3. Wordstream's Negative Keyword List Templates by Industry

For advertisers seeking more specialized, industry-specific resources, Wordstream offers one of the most comprehensive collections of pre-built negative keyword lists. Their templates go beyond general exclusions by providing curated lists for over 20 different industries, from legal services and healthcare to real estate and e-commerce. This level of specialization helps businesses immediately filter out highly specific yet irrelevant search traffic.

The primary value of these templates lies in their depth and industry nuance. A law firm, for example, can instantly download a list that excludes terms like "pro bono," "free consultation," and "DIY legal forms," focusing their ad spend on users seeking professional representation. Similarly, a real estate agent can use a template to separate "for sale" queries from "for rent" searches, ensuring their budget targets qualified buyers.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Wordstream's industry-specific lists are ideal for businesses entering a new vertical or for those looking to refine established campaigns with more granular control. They save countless hours of manual research that would otherwise be spent identifying common, industry-specific non-converting terms.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Download Your Industry Template: Start by selecting the template that best aligns with your business sector. This serves as a powerful foundational list that is already more targeted than a generic one.
• Customize with Brand and Service Specifics: No template is perfect. Augment the list with your own brand-specific exclusions, such as competitor names you don't want to bid on or service variations you don't offer.
• Incorporate Seasonal and Local Variations: Add terms related to seasonal events or locations you don't serve. A local HVAC company, for instance, should exclude names of neighboring cities or states to avoid wasted clicks from outside its service area.
• Share Lists for Team Consistency: To maintain a unified strategy, ensure the customized template is shared as a master list across all team members managing your PPC accounts. This prevents inconsistent ad delivery and ensures everyone works from the same playbook.
• Schedule Regular Reviews: Treat these lists as living documents. Set a recurring reminder to review your Search Query Reports and add new negative terms discovered through real campaign data. This continuous refinement is key to long-term performance.

4. Python Scripts for Automated Negative Keyword Management (Google Ads API)

For advertisers managing large-scale or complex accounts, manual updates to negative keyword lists can become a significant bottleneck. This is where custom Python scripts utilizing the Google Ads API offer a powerful, scalable solution. By directly interacting with the API, you can automate the entire lifecycle of negative keyword management, from discovery and creation to application and reporting, saving immense time and reducing human error.

The core concept is to programmatically analyze search query reports, identify underperforming or irrelevant terms based on custom rules, and automatically add them to the appropriate negative keyword lists. For example, a script can be set to run daily to find queries with zero conversions but high spend and add them as negatives, ensuring your budget is constantly optimized toward performance. This level of automation moves account management from a reactive to a proactive state.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Automated scripts are most effective for dynamic environments where search query landscapes change rapidly. This method is ideal for e-commerce businesses with vast product catalogs or lead generation campaigns across multiple verticals that require constant vigilance to maintain profitability.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Start Simple, Then Scale: Begin with a basic script that pulls a search query report. Gradually add functionality, such as filtering by metrics (clicks, cost, conversions) and then adding the logic to update a negative keyword list.
• Implement Safety Checks: Before deploying any script that makes changes to your account, build in safety checks and an approval workflow. For instance, the script could output potential negatives to a Google Sheet for manual review before pushing them to the account.
• Test in a Staging Environment: Always test your scripts on a non-production or staging Google Ads account first. This prevents a buggy script from accidentally pausing campaigns or adding incorrect negative keywords to your live, revenue-generating accounts.
• Document Everything: Good code is well-documented code. Add comments throughout your script explaining what each part does. This is crucial for team collaboration and for when you need to update the script months later.
• Monitor API Usage: Be mindful of your Google Ads API quotas to avoid service disruptions. Implement exponential backoff strategies in your code to handle API rate limit errors gracefully. For those looking to dive deeper, you can find a wealth of information about advanced marketing automation strategies.

5. Bing Ads Negative Keyword Import Templates & Microsoft Advertising Library

While Google Ads often dominates the conversation, savvy advertisers know not to overlook Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads). Microsoft provides its own official templates and a shared library feature to help manage negative keyword lists effectively across its network, which often has a distinct user demographic and search behavior compared to Google.

The fundamental value here is recognizing that a one-size-fits-all negative list doesn't work across different search engines. Microsoft's tools are designed to streamline the import process but also encourage platform-specific refinement. For example, a B2B tech company might use a Microsoft template to exclude terms related to student research or personal projects, which may appear more frequently on the Bing network depending on the user base. This ensures your ad budget is reserved for high-intent, professional queries.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Microsoft's resources are most powerful when used to adapt and refine your Google Ads strategy for a new audience, not just replicate it. The user intent and query language can vary significantly, requiring a dedicated approach to negative keyword management on the platform.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Don't Just Copy-Paste: Avoid directly importing your Google Ads negative lists without review. Search behavior differs, and what is irrelevant on Google might be a valuable query on Bing. Start by importing, but treat it as a draft.
• Analyze the Bing Query Report: This is your best source for platform-specific insights. Regularly mine this report for irrelevant search terms unique to the Bing audience, such as different phrasing, misspellings, or brand-adjacent queries.
• Create Shared Lists for Consistency: Use the Microsoft Advertising Library to create shared negative lists. This is especially useful for maintaining brand safety and consistency across multiple campaigns, ensuring terms like "scam," "reviews," or competitor names are uniformly excluded.
• Test with a Smaller Budget: Before applying a large new negative list to a major campaign, test its impact on a smaller, controlled budget. This allows you to observe any unexpected drops in traffic or conversions and adjust accordingly.
• Monitor Quarterly: Bing's audience and algorithm evolve. A quarterly review of your negative keyword lists and the Search Query Report is a healthy cadence to catch new trends and ensure your campaigns remain efficient and targeted.

6. Optmyzr's Negative Keyword Management Suite

For advertisers managing large-scale or multiple accounts, manual list management becomes inefficient and prone to error. Optmyzr offers an enterprise-grade suite of tools designed to automate and streamline the entire negative keyword workflow, moving beyond simple lists into a sophisticated management system. It's built for agencies and in-house teams who need precision, control, and efficiency across complex account structures.

The platform's power lies in its automation and monitoring capabilities. It can analyze search query data from multiple ad platforms, suggest new negatives based on performance metrics, and apply them across accounts with predefined rules. For example, an agency can create a universal "master" negative keyword list for all its e-commerce clients and deploy it systematically, ensuring baseline protection against common irrelevant terms like "jobs" or "free" without manual work on each account.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Optmyzr is most effective for users who require advanced control, cross-platform consistency, and scalable optimization. It shifts the process from reactive list-building to proactive, automated account hygiene.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Establish Approval Workflows: For teams, it's crucial to set up approval workflows for any bulk changes. This ensures a senior strategist reviews and approves new negative additions before they are pushed live, preventing accidental blocking of high-value keywords.
• Leverage Cross-Account Templates: Create master negative keyword lists at the agency or manager account level. A "Competitor Brand Names" list or a "General Wasteful Terms" list can be applied to all relevant client accounts, ensuring immediate and consistent filtering.
• Set Up Automation Rules: Use Optmyzr's Rule Engine to automatically find and add negative keywords. For instance, create a rule that flags any non-converting query that has spent over a certain threshold (e.g., $20) and adds it as a negative phrase match.
• Coordinate Across Platforms: For brands advertising on both Google and Microsoft Ads, use the platform to synchronize negative lists. This ensures that an irrelevant query identified in one platform is automatically blocked in the other, saving time and budget.
• Schedule Regular Reviews: Automation doesn't replace strategy. Schedule monthly or quarterly reviews of your automated rules and the negatives they've added to ensure they are still aligned with your campaign goals. This level of expert oversight is a core component of many professional paid search services.

7. Industry-Specific Negative Keyword Collections (eBook & Resource Libraries)

Moving beyond generic templates, industry-specific collections offer a more refined layer of targeting. These resources are often crowdsourced by PPC communities or curated by digital marketing agencies, providing deep-dive negative keyword lists tailored to the unique language and search behavior of specific business verticals. They are typically found in comprehensive eBooks or dedicated online resource libraries.

The primary value of these collections is their specificity. For example, a law firm can immediately exclude terms related to "free legal advice" or "DIY divorce kit" to focus on high-intent clients. Similarly, a real estate agency selling homes can filter out searches for "apartments for rent" and "short-term lease," ensuring their budget is spent on genuine homebuyers, not renters. This targeted approach prevents spending on traffic that is fundamentally misaligned with business objectives.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Industry-specific lists are most powerful when used to build a robust, multi-layered negative keyword strategy. They go deeper than foundational templates by addressing the nuances and common irrelevant queries unique to a particular sector, saving you hours of manual research.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Combine and Customize: Download lists from multiple credible sources within your industry to create a comprehensive master list. You must then customize it by adding your own company-specific brand exclusions and the names of direct competitors.
• Create Tiered Lists: Not all negative keywords are equal. Segment your lists into tiers such as "must-exclude" (e.g., "free," "jobs") and "should-exclude" (e.g., competitor names in a brand campaign, low-intent informational terms). This allows for more flexible application across different campaigns.
• Update Seasonally: Industries have trends and seasonal shifts. A B2B software company might need to add negative keywords related to "end-of-year reports" in Q4 to avoid irrelevant research traffic. Regularly review and update your lists to reflect these changes.
• Document Your Rationale: As your negative keyword lists grow, it's easy to forget why a term was added. Keep a simple log or add notes in your Google Ads account explaining the reason for each exclusion. This is invaluable for team collaboration and future account audits.
• Apply to Niche Campaigns: These lists are perfect for highly specialized campaigns. An insurance provider targeting "commercial vehicle insurance" can use an industry list to proactively exclude terms related to personal auto policies, comparison sites, and low-quality lead generation queries.

8. Google Ads Script Templates for Negative Keyword Automation

For advertisers managing large-scale accounts or seeking to implement sophisticated rules, negative keyword automation via Google Ads Scripts is a powerful, advanced technique. These pre-built, JavaScript-based templates allow you to automate the process of finding and adding negative keywords based on performance data, saving countless hours of manual work and ensuring your accounts remain optimized in real time.

The fundamental advantage of scripts is their ability to execute custom logic that goes beyond standard platform rules. Instead of manually sifting through search query reports, you can deploy a script that automatically identifies and excludes terms that meet specific negative criteria. For example, a script can be configured to add any search query as a negative keyword if it has spent over $50 without a single conversion, effectively plugging budget leaks before they escalate.

Use Cases and Implementation Tips

Google Ads Scripts are most impactful when used to enforce strict performance guardrails and maintain account hygiene at scale. They transform reactive analysis into a proactive, automated system for building highly effective negative keyword lists.

Key Implementation Steps:

• Start with Community Scripts: You don't need to be a developer to get started. The Google Ads developer community and various PPC blogs offer a wealth of ready-to-use scripts. Look for templates designed for tasks like n-gram analysis or CPA-based exclusions.
• Test on Small Campaigns: Never run a new script on your entire account at once. Test it on a single, non-critical campaign first to ensure it functions as expected and doesn't accidentally exclude high-value terms.
• Set Up Error Notifications: Configure your scripts to send email alerts if they encounter errors during execution. This helps you quickly identify and fix any issues that could disrupt your automation.
• Document and Version Control: Use comment blocks within the script's code to document its logic, thresholds, and any changes you make. This is crucial for troubleshooting and for other team members to understand its function.
• Review Performance Monthly: Automation is not a "set it and forget it" solution. Schedule a monthly review to check the script’s performance, analyze the negatives it has added, and adjust its performance thresholds (e.g., CPA, CTR, impression count) as needed.

Negative Keyword Lists — 8-Resource Comparison

From Lists to Lasting Results: Mastering Your Negative Keyword Strategy

Throughout this guide, we've explored a diverse toolkit of resources, from ready-made templates to sophisticated automation scripts, all designed to refine your paid search campaigns. You now have access to industry-specific lists from Wordstream, powerful management tools like Optmyzr, and foundational templates directly from Google and Microsoft. We've seen how these tools are not just repositories of words but strategic assets that shield your budget from irrelevant clicks and sharpen your targeting.

The core takeaway is this: a negative keyword strategy is not a one-time setup. It's a dynamic, ongoing process of refinement. The initial implementation of comprehensive negative keyword lists provides an immediate lift by cutting obvious waste, but the real, sustained value comes from diligent, data-driven maintenance. This is the critical shift from simply using lists to truly mastering your negative keyword approach.

Key Principles for Long-Term Success

To transition from a reactive to a proactive strategy, embed these principles into your campaign management workflow:

• Embrace a Tiered Structure: The most effective strategies use a layered approach. Implement broad, universal negatives (like competitors, job-seeking terms) at the account or shared list level. Apply campaign-specific negatives to control for intent (e.g., "free" or "DIY" for a premium service). Finally, use ad group-level negatives for hyper-granular control, ensuring your ad for "men's leather boots" doesn't show for "men's hiking boots."
• Schedule a Cadence of Review: Don't wait for your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) to spike before checking your search query reports. Set a recurring calendar reminder, weekly or bi-weekly, to proactively hunt for irrelevant queries. This consistent review is the engine of a healthy account, turning real user data into actionable intelligence.
• Think Beyond the Obvious: The downloadable negative keyword lists are your starting point, not your final destination. Your unique business will attract unique, irrelevant queries. Look for patterns. Are you a software company getting searches for a similarly named musician? Are you a local service provider getting clicks from other states? These nuanced insights are where you'll find significant savings.

From Good to Great: The Strategic Impact

Ultimately, a meticulously managed negative keyword strategy does more than just save you money on wasted clicks. It has a cascading positive effect across all your key performance indicators. By filtering out unqualified traffic, you naturally improve your click-through rate (CTR), as your ads are shown to a more relevant audience. This improved CTR, in turn, boosts your Quality Score.

A higher Quality Score leads to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and better ad positions, creating a powerful flywheel of efficiency and performance. You are not just stopping bad clicks; you are actively creating an environment where your best clicks cost less and deliver more. This is how you transform a defensive tactic into a powerful offensive advantage, ensuring every dollar of your ad spend is invested in driving meaningful growth, generating qualified leads, and securing profitable conversions. Your mastery of negative keyword lists is a direct investment in the long-term health and scalability of your paid advertising engine.

Feeling overwhelmed by the ongoing maintenance? The expert team at Rebus specializes in building and managing enterprise-grade paid search strategies, where meticulous negative keyword management is a cornerstone of our process. Let us handle the complexity of search query analysis and strategic list implementation so you can focus on your business growth. Learn how Rebus can transform your wasted ad spend into a powerful competitive advantage.