Guide · Google Ads search terms
In B2B, the dangerous negative keyword is the one that looks obvious. Block only the searches that can never become a qualified lead, judge mixed-intent terms by what sales did with them, and let brand exclusions handle brands.
Short answer
Exclude only terms that can never become a buyer, such as jobs, salary, training courses and consumer retail modifiers, at account level. Exclude offer-specific mismatches per campaign. Leave mixed-intent B2B terms like price, supplier, dealer, datasheet and competitor names running until you can see how many of those leads sales qualified.
Most negative keyword lists are written for ecommerce and local services, where “cheap”, “price” and “wholesale” really do signal the wrong buyer. In B2B the same words are often typed by a procurement engineer comparing suppliers or a distributor looking for a manufacturer. Pasting a generic list into a B2B account removes some of the searches most likely to become an RFQ, a demo or a consultation.
This guide separates what Google documents about negatives from rules of thumb, gives a three-bucket decision ladder and a starting library for industrial, SaaS and professional services accounts, and shows how to review search terms against qualified leads rather than cost per click.
Mechanism
Short answer
A negative keyword stops your ads showing for searches that contain it, according to its match type. Negatives don’t match close variants or other expansions, but Google says they do account for casing and misspellings. They can sit at account level, in shared lists, or on a campaign or ad group.
| Negative match type | What it blocks | Negative | Blocked | Not blocked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broad | Searches containing all the terms, in any order | bearing jobs | jobs in bearing company | bearing job (close variant), bearing supplier |
| Phrase | Searches containing the terms in the same order, with or without extra words | “ITI course” | ITI course for welding | course for ITI fitter |
| Exact | Only the exact terms in the same order, with no extra words | [valve price] | valve price | ball valve price list |
Source: Google Ads Help on negative keywords. Because close variants are not covered, a negative “bearing” does not block “bearings”; add plurals and meaningful variants yourself.
Account-level negatives apply to all Search and Shopping inventory in Search, Performance Max, App, Shopping, Smart and Local campaigns, with a limit of 1,000 per account (Google Ads Help). The home for terms that can never be a buyer.
Negative keyword lists apply one set of terms to several campaigns (Google Ads Help). Use them for a product line or market, such as all rental-offer campaigns.
For terms wrong for one campaign only, such as “second hand” in a new-machinery campaign when a refurbished campaign exists.
Short answer
Use brand exclusions for brands. Google says brand exclusions block searches for a brand name, common misspellings and related subsidiary brands, and can be added to Search and Performance Max campaigns. For Performance Max, Google calls negative keywords a highly restrictive control that can harm performance, and recommends them only for brand safety or completely irrelevant terms.
Sources: brand exclusions and Performance Max negative keywords and brand exclusions. That warning is the reason the “never” bucket below stays narrow.
Original framework
Every search term goes into one of three buckets. Only the first two become negatives. The third is judged by outcome, never on sight.
| Bucket | Rule | Typical terms | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Negate account-wide | Can never be a buyer in any campaign you run | salary, internship, resume, job vacancy, fresher, course syllabus, wallpaper | Account-level list, phrase match |
| 2. Negate per campaign | Wrong for this offer, right for another or harmless elsewhere | rental (in a sales campaign), open source (paid SaaS), residential (commercial HVAC), second hand (new machinery) | Campaign negatives or a shared list for that offer |
| 3. Review by outcome | Mixed intent: keep running until enough leads show the qualified rate | price, cost, cheap, supplier, manufacturer, wholesale, distributor, dealer, OEM, datasheet, PDF, CAD, manual, specification, tender, free trial, demo, template, alternative, competitor names | No negative yet; tag the term group and read it monthly |
Google publishes no threshold. Our rule of thumb: read a term group once it has produced at least about ten leads that sales has had time to qualify. Below that, one good or bad lead swings the rate, so investigate rather than negate.
Starting library
A starting point, not a paste-in list. Check each term against what you sell and against your search terms report before adding it.
| Term or pattern | Bucket | Match type | Level | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ITI, diploma, apprentice, welding course | 1 | Phrase | Account | Training and job seekers, common in Indian industrial categories |
| DIY, for home, for bike | 1 or 2 | Phrase | Account or campaign | Hobby and consumer use; check the term isn’t part of a product name |
| Amazon, Flipkart, online shopping | 2 | Phrase | Campaign | Retail purchase intent, not quantity buying |
| near me | 3 | – | – | National manufacturers may want it gone, but distributors and site engineers search it |
| list of manufacturers in, exporters list | 3 | – | – | Directory research, but sometimes buyers building a supplier shortlist |
| Competitor-exclusive and obsolete part numbers | 2 | Exact | Campaign | Only after the search terms report shows no cross-reference demand |
Target your own and cross-referenced part numbers with exact or phrase keywords. Negate competitor-exclusive and obsolete numbers as exact negatives, one at a time. Never add a fragment such as “6204” as a broad negative: it blocks every bearing search that contains it.
| Term or pattern | Bucket | Match type | Level | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| login, sign in | 2 | Phrase | Non-brand campaigns | Existing users navigating; handle your own brand with brand controls |
| crack, torrent | 1 | Phrase | Account | Never a buyer |
| tutorial, certification, jobs | 1 | Phrase | Account | Learners and job seekers |
| open source, free | 2 | Phrase | Campaign | Wrong for a paid plan campaign; keep “free trial” running if you offer one |
| free trial, demo, alternative, competitor names | 3 | – | – | Often the highest-intent evaluation searches |
| Term or pattern | Bucket | Match type | Level | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| internship, salary, course | 1 | Phrase | Account | Students and job seekers |
| template, PDF format, format download | 2 or 3 | Phrase | Campaign | Do-it-yourself intent for advisory firms; review if you publish lead-gated templates |
| government scheme (India) | 3 | – | – | Mostly individuals, but some businesses seek advisers for scheme applications |
| visa, jobs in Dubai (UAE) | 1 or 3 | Phrase | Account | Negate unless you advise on immigration or company set-up |
| free consultation | 3 | – | – | A broad “free” negative would block it; if it is your offer, it may be your best term |
For the segment playbooks these lists support, see marketing for professional services firms and marketing for EPC and engineering firms.
Review routine
Short answer
Scan weekly for terms that can never become buyers, and review mixed-intent terms monthly once enough leads have reached a qualified stage in your CRM or sheet. Judge each term group on qualified leads and cost per qualified lead, not click-through rate, because low-CTR specification terms often produce the best RFQs.
The search terms report (Campaigns › Insights and reports › Search terms) can be segmented by conversions (Google Ads Help). If you import a qualified-lead conversion action, segmenting by conversion action shows which terms produced qualified leads, separately from raw form fills. Setting that import up is covered in offline conversion import.
The click ID doesn’t carry the search term. For analysis in your CRM or sheet, pass the {keyword} and {matchtype} ValueTrack parameters into hidden form fields. Google documents that {matchtype} returns e, p or b, or “a” for AI Max keywordless matches, and that {keyword} is blank when an ad matches without a keyword (Google Ads Help).
Google omits some low-volume search terms from the report for privacy and groups them in search terms insights instead. The actual search term stays in Google’s report; your CRM holds the keyword that matched. Reading both together is as close as you get.
For the maths behind cost per qualified lead, see cost per qualified lead.
Automated matching
Short answer
Yes, with limits. In Performance Max, negatives apply to Search and Shopping inventory only, through campaign negatives, shared lists and account-level negatives. They don’t stop Display, YouTube or Gmail placements. In AI Max for Search campaigns, review the AI Max match type rows in the search terms report before adding negatives.
| Inventory | Negative keywords apply? |
|---|---|
| Search campaigns, including AI Max matches | Yes |
| Performance Max, Search and Shopping inventory | Yes (source) |
| Performance Max, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover | No: fix goals and forms instead |
Some industry reports mention a per-campaign limit for Performance Max negatives. Google’s own page doesn’t state one, so check the limit in your account rather than planning around a number.
In AI Max, search term matching finds queries beyond your keywords. Let it run long enough to see what it matches, add bucket-1 terms at account level before you start, and read the new queries by qualified lead before adding anything else. Details are in AI Max for Search; for Performance Max controls, see Search vs Performance Max.
Worked numbers
An industrial manufacturer in India spends ₹3,00,000 a month on Search: 240 RFQs at ₹1,250 each, 60 quote-ready at ₹5,000 each, 18 quotes and 4 purchase orders. One month of search terms, grouped:
| Term group | Spend | RFQs | Quote-ready | ₹ per quote-ready | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Specification and part-number terms | ₹90,000 | 70 | 30 | ₹3,000 | Keep; add top queries as exact keywords |
| “price” and “price list” | ₹60,000 | 60 | 15 | ₹4,000 | Keep: 25% qualified, the same as the account |
| “supplier” and “dealer” | ₹45,000 | 50 | 12 | ₹3,750 | Keep; record distributor enquiries as their own stage |
| Job, training, “ITI” | ₹30,000 | 25 | 0 | – | Negate account-wide, phrase match |
| Retail, “Amazon”, “online” | ₹45,000 | 20 | 1 | ₹45,000 | Negate per campaign |
| Other | ₹30,000 | 15 | 2 | ₹15,000 | Review next month |
| Total | ₹3,00,000 | 240 | 60 | ₹5,000 |
“Price” is on most starter negative lists. Here it produced 15 of the 60 quote-ready RFQs, at ₹4,000 each, cheaper than the account’s ₹5,000.
The job, training and retail groups together. They made RFQ volume look healthy while producing almost nothing sales could quote.
Removing ₹75,000 of waste frees budget. It doesn’t guarantee the same number of quote-ready RFQs from other terms, because deeper auctions on the good terms cost more per click.
To audit existing negatives, export them with the level they sit at, check each against current offers and keywords, and look for negatives that conflict with your own keywords. Routine checks like this belong in a wider Google Ads audit.
If the problem is spam or fake submissions rather than search intent, negatives won’t fix it: see junk leads from ads.
“Price”, “rate”, “price list”, “wholesale” and “dealer” are commonly typed by genuine business buyers: review them, don’t negate them. Job-seeker terms such as “vacancy”, “ITI” and “fresher” are safe bucket-1 terms. Marketplace names such as IndiaMART and TradeIndia belong in bucket 3, because some searchers are comparing suppliers; see B2B marketplaces vs paid ads. Transliterated and Hinglish versions need their own negatives, since negatives don’t cover close variants.
“Jobs in Dubai”, “salary in UAE” and “visa” are usually bucket 1, and “free zone company setup” is bucket 1 unless you sell set-up services. If you target Arabic-language users, keep a separate Arabic-script list, because negatives don’t translate. More on GCC campaigns in GCC B2B paid ads.
“Thomasnet”, “Grainger” and “McMaster” searches are distributor or marketplace navigation: bucket 3. “Salary”, “resume” and “Glassdoor” are bucket 1. Services firms often need negatives for state-agency terms that share their service names.
Zephra supports negative keywords, search-term promotion and waste detection as Google Ads levers, where configured, and reads them against lead-quality evidence from your CRM or a spreadsheet. Changes follow the permissions and approvals you set, and every change is recorded in an audit log. See Google Ads for B2B and lead quality optimisation, or the wider Google Ads lead quality controls.
Questions, answered
No. Google says negative keywords don’t match close variants or other expansions, although they do account for casing and misspellings. A negative “bearing” won’t block “bearings”. Add plurals and meaningfully different variants yourself, and add separate negatives for transliterated or other-language versions if you target those users.
Usually not. In many B2B markets, including India and the UAE, buyers with real purchase intent search for price or a price list before requesting a quote. Keep these terms, send them to a page that explains pricing factors or minimum order quantities, and negate only if their leads rarely qualify over a meaningful number of leads.
There is no right number, and Google doesn’t recommend one. Counts quoted in blog posts are unsourced. A short, accurate bucket-1 list plus campaign negatives backed by search terms evidence beats a long pasted list.
Account level for terms that can never be a buyer, within the 1,000-term limit, because they also reach Performance Max Search and Shopping inventory. Shared lists for terms that are wrong for a group of campaigns but not all of them.
Only if outcome evidence says their leads don’t qualify. Many B2B buyers search competitor names while evaluating. Consider a separate competitor campaign so you can budget and read it on its own, and follow Google’s trademark policy in ad text.
Target your own and cross-referenced numbers with exact or phrase keywords. Negate competitor-exclusive and obsolete numbers as exact negatives after checking the search terms report. Never add number fragments as broad negatives.
They can. Google describes negatives in Performance Max as a highly restrictive control that can harm performance by preventing its AI from finding valuable traffic. That is why negatives should cover only terms that can never convert, and the rest should be judged by outcome.
Negative keywords and waste detection are supported Google Ads levers, where configured. Low-risk changes can run automatically; everything else follows the permissions you grant or waits for approval, and every change is recorded in an audit log.
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