Every account attracts searches that look related but will never convert — job seekers, people looking for free or DIY options, competitors' support lines, or services you don't offer. Adding these terms as negatives at the campaign, ad group, account, or shared-list level stops your ads from appearing for them, and negatives can now be applied to Performance Max campaigns as well.
Negative keywords use their own match types and don't automatically include close variants, so a thorough list includes plurals and common misspellings. Building negatives isn't a one-time task: reviewing the search terms report regularly and adding new negatives is one of the highest-return habits in paid search.
Example
A personal-injury firm adds 'jobs,' 'salary,' 'free legal advice,' and 'paralegal' as negatives so its ads don't show to job seekers or people looking for free help.
How Sloss Digital uses it
We launch every campaign with a researched negative-keyword library and refine it weekly from search-term data — one of the fastest ways we cut wasted spend in an inherited account.