How to Use the Search Terms Report to Find Negative Keywords (Step-by-Step)

TL;DR: Access the search terms report via Campaigns > Insights & reports > Search terms. Sort by cost or impressions to find the biggest budget wasters. Categorize irrelevant queries by type. Add them as negative keywords at the ad group, campaign, or shared list level using the right match type. Then set a recurring review schedule so it stays a habit, not a one-time fix.

Most advertisers know they should be adding negative keywords. But in most accounts I audit, the search terms report is either checked once at launch and forgotten, or it's exported to a spreadsheet that never gets actioned. The result is the same either way: budget bleeding out on clicks that were never going to convert.

If someone searching "project management degree" clicks your ad for project management software, you paid for that click. They were never buying. And Google will keep serving your ad to similar queries unless you tell it not to.

This guide walks through exactly how to use the search terms report to find negative keywords, step by step. You'll learn where to find the report, how to sort and filter it, how to categorize what you find, and how to add negatives at the right level with the right match type. There's also a section on building a recurring review process so this actually sticks.

Whether you're managing one account or running campaigns for a dozen clients, the workflow is the same. The only difference is scale. Let's get into it.

Step 1: Open the Search Terms Report in Google Ads

The navigation path has shifted around over the years, but as of the current Google Ads UI, you'll find it here: click Campaigns in the left sidebar, then look for Insights & reports in the secondary navigation, and select Search terms from the dropdown.

If you don't see it immediately, make sure you're inside a specific campaign or have campaigns selected. The report can be viewed at the campaign level, ad group level, or across the entire account depending on what's selected in your campaign tree on the left.

Before you do anything else, set your date range. This is one of the most common mistakes people make: they check the last 7 days and wonder why they're only seeing a handful of terms. For a meaningful sample, set it to at least the last 30 days. If the account is lower volume or you're running a newer campaign, push it to 90 days to get enough data to work with.

Now, a quick clarification that trips up a lot of people: search terms and keywords are not the same thing. Keywords are what you're bidding on. Search terms are what people actually typed into Google before your ad appeared. With broad match and phrase match keywords, one keyword can trigger hundreds of different search terms. That gap between what you're bidding on and what's actually triggering your ads is exactly where negative keyword opportunities live. If you want a deeper dive on this distinction, check out our guide on the difference between search terms and keywords.

One more thing worth knowing: Google has been redacting search term data since 2020, showing only queries that meet certain privacy and volume thresholds. You won't see every single search term that triggered your ads. That's frustrating, but the report still shows enough to make a real impact. Work with what you have.

Step 2: Sort and Filter to Surface the Biggest Offenders

Once you're in the report with a solid date range, don't just scroll through randomly. Start by sorting in a way that surfaces the highest-impact problems first.

Click the Cost column header to sort descending. This shows you the search terms that have eaten the most budget. These are your priority targets. If a term has spent a meaningful amount and produced zero conversions, that's an immediate negative keyword candidate.

Alternatively, sort by Impressions descending to find terms that are triggering your ads at high volume even if the cost looks low. High-impression, zero-conversion terms are a signal that your ads are showing up in the wrong context repeatedly. For a more comprehensive approach to this analysis, see our guide on Google Ads search terms analysis.

After sorting, use the filter bar to search for known junk categories. Here are some common ones worth filtering for:

Free: Unless you offer a free product, anyone searching with "free" in the query is almost certainly not your customer.

Jobs / salary / careers / hiring: These indicate job-seekers, not buyers. If you sell software, you don't want your ads showing to people searching for "project management jobs" or "project manager salary."

DIY / how to / tutorial / guide: These are informational queries. The person is trying to learn something, not buy something. Sometimes useful for brand awareness, but rarely for conversion-focused campaigns.

Reddit / forum / review: These often indicate someone in early research mode, or looking for community opinions rather than a product to purchase.

Competitor names: If you're not running an intentional competitor campaign, competitor brand terms you're accidentally triggering on can waste significant budget.

There's also an Added/Excluded column in the report. This tells you whether a term has already been added as a keyword or excluded as a negative. Use it to quickly identify which terms are new and haven't been acted on yet.

If you prefer working in bulk, you can export to a spreadsheet and work through it there. But tools like Keywordme let you do this directly inside the search terms report without the export step, which is a significant time saver when you're doing this across multiple campaigns or accounts.

Step 3: Categorize What You Find Before You Act

Not all bad search terms are the same, and treating them the same way leads to sloppy negative keyword lists. Before you start adding negatives, take a minute to sort what you've found into buckets. This affects how you add them and at what match type.

Here are the three main categories to work with:

Completely unrelated (junk): These have nothing to do with your product or audience. If you're selling PPC software and you see "what is PPC" in your search terms, that's junk. The person is doing basic research. They're not buying. Same goes for "PPC meaning" or "PPC definition." For a deeper look at tackling these, our article on eliminating Google Ads junk keywords covers specific strategies.

Related but wrong intent: These are trickier. The topic is relevant, but the searcher isn't in buying mode. "PPC tutorial" or "how to set up Google Ads" might be triggered by your keywords, but the person is looking to learn, not purchase a tool. If you're selling a paid PPC optimization tool, these are not your buyers right now.

Competitor or brand terms you don't want: This includes searches like "[competitor name] pricing" or "[competitor name] alternative" that you're accidentally triggering on. Sometimes these are worth bidding on intentionally. But if they're showing up unintentionally and not converting, they need to be excluded.

Why does categorizing matter? Because it determines the right negative match type to use, which is the next step. A junk term you never want under any circumstances gets treated differently than a phrase that's sometimes relevant but not in this context. Lumping them together and adding everything as negative broad match is a fast way to accidentally block good traffic.

It also helps when you're building shared negative keyword lists. Junk terms like "jobs," "free," and "salary" belong on a universal list applied across your whole account. Wrong-intent terms might only need to be excluded at the campaign level. Our roundup of common negative keywords every campaign should have is a useful starting point for building that universal list.

Step 4: Add Negative Keywords at the Right Level

This is where a lot of advertisers make a structural mistake. They add every negative keyword at the campaign level by default, which is fine for some terms but wrong for others. Understanding the three levels will make your account cleaner and more precise.

Ad group level: Use this when a term is irrelevant to one ad group but potentially relevant to another within the same campaign. A classic example: you're running a software campaign with both an SMB ad group and an Enterprise ad group. The term "enterprise" might be a negative in your SMB ad group to prevent budget bleed, but you absolutely want it in your Enterprise ad group. Ad group negatives let you make that distinction.

Campaign level: Use this when a term is irrelevant to everything in that campaign, but you don't necessarily want to block it account-wide. Maybe "free trial" is fine to exclude from your high-intent purchase campaign, but you're running a separate awareness campaign where it might be acceptable.

Shared negative keyword list: This is the most powerful and underused option. When a term is universally irrelevant across your entire account, like "jobs," "salary," "free download," or "what is," add it to a shared list and apply that list to all campaigns. For a walkthrough on setting this up, see our guide on how to add negative keywords to all campaigns at once.

Here's how to actually add a negative from the search terms report in Google Ads: check the checkbox next to the term, click the Add as negative keyword button that appears in the action bar at the top, then choose whether to add it at the ad group, campaign, or account level. You can also add it to an existing shared list from that same dialog.

What usually happens here is that people go one by one through this process, which works but gets slow fast. If you're managing a larger account or multiple clients, this is exactly where Keywordme helps: it lets you add negatives in bulk with one-click actions directly inside the search terms report, without switching tabs or exporting anything.

Step 5: Choose the Right Negative Match Type

Negative match types work differently from positive match types, and the difference matters more than most people realize. Our deep dive on how match types work for negative keywords covers the full mechanics, but here's the practical summary.

Negative broad match blocks any query that contains all the words in your negative keyword, in any order. It does not include close variants the way positive broad match does. So if your negative broad match keyword is "project management software," it would block a query like "software for project management" but not "project management tool." Use this when you want to cast a wide net on a concept.

Negative phrase match blocks queries that contain your exact phrase in that specific order. If your negative phrase match is "free trial," it blocks "free trial software" and "download free trial" but not "trial free" (different order). This is the most commonly used negative match type and works well for most situations.

Negative exact match blocks only that precise query, nothing else. Use this when you need surgical precision: you want to block one very specific search term but don't want to accidentally block related variations that are still relevant.

The practical rule of thumb: default to negative phrase match for most of what you find in the search terms report. It's specific enough to avoid collateral damage but broad enough to block the full range of variations you don't want.

Here's a real example of why match type selection matters. Say you're adding "free" as a negative. If you add it as negative broad match, you might block searches like "risk-free trial" or "free up time"—phrases that aren't necessarily problematic. If you add "free trial" as negative phrase match instead, you're being more precise about what you're excluding. Think through the downstream impact before you add, especially for short or common words. For more on avoiding these pitfalls, read about how to avoid blocking good traffic with negative keywords.

Step 6: Build a Recurring Review Schedule That Actually Sticks

This is the step most guides skip, and it's the reason people do one round of negative keyword work and then let the account drift for months.

The search terms report is not a one-time destination. New queries come in constantly, especially if you're using broad match keywords, running Performance Max campaigns, or in a competitive niche where search behavior shifts. Your negative keyword list needs to grow with the account.

Here's a suggested cadence based on account type:

Weekly: High-spend accounts, new campaigns in the first 60-90 days, or any campaign that's had recent targeting changes. New campaigns in particular can generate a lot of unexpected search terms early on.

Biweekly: Mature, stable campaigns with established negative keyword lists. By this point, you're doing maintenance rather than heavy lifting.

Monthly at minimum: Even a low-volume account will accumulate new search terms over a month. Monthly reviews are the floor, not the standard.

The good news: each review gets faster as your negative keyword lists mature. The first pass through an account is always the heaviest lift because you're starting from scratch. After a few review cycles, you're mostly scanning for new patterns rather than rebuilding from zero.

To measure whether your reviews are working, track cost-per-conversion and click-through rate before and after your negative keyword additions. Many advertisers find that regular search term reviews lead to meaningful reductions in wasted spend over time, even if the effect isn't immediate. Learning to read Google Ads reports properly will help you track this impact more effectively.

For agencies managing multiple accounts, this is where shared negative keyword lists become essential. Maintaining a universal junk list that you apply to every new client account saves hours of setup time. And if you're using a tool like Keywordme, the multi-account support means you can move through this review process across clients without the constant tab-switching and spreadsheet juggling.

Your Quick-Reference Checklist

Here's the full workflow condensed into a repeatable checklist you can use every time you sit down to review:

1. Open the search terms report: Campaigns > Insights & reports > Search terms. Set date range to 30-90 days depending on account volume.

2. Sort by cost or impressions descending to surface the biggest budget wasters first.

3. Filter for known junk categories: free, jobs, salary, DIY, tutorial, Reddit, competitor names.

4. Categorize what you find: junk, wrong intent, or competitor/brand terms you don't want.

5. Add negatives at the right level: ad group for campaign-internal conflicts, campaign for campaign-specific exclusions, shared list for universal junk.

6. Choose the right negative match type: default to phrase match, use exact match for surgical precision, use broad match carefully for wide exclusions.

7. Set your next review date: weekly for new/high-spend accounts, biweekly for stable ones, monthly at minimum.

Finding negative keywords from your search terms report is one of the highest-ROI activities in Google Ads management. It doesn't require a big budget, a new campaign structure, or any advanced strategy. It just requires showing up regularly and knowing what to look for. Every irrelevant click you prevent is money that stays in your budget and gets redirected toward queries that actually convert.

If you want to make this entire workflow faster, Keywordme is built exactly for this. It's a Chrome extension that lives inside Google Ads, so you can remove junk search terms, add negatives, apply match types, and build keyword lists without leaving the interface or opening a single spreadsheet. Start your free 7-day trial (then just $12/month) and see how much faster your search term reviews can actually be.