Google Ads Negative Keywords by Industry and Campaign-Level Strategy

Question 1

Why did campaign-level negative keywords become more important in 2025?

Accepted Answer

According to groas, Google’s 2024 deprecation of account-level negative keyword lists inside the standard interface pushed advertisers toward campaign-level negative keyword management. The article states this encourages precision because a term like “free” might be excluded in a branded Search campaign but retained in a top-of-funnel Discovery campaign. It also states that Google’s native AI optimizes within individual campaigns but cannot make cross-campaign negative keyword decisions.

Question 2

What is a campaign-level negative keyword and how is it different from account and ad group negatives?

Accepted Answer

According to groas, a campaign-level negative keyword list is a set of excluded search terms applied to a specific campaign, preventing ads in that campaign from showing for those terms while leaving other campaigns free to bid on them. Account-level negatives block a term everywhere, which the article describes as ideal for universally irrelevant terms such as “jobs.” Ad group-level negatives are the most granular and direct searches to the most relevant ad group by excluding overlapping terms from the less relevant one.

Question 3

What are the Google Ads limits for negative keywords?

Accepted Answer

The article states each campaign can hold up to 10,000 negative keywords, each shared negative keyword list can hold up to 5,000 terms, and up to 20 shared lists can be created per account. It states that negative broad match does not include close variants, so misspellings and variations must be added manually. The article describes negative exact match and negative phrase match as similarly literal.

Question 4

How do I find negative keywords from my search term report?

Accepted Answer

The article recommends pulling the search term report for the last 30 days and filtering by spend descending, with any term that spent money without converting treated as a candidate for exclusion. It recommends looking for patterns rather than only individual terms, such as blocking an intent category when “jobs,” “careers,” “salary,” and “hiring” all appear. It recommends checking match types before adding negatives and repeating the review weekly because new irrelevant queries appear every week.

Question 5

When should I use shared lists versus campaign-level versus ad group-level negatives?

Accepted Answer

The article recommends shared negative keyword lists when terms such as “jobs,” “careers,” “salary,” “free,” and “scam” are irrelevant across multiple campaigns. It recommends campaign-level negatives when a term such as “pricing” is irrelevant in one campaign but relevant in another. It recommends ad group-level negatives for traffic sculpting between ad groups, such as adding “trail” as a negative in a “running shoes” ad group when a separate “trail running shoes” ad group exists.

Question 6

How does groas manage negative keywords autonomously?

Accepted Answer

According to groas, onboarding starts with a dedicated account manager audit of existing shared lists, campaign-level negatives, and ad group exclusions to identify gaps, conflicts, and over-exclusions. From there, the article states AI agents monitor search terms around the clock and flag new irrelevant query patterns immediately. The account manager then decides the exclusion level, whether phrase match or exact match treatment is needed, and whether the pattern indicates a broader keyword strategy issue.