The negative keyword audit that cut a client's cost per lead by 40%

A negative keyword audit is the least exciting work in Google Ads and reliably one of the highest-return hours you can spend. Most accounts we audit have never had a proper pass, and a meaningful share of spend is going to searches that could not possibly become a customer.

Here is the process, and the categories that matter most in Indian accounts.

Where to look

The search terms report — the actual queries people typed, not the keywords you bid on. Set the date range to the last 90 days, sort by cost descending, and read. Do not skim; read.

You are looking for queries that cost money and produced nothing, and more importantly for patterns, because you want to block categories rather than individual strings.

The categories that waste the most

1. Job seekers

Enormous in India and almost universally overlooked. Anything with job, vacancy, hiring, salary, internship, recruitment, career. A service business advertising its category will attract people looking to work in it.

2. Free and DIY intent

free, cheap, how to, DIY, sample, template, download, tutorial. These are researchers, not buyers. Some businesses do want this traffic for content marketing — but not on a paid search budget optimised for leads.

3. Wrong geography

Other cities, other countries. Even with location targeting set correctly, city names inside the query slip through. If you serve Gurugram, interior designer in Pune is not your customer.

4. Education and definitions

what is, meaning, full form, course, certification, syllabus, PDF. Someone learning your industry is not hiring you this week.

5. Competitor and comparison, conditionally

Not automatically negative — competitor terms can convert. But they need their own campaign with their own budget and their own expectations, not silently eating your core budget.

6. Wrong product or service

The obvious one that still slips past. If you only do residential interiors, block commercial, office, showroom. Every business has a version of this list.

Most wasted search spend is not a targeting failure. It is a reading failure — nobody ever looked at what people actually typed.

Running the negative keyword audit

1. Export 90 days of search terms with cost, clicks and conversions.
2. Sort by cost, zero conversions first. That is your waste list.
3. Group into themes, not individual terms. You are building categories.
4. Add negatives at the right level — account level for jobs and geography, campaign or ad group level for anything product-specific.
5. Use phrase match for themes, exact match only for specific high-cost offenders.
6. Build a shared negative list so it applies across campaigns and you only maintain it once.

Do not over-block

It is possible to strangle an account. Two guardrails:

• Never negative a term that has produced a conversion, however odd it looks.
• Check impression volume after each pass. A sharp drop with no efficiency gain means you cut too deep.

Make it a habit

Weekly for the first month of any new campaign, then monthly. New queries appear constantly, especially with broad match and automated campaign types, where negatives are often the only steering you have left.

The 40% figure in the title was one account — a lead-gen business whose budget was being eaten by job searches and two neighbouring cities. It is not typical, and it is also not rare. Nobody had read the report.

Want us to read yours? Start with a free audit.

The wider version of this, including where Google accounts usually leak budget, is on our Google Ads page.

Search terms are one of ten places budget drains quietly — the full checklist is worth an afternoon before any budget increase.

Questions people ask