A practical negative keyword strategy for small budgets

Rather than blocking terms one by one, group them. Almost every account leaks money to the same handful of intent categories:

Negative match types work differently to positive ones. A negative broad match blocks any query containing all the words in any order; negative phrase blocks the words in sequence; negative exact blocks only that exact query.

As a rule: use negative phrase for intent categories ("jobs" as a phrase catches "plumbing jobs near me"), and negative exact when you're blocking one specific high-spend query you still want close variants of.

Campaign-level negatives get out of sync fast. A single shared negative keyword list applied to every search campaign means one place to look and one place to edit. Add a second list only when a campaign genuinely needs different rules — for example a brand campaign that should keep competitor terms.

Sort the search terms report by cost, descending, over the last 30 days. Filter to conversions = 0. Anything above roughly three times your target cost-per-acquisition with no conversions is a candidate. Read them, block the ones that are clearly wrong-intent, and leave the ones that are simply unlucky — a term with 4 clicks and no conversion hasn't proven anything yet.

That statistical threshold is the part automation does well: it knows how many clicks a term needs before "zero conversions" is meaningful for your account's conversion rate.