The 17 negative keywords that fix 80% of Google Ads waste

We've audited around 40 Google Ads accounts in the past nine months. The same 17 negative keywords are missing in over 70% of them. Add them as account-level negatives, do nothing else, and most accounts recover meaningful spend within a week.

This post is the list, the reasoning, and the exact steps to add them.

What 'fix 80% of waste' actually means

We measured the spend going to search terms that match these 17 patterns across 40 accounts. The median was 28% of total spend, with a range of 8% to 51%. "80% of waste" is a heuristic, not a precise claim — the realistic range for a typical account is "fixes a meaningful chunk of the wasted spend, but not all of it."

The 17

Add these as account-level negatives in BROAD match unless noted otherwise. Account-level means they apply to every campaign and you only have to add them once.

Job-seeker terms

1. job — anyone searching "[your product] job" is looking for employment, not buying

2. jobs — same

3. salary — same

4. career — same

5. resume — same

Tutorial / DIY seekers

6. how to (phrase match — "how to") — "how to do X" is informational; they're not buying X, they're trying to learn it

7. tutorial — same

8. course — informational, often a budget-conscious learner

9. examples — looking for inspiration, not your product

10. template — looking for a free download, not your tool

Free-seekers (the big one)

11. free — single most expensive negative-keyword miss in our audit data

12. cheap — same audience, different word

13. download — typically followed by "free" anyway

Competitor / wrong-product confusion

14. amazon — Amazon search overlap is common in retail

15. login — branded login searches by existing customers; you don't need to pay to send your own users to your login page

16. crack — software piracy searchers

17. apk — same, mobile context

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How to add them all in 5 minutes

In Google Ads:

Tools → Shared library → Negative keyword lists
Click "+" to create a new list. Name it core-waste-negatives or similar.
Paste the 17 above, one per line.
Save.
Apply the list to every active campaign in your account. (Use the bulk-apply feature: select all campaigns, apply list.)

The whole operation takes less than 5 minutes. The savings start within hours.

Performance Max gotcha

Performance Max campaigns don't accept account-level negative-keyword lists by default. You have to request the negative-keyword list capability from Google support, then apply it. If you're running PMax and didn't know this — most of the leak is happening there.

Why "free" is the most expensive missing negative

A representative example from one account we audited:

14% of total monthly spend went to search terms containing "free"
Conversion rate on "free" terms: 0.3%
Conversion rate on the rest of the account: 2.8%
Effective CPA on "free" terms: 9.3x the account average

Free-searchers are the highest-volume, lowest-intent traffic Google has. They click through to comparison shop, evaluate, or just look around — almost never to buy at a price point that pays back the click.

Adding "free" as a broad-match negative kills that traffic instantly. The 14% of budget redirects to qualified searches and overall account efficiency jumps.

Quote

"Free" is the most expensive single keyword you can run, because it's almost always implied negative.

What this list does NOT cover

Honest accounting:

Competitor names. You should add these as negatives unless you specifically want to bid on competitor terms (which is a separate strategy with separate trade-offs). The right competitor list is account-specific.
Service-area / off-geography terms. A plumber in Austin running ads should add "Houston," "Dallas," etc. as negatives. Account-specific.
Industry-specific noise. A SaaS company will collect dozens of industry-specific negative keywords over time. The list above is the universal starting point; your account-specific list will grow longer.
Long-tail wasteful queries. The 17 are broad-pattern. Some of your waste is in long-tail queries that don't match these patterns; those need weekly search-term review to catch.

What good looks like after adding

Within 7 days of adding the list, you should see:

Total impressions drop 5–15% (you're filtering out unqualified queries)
CTR rise (the impressions you keep are more qualified)
Conversion rate rise modestly (same)
CPA drop 15–30% on average (the remaining spend converts better)

If none of these move, either you're already extremely tight on negatives (uncommon) or there's a deeper structural issue elsewhere in the account that this list won't fix.

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What to do after adding

The list is the floor, not the ceiling. The discipline that compounds:

Weekly search-term review. 10 minutes every Friday. Look at your top 50 search terms by spend, add the obvious wasters as negatives.
Per-campaign refinement. Account-level negatives are blunt. Per-campaign negatives let you exclude terms that are wasteful for one campaign but valuable for another.
Match-type discipline. Most waste enters via broad-match keywords. Phrase and exact match limit the damage; broad needs the negative-keyword scaffolding to be safe.

The 17 negatives plus weekly search-term review plus tight match-type discipline is the entire toolkit. It's enough to keep most accounts at a reasonable waste level without ever needing fancy tools.

What we'd ship first

Open Google Ads. Create the negative keyword list. Paste the 17. Apply to all campaigns. Total time: under 10 minutes including the bulk-apply.

If you do nothing else this week, do that. The expected lift is real, and the downside is approximately zero.