Search terms and negative keywords

Search terms show the real searches that triggered your ads, which ones spend without converting, and turn them into negative keyword proposals. In small accounts, this is often where the most money is saved.

Terms come from Search, Shopping, Performance Max, AI Max and dynamic search ads.

The screens

Screen	What it shows
"Search terms"	All terms with source, match, metrics, "Already a keyword?" and "Blocked by a negative?"
"N-Gram"	Terms broken into 1, 2 and 3 words, with combined spend and results
"Waste"	Terms with spend and no conversion, sorted by money, with a relevance score
"Overlap"	Performance Max terms that also exist as Search keywords, and the reverse
"Blocking negatives"	Negatives that block terms which converted in the last 90 days
"Lists"	Shared negative lists, plus ready-made lists by industry

Add negatives

Open “Waste”
Start with the terms that spent the most.
Click “Add as negative”
Select the terms first; to promote a good term, use “Add as keyword”.
Read the 90-day check
The proposal shows which past terms the negative would have blocked, and their conversions and revenue.
Check shared lists
If it goes into a shared list, the proposal names every campaign the list is attached to, including Performance Max.
Approve
Negatives are then watched for 7 days and restored if impressions drop over 40% and conversions over 20%.

Use n-grams

On “N-Gram”, a row like “free” shows the combined spend of every term that contains it. “Negate everything that contains” creates a phrase negative for that word.

How terms are sorted

Terms are labeled relevant, irrelevant, competitor, job seeker, do-it-yourself or informational. Only high-confidence irrelevant, job-seeker and do-it-yourself terms go into proposals on their own; you choose from the rest. New terms, and terms past ₪20 of spend, get labeled.

Hebrew and multilingual accounts

Google doesn't split Hebrew prefixes. A Hebrew negative is sent in all its prefixed forms and common spellings, about 12–15 forms each.
A word in another language isn't irrelevant by default. Arabic- or Russian-speaking customers may be exactly who you target.
Brand misspellings are added only as exact match.

Troubleshooting

Performance Max shows categories, not terms. Google shares only part of the term data for Performance Max.

A converting term disappeared. Check “Blocking negatives” and accept the proposal to remove the negative.

I want this to run on its own. Set adding negatives to autopilot (default cap: 25 per proposal, 100 per day), or create a rule.