A plumber in Brisbane rang me a couple of years ago, furious. He had been running Google Ads for three months, spending around $800 a month, and had barely gotten a single decent lead.
When I pulled up his Search Terms Report, I could see exactly why. His ad had shown up for searches like “plumbing courses online”, “free plumbing advice”, “how to fix a leaking tap yourself” and, my personal favourite, “plumber salary Australia”.
He was not targeting plumbers looking for a career change. He was not running a trade school. He just wanted paying customers with a burst pipe. But Google had other ideas.
This is one of the most common problems I see in Google Ads accounts, and the good news is it is completely fixable. The bad news is that if you leave it alone, you will keep burning money on clicks from people who were never going to buy from you.
To understand why this happens, you need to understand how keyword match types work, and how much they have changed.
When you add a keyword to your campaign, you are not just telling Google “show my ad when someone searches this exact phrase”. You are giving Google a signal, and depending on your match type, that signal can be interpreted very loosely or very tightly.
Broad match, which is now the default in Google Ads, used to mean your ad might show for searches with related words. These days it means something much more expansive.
Google’s AI now interprets broad match keywords based on your landing page, your other keywords, and what Google believes the intent of the searcher is. It will match to synonyms, related topics, and searches it considers “relevant” even if you would never in a million years have connected them to your business.
Phrase match and exact match give you more control, but even exact match is not as strict as it once was. Google can still show your ad for close variants and implied meanings.
The result? Without actively managing what you are excluding, your ads will show for searches that have nothing to do with what you sell. That is where negative keywords come in.
The Search Terms Report is the most important tool for stopping wasted spend on Google Ads. It shows you the actual searches that triggered your ads, not just the keywords you are bidding on. Those two things are very different.
Here is how to find it and what to do with it.
Do this at least once a fortnight. It only takes 15 to 20 minutes and it is one of the highest-value tasks you can do in your account.
When you add a negative keyword in Google Ads, you have a choice about where it lives, and it matters.
A campaign-level negative keyword blocks the search term within that specific campaign only. This is useful when a term might be relevant for one campaign but not another.
For example, if you run both a “commercial plumbing” campaign and a “residential plumbing” campaign, you might want to block commercial-related searches from the residential campaign without blocking them altogether.
An account-level negative keyword list is a shared list you build once and apply across multiple campaigns. This is where your universal exclusions belong, terms that should never trigger your ads under any circumstances, things like “free”, “DIY”, “jobs”, “training”, “how to”.
To create a shared list, go to Tools in Google Ads, then Shared Library, then Negative Keyword Lists. Build your master list there and apply it to all relevant campaigns. It saves you a huge amount of time compared to adding the same negative keywords one campaign at a time.
After reviewing hundreds of Google Ads accounts, here are the negative keywords I see missing again and again. These belong in almost every small business campaign:
This is not an exhaustive list. Every industry has its own problem searches. A good starting point is to think about who you definitely do not want clicking your ads and work backwards from there.
If you have never properly audited your Search Terms Report, do it today. You will almost certainly find searches in there that make your stomach drop, and you will understand immediately why your cost per lead has been higher than it should be.
Getting your negative keywords right is not a one-time job. It is an ongoing habit. The advertisers who get the best results from Google Ads are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who are actively managing what they exclude, not just what they target.
Google Ads showing wrong searches is one of the most common and most fixable problems in small business advertising. You do not need a massive agency to sort it out. You just need to know where to look and what to do with what you find.
I offer 1-on-1 Google Ads coaching sessions where we work through your account together, live. We will pull up your Search Terms Report, build out your negative keyword lists, and make sure every dollar you spend is going towards people who actually want what you offer.
No lock-in contracts. No agency fees. Just straightforward, practical coaching from someone who has been in the weeds of Google Ads for years and knows exactly what small business accounts need.
Book your 1-on-1 Google Ads coaching session at ianredford.com and let’s stop the wasted spend together.
