If you are regularly adding Negative Keywords to your Google Ads Account and campaigns you might wonder “how many Negative Keywords is enough?” Is there a limit to how many Negative Keywords should be used? Can I ever stop adding Negative Keywords?
Of course the best answer is it depends on the specifics of your business, targeting options, keyword match types and the nuances of your specific situation.
Here are some insights that may help answer the question for your business and campaigns.
When it comes to contractors, home service and local businesses, my experience is that even after years of managing a campaign and diligently excluding irrelevant terms, I still regularly find Negative Keywords to add.
Over a long period of time the amount I add each review gets smaller, but there is a seemingly limitless supply of low value, irrelevant terms . Competitor names, low value terms, irrelevant searches, personal names, locations outside of your service area, the list goes on.
This is particularly the case if there are Keywords that are other than exact match type, a campaign utilizes AI Max or there are Performance Max campaigns.
Anything outside of the tightest campaign targeting, will very likely produce an endless stream of Negative Keywords to remove.
If you want to be on top of all the low quality terms that show up in the Search Query Report there really is no such thing as too many Negative Keywords.
Just keep excluding terms as you come across them in the Search Terms report.
Alternatively, if you take a more relaxed approach to Negative Keywords exclusions. Not removing every term with 1 Impression. You may find that sooner rather than later there are not many terms to exclude.
In my experience, I have never come close to meeting the limit of Negative Keywords allowed. I like to exclude every last 1 Impression irrelevant term. There is plenty of room to keep excluding the terms that do not bring value and I like to utilize that to its fullest extent.
Only you can decide how many Negative Keywords are enough.
INSTANTLY ACCESS NEGATIVE KEYWORD LISTS
From a functional perspective, there is a limit to how many Negative Keywords that can be added.
Here are the limits for Google Ads:
- At the account level, there is a maximum of 1,000 Negative Keywords.
- At the campaign level there is a limit of 10,000 Negative Keywords. This only directly applied to the campaign though.
- Each campaign can also have up to 20 Negative Keyword Lists . With each having a capacity for 10,000 Negative Keywords.
- A single campaign could have 210,000 Negative Keywords if you somehow managed to max out all lists and the campaign. A huge amount by any measure.
In my experience managing campaigns for local home service businesses, it is somewhat common to use all of the 10,000 Negative Keywords for a campaign and then have to expand into an additional list. That’s usually as far as I need to go.
It often takes multiple years to fill up the campaign level Negative Keywords for a local service advertiser.
To answer the question of how many Negative Keywords is enough, you need to consider how in-depth you want to get with excluding terms.
If you are dedicated to excluding low value terms from your campaigns, there is never a limit. There is never enough Negative Keywords.
If you are more tempered in your approach then you can probably get the main terms removed fairly quickly. Google Ads provides ample limits to how many Negative Keywords you can exclude.
Where Google Ads gives advertisers few controls, Negative Keywords is one of the best ways to directly control campaign targeting.
Get the best value from your campaigns and utilize Negative Keywords to their fullest extent.