Last updated: February 12, 2026
If you are running Google Shopping campaigns and not actively managing your negative keywords, you are almost certainly burning money. Not a little bit of money. We are talking about 15 to 30 percent of your entire Shopping budget going to clicks that will never, ever convert.
That is not a guess. That is what we consistently see across hundreds of ecommerce accounts at groas. And the worst part? Most advertisers have no idea it is happening because Google Shopping works so differently from Search campaigns that the usual keyword hygiene habits simply do not apply.
This guide is going to walk you through everything you need to know about negative keywords in Google Shopping campaigns. We will cover the fundamentals, the advanced strategies, the exact process for finding wasted spend, and the categories of negative keywords you should be adding right now based on your vertical. We have also included a downloadable list of over 100 Shopping-specific negative keywords to get you started immediately.
Whether you are running Standard Shopping campaigns, Performance Max, or both, this is the most comprehensive resource you will find on this topic. Let us get into it.
Here is where most guides go wrong. They treat Shopping negative keywords exactly the same as Search negative keywords. They are not. The entire targeting mechanism is different, and that difference changes everything about how you approach negative keyword management.
In a Search campaign, you choose the keywords you want to bid on. You tell Google "I want to appear when someone types 'mens running shoes size 10.'" Google then matches your keyword to search queries. You have proactive control over what triggers your ads.
In a Shopping campaign, you do not choose any keywords at all. Google reads your product feed, which includes your product titles, descriptions, categories, brand names, and other attributes, and it decides which search queries to show your products for. You have zero proactive keyword control. Your product feed is your keyword strategy.
This means the only control you have over which searches trigger your Shopping ads is reactive. You wait for Google to match your products to search queries, then you review those queries, and then you exclude the ones that are irrelevant. That is what makes negative keywords in Shopping campaigns so critically important. They are literally your only lever for controlling search query matching.
Think about it this way. In a Search campaign, negative keywords are a safety net. In a Shopping campaign, negative keywords are the steering wheel.
Google uses a combination of signals from your product feed to determine relevance. The main ones are your product title (which carries the most weight), your product description, your Google Product Category, your brand attribute, and your GTIN or MPN. Google also factors in your landing page content, historical performance data, and the overall structure of your Merchant Center feed.
The problem is that Google's matching algorithm is intentionally broad. Google wants to show your products to as many potentially relevant searchers as possible because more impressions mean more potential clicks, and more clicks mean more revenue for Google. This is not cynical; it is just how the incentive structure works.
For example, if you sell premium leather wallets and your product title says "Genuine Leather Bifold Wallet for Men," Google might show your ad when someone searches for "cheap wallets," "wallet DIY kit," "wallet repair near me," or even "free wallet app." None of those people are going to buy your leather wallet. But Google will happily serve your ad to them, and if they click, you pay.
According to industry data, Shopping ads now account for roughly 76 percent of all retail search ad spend and generate about 85 percent of clicks on ecommerce Google Ads campaigns. With an average CPC of $0.66 and an average conversion rate of just 1.91 percent, every irrelevant click compounds fast. If your Shopping campaigns are generating 10,000 clicks per month and even 20 percent are from irrelevant queries, you are wasting around $1,320 per month, or nearly $16,000 per year, on traffic that was never going to convert.
The search terms report is your single most important tool for identifying negative keyword opportunities in Shopping campaigns. Here is exactly how to use it effectively.
First, log into your Google Ads account and navigate to the Shopping campaign you want to audit. Click on "Insights and reports" in the left navigation, then select "Search terms." This report shows you the actual queries people typed into Google before seeing and clicking on your Shopping ads.
Now, here is where most advertisers make a mistake. They sort by clicks or cost and only look at the top spenders. That is a fine starting point, but you are missing the bigger picture. Instead, sort by impressions first. Why? Because high-impression, low-click queries are destroying your click-through rate, which directly impacts your Quality Score equivalent in Shopping (Google calls it "ad rank" for Shopping, but the principle is the same). A low CTR signals to Google that your products are not relevant, which raises your CPCs across the board.
After reviewing high-impression terms, switch to sorting by cost with zero conversions. These are the queries actively draining your budget with nothing to show for it. Any search term that has spent more than two to three times your target CPA without converting is a strong candidate for exclusion.
Finally, look at search terms with very high CPCs relative to your average. Sometimes a single irrelevant but competitive query can cost you $3 to $5 per click in a campaign where your average CPC is $0.50. These are silent budget killers.
When evaluating whether a search term should become a negative keyword, look at these signals together rather than in isolation.
Relevance is the first and most important factor. Does this search term describe a product you actually sell? If someone searched for "running shoes" and you only sell dress shoes, that is an immediate negative regardless of performance. Do not wait for it to waste money.
Cost without conversion is the next signal. If a term has spent more than 3x your target CPA with zero conversions, add it as a negative. The data has spoken.
Click-through rate matters because terms with extremely low CTR (below 0.3 percent) but high impressions are dragging down your overall campaign performance even if the clicks are cheap.
Conversion rate relative to average helps you spot terms that get clicks but do not convert. If your campaign average conversion rate is 2 percent and a particular search term has a 0.2 percent conversion rate across 50 or more clicks, that term is likely not worth the spend.
This is where the real value is. After analyzing thousands of ecommerce Shopping campaigns across dozens of verticals, certain patterns emerge. These are the negative keyword categories that show up again and again, organized by type so you can quickly identify what applies to your business.
These are searches from people who are looking for information, not products. They are in research mode, and Shopping ads are the wrong format for them.
Common examples include terms like "how to," "what is," "tutorial," "guide," "review," "vs," "comparison," "best," "top 10," "Reddit," "forum," and "wiki." In the fashion vertical, you might see "how to style," "what to wear with," or "outfit ideas." In electronics, it is "specs," "benchmark," "teardown," or "unboxing."
The "review" keyword is particularly tricky because someone searching for "running shoes review" might be close to purchasing, while someone searching for "review running shoes" is more likely in research mode. Context matters, so review your search terms report before blanket-excluding "review."
If you sell products at full price or premium price points, these terms will eat your budget alive. The most common ones are "free," "cheap," "cheapest," "budget," "discount," "coupon," "promo code," "deal," "sale," "clearance," "wholesale," "bulk," "used," "refurbished," "secondhand," and "pre-owned."
A word of caution here. If you actually do run promotions or have a clearance section, you may not want to exclude all of these. Be strategic. If you sell premium furniture and never discount, "cheap" and "discount" should be immediate negatives. If you run a mid-range clothing store with regular sales, you might keep "sale" but exclude "free" and "cheapest."
This is one of the biggest sources of wasted spend in Shopping campaigns, and it is one that many advertisers overlook entirely. When someone searches for "Nike running shoes" and you sell Adidas, Google may still show your Adidas products if the product category and attributes are similar enough.
You need to build a negative keyword list of all major competitor brand names in your space. Not just your direct competitors, but also aspirational and adjacent brands. If you sell mid-range watches, you should be excluding searches for Rolex, Omega, and Tag Heuer because someone specifically searching for those brands is not going to buy your product.
The exception is if you explicitly position your products as alternatives (for example, "the affordable alternative to Yeti coolers"). Even then, conversion rates on competitor brand terms tend to be very low for Shopping ads because the user intent is brand-specific.
These are terms that modify the product type in ways that do not match what you sell. They vary heavily by vertical but follow predictable patterns.
In apparel, common irrelevant modifiers include sizes or gender categories you do not carry ("plus size" if you only sell straight sizes, "mens" if you only sell womens), styles you do not offer ("vintage," "retro," "custom," "handmade"), and materials you do not use ("vegan leather" if you sell real leather, "silk" if you sell cotton).
In electronics, irrelevant modifiers often include "parts," "repair," "replacement," "manual," "driver," "software," "firmware," "compatible with," and specific model numbers you do not carry.
In home and garden, watch for "rental," "hire," "plans," "blueprints," "instructions," and "installation service."
In health and beauty, common ones are "recipe," "homemade," "DIY," "natural," "organic" (if your products are not), and medical terms that suggest the searcher needs a professional, not a product.
This one surprises people, but it is remarkably common. If you sell products in a professional category, Google will often match your ads to people searching for jobs in that industry. Terms like "jobs," "career," "salary," "hiring," "vacancy," "internship," "training," and "certification" should be on almost every Shopping negative keyword list regardless of vertical.
If you sell commercial kitchen equipment, Google will absolutely show your products to someone searching "chef jobs near me." If you sell industrial tools, expect to see "electrician apprenticeship" in your search terms report. Always exclude job-related terms.
If you are a pure ecommerce business, search terms containing "near me," "in [city name]," "store," "shop," "showroom," "open now," and "directions" are usually wasted spend. These searchers want a physical location, and your Shopping ad pointing to an online store is not going to satisfy that intent.
Campaign-level negative keywords prevent your ads from showing across your entire Shopping campaign, regardless of which product group or ad group triggered them. Use campaign-level negatives for broad exclusions that should apply universally, such as "free," "jobs," "DIY," "how to," and competitor brand names that are never relevant.
In 2025, Google expanded the negative keyword limit in Performance Max campaigns from 100 to 10,000 per campaign, which was a massive change. For Standard Shopping, the limits have always been generous (up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign), but the PMax expansion means advertisers running Performance Max Shopping campaigns finally have the room they need for proper negative keyword management.
You can also use account-level negative keywords, which apply across all campaigns including Search, Shopping, and Performance Max. Google allows up to 1,000 account-level negatives. Use these for your most universal exclusions, the terms that are never relevant to any campaign in your account.
Ad group-level negatives give you more surgical control. They are essential when you have a single Shopping campaign with multiple ad groups targeting different product categories. For example, if you sell both running shoes and dress shoes in the same campaign, you might add "formal" and "oxford" as negatives at the ad group level for your running shoes group, while adding "trail" and "marathon" as negatives for your dress shoes group.
Ad group-level negatives are also the foundation of a priority-based Shopping campaign structure, which is still one of the most effective advanced strategies available. In this setup, you create three campaigns (high, medium, low priority) and use ad group negatives to funnel specific search queries into the campaign with the appropriate bid level. High-intent, brand-specific queries get pushed to the high-bid campaign, while broader queries stay in the low-bid campaign. This gives you granular bid control that Shopping campaigns otherwise lack.
Google Ads lets you create shared negative keyword lists that can be applied across multiple campaigns simultaneously. This is the most efficient way to manage negatives at scale, and it is criminal how many advertisers are not using them.
Create separate lists organized by category. You might have a "Job Terms" list, a "Competitor Brands" list, a "Free and Cheap" list, a "Informational Queries" list, and so on. When you find a new negative keyword in one campaign, add it to the appropriate shared list and it automatically applies everywhere the list is attached. This saves enormous amounts of time and ensures consistency.
Negative keywords in Shopping campaigns support three match types, and getting these right is critical.
Negative broad match (the default) will block your ad whenever all the words in your negative keyword appear in a search query, in any order, even with additional words present. If you add "cheap shoes" as a negative broad match, your ad will not show for "cheap red shoes," "shoes that are cheap," or "cheap running shoes for women."
Negative phrase match blocks your ad when the exact phrase appears in the search query, in order, with possible additional words before or after. If you add "cheap shoes" as negative phrase match, it blocks "buy cheap shoes online" but would not block "cheap red shoes" because "red" breaks up the phrase.
Negative exact match only blocks the exact query with no additional words. If you add [cheap shoes] as exact match, it only blocks searches for exactly "cheap shoes" and nothing else.
The general recommendation is to start with phrase match for most negatives. It provides a solid balance of control and coverage. Use exact match only when you need to be very precise, such as when a term is irrelevant in one context but valuable in another. Use broad match when you want the widest possible exclusion, such as for "free" or "jobs."
One important note: unlike positive keywords, negative keywords do not match to close variants or misspellings. If you add "cheap" as a negative, it will not automatically block "cheep" or "cheeap." You need to add common misspellings manually if they are showing up in your search terms report.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that most advertisers do not want to hear. Managing Shopping negative keywords on a weekly or monthly cadence is not good enough. Not even close.
Think about the math. If your Shopping campaigns generate 500 clicks per day and 20 percent of those are from irrelevant queries, that is 100 wasted clicks every single day. At an average CPC of $0.66, you are burning $66 per day in wasted spend. If you review your search terms once a week, you have already lost $462 before you even identify the problem. Once a month? That is nearly $2,000 down the drain.
And it gets worse. Google's algorithm learns from engagement signals. If irrelevant searchers are clicking your ads (even at low rates), Google interprets that as a signal that those queries are relevant to your products. This means over time, Google will show your ads to even more similar irrelevant queries. The problem compounds exponentially if you are not actively managing it.
The ideal cadence for Shopping negative keyword management is daily. Every day, someone needs to pull the search terms report, identify irrelevant queries, and add them as negatives. For large catalogs with thousands of products and high traffic volumes, this task alone can take 30 minutes to an hour per day. Across a month, that is 10 to 20 hours of tedious, repetitive work just to stop your campaigns from bleeding money.
This is exactly the kind of task where human marketers struggle and where AI excels. The work is high-impact but mind-numbingly repetitive. It requires pattern recognition across thousands of data points. It needs to happen in real time, not on a human schedule. And the consequences of falling behind are immediate and measurable.
Below is a comprehensive starter list of negative keywords that apply to most ecommerce Google Shopping campaigns. This is organized by category so you can quickly grab what is relevant to your business. Add these as phrase match negatives unless otherwise noted.
how to, what is, tutorial, guide, instructions, manual, wiki, definition, meaning, explained, example, template, sample, diagram, infographic, PDF, ebook, course, class, training, certification, lesson, learn, study, research, comparison chart, versus, vs
free, free shipping only, freebie, giveaway, cheap, cheapest, budget, bargain, discount code, promo code, coupon, voucher, deal of the day, clearance, wholesale, bulk pricing, used, secondhand, pre-owned, refurbished, thrift, pawn, garage sale, yard sale
jobs, job, career, careers, hiring, vacancy, salary, wage, pay, internship, apprenticeship, resume, CV, interview, recruiter, employment, employer, work from home
DIY, homemade, handmade, make your own, build your own, plans, blueprint, pattern, recipe, hack, alternative, substitute, replacement part, repair, fix, troubleshoot, return policy, recall, lawsuit, complaint, scam
near me, nearby, store, shop, showroom, outlet, mall, directions, hours, open now, phone number, address, location, in-store
rental, rent, hire, lease, borrow, subscribe, subscription box, sample size, trial, demo, virtual, digital, software, app, download, streaming, torrent, wallpaper, screensaver, coloring page, printable
Everything we have described above, the daily search term reviews, the pattern recognition across thousands of queries, the real-time identification of wasted spend, the precise application of negatives at the right match type and campaign level, this is exactly the kind of work that groas was built to do.
Where a human marketer reviews search terms once a day at best (and realistically, once a week for most teams), groas monitors your Shopping campaign search terms continuously. Every query that triggers your ads is evaluated in real time against your product catalog, your historical conversion data, and your profitability targets. When groas identifies an irrelevant or underperforming query, it acts immediately. Not tomorrow. Not at the next weekly review. Right now.
This matters because every hour an irrelevant search term goes unchecked, it is costing you money and polluting your campaign data. groas eliminates that lag entirely.
The human brain is remarkably good at pattern recognition, but it has limits. When you are reviewing a search terms report with 3,000 unique queries, it is easy to miss the patterns. Maybe there is a cluster of queries containing "parts" that indicate people looking for replacement components rather than finished products. Maybe there is a seasonal trend of queries containing "costume" that appears every October. Maybe a new competitor just launched and their brand name is suddenly showing up across your Shopping campaigns.
groas identifies these patterns automatically because it is processing your data at a scale and speed that human analysis simply cannot match. It does not just find individual negative keywords. It discovers categories of wasted spend that you would never catch manually.
One of the things that sets groas apart is its close integration with Google's advertising infrastructure. Because groas is built specifically around Google Ads and works in tight alignment with Google's tools and APIs, it understands the nuances of how Shopping campaigns interact with Performance Max, how account-level negatives cascade across campaign types, and how changes to your Merchant Center feed should trigger updates to your negative keyword strategy.
This is not a generic marketing tool that bolts onto Google Ads as an afterthought. groas is purpose-built for this ecosystem, which means it can make decisions that account for the full context of your Google advertising setup, from your feed optimization to your bidding strategy to your negative keyword management, all working together as one unified system.
On average, ecommerce accounts that implement autonomous negative keyword management through groas see a 15 to 25 percent reduction in wasted Shopping spend within the first 30 days. Over a 90-day period, that compounds into significantly improved ROAS as the campaign data becomes cleaner and Google's algorithm starts serving ads to more relevant queries.
But the real win is not just the money saved. It is the time reclaimed. Those 10 to 20 hours per month that someone on your team was spending on search term reviews? That time goes back to strategy, creative development, new market expansion, and all the high-value work that actually moves your business forward.
The biggest development in negative keyword management over the past year has been Google's expansion of Performance Max negative keyword support. In early 2025, Google increased the limit from 100 to 10,000 negative keywords per Performance Max campaign. This was a game-changing update for ecommerce advertisers because Performance Max campaigns include Shopping inventory, and previously, the 100-keyword cap made it nearly impossible to maintain proper negative keyword hygiene.
Google also rolled out full search term reporting for PMax campaigns covering Search and Shopping placements, which means you can now actually see which queries are triggering your PMax Shopping ads. Before this update, PMax was essentially a black box for negative keyword management. Now you have the visibility to identify wasted spend and the capacity to act on it.
Google now supports account-level negative keywords that apply across all campaign types, including Search, Shopping, and Performance Max. You can add up to 1,000 negatives at the account level. This is ideal for universal exclusions that should never trigger any of your ads, like job terms, explicit content, or completely unrelated industries.
Google's rollout of AI Max for Search campaigns in 2025 and into 2026 signals a broader trend toward keywordless, AI-driven targeting across all campaign types. As Google continues pushing advertisers toward automated campaign formats, the importance of negative keywords as a control mechanism only increases. When the algorithm is making more targeting decisions on your behalf, your ability to tell it what not to target becomes your most powerful optimization lever.
This is precisely why having an AI system like groas managing your negatives makes so much sense in the current landscape. Google is increasingly relying on AI to decide where your ads appear. You need your own AI working on your side to ensure those decisions align with your actual business goals, not just Google's revenue goals.
Google has expanded ads within AI Overviews across desktop and multiple global markets. Shopping ads can now appear directly within AI-generated search summaries. This means your products are potentially being shown in entirely new contexts where irrelevant matches are even more likely. The need for tight negative keyword management has never been more important as these new placements roll out.
Despite the rise of Performance Max, the classic three-tier priority Shopping campaign structure remains one of the most effective strategies for controlling search query matching. Here is how it works.
You create three Standard Shopping campaigns targeting the same products: a High Priority campaign with low bids, a Medium Priority campaign with medium bids, and a Low Priority campaign with high bids. Then you use negative keywords to funnel queries through the tiers. Your most valuable, high-intent queries (like brand-name plus product-specific searches) get negative keywords in the High and Medium Priority campaigns, forcing them into the Low Priority campaign where bids are highest. Broader, cheaper queries stay in the High Priority campaign where bids are lowest.
This structure lets you bid differently based on query intent, which is something Shopping campaigns do not natively support. It is complex to set up and maintain manually, but it remains one of the most profitable Shopping strategies available.
Your negative keyword list should not be static. It needs to evolve with seasonal trends and buying patterns. In October and November, queries containing "costume" and "Halloween" spike and may trigger your non-costume products. During back-to-school season, queries containing "school supply" or "student" might match to products that have nothing to do with education.
Build seasonal negative keyword lists that you activate and deactivate throughout the year. This prevents irrelevant seasonal traffic from inflating your costs during peak periods when CPCs are already elevated.
Here is something most guides do not mention: the best negative keyword strategy starts before you ever add a single negative. It starts with your product feed.
If your product titles and descriptions are vague or generic, Google will match them to a wider range of irrelevant queries, which means you need more negatives to compensate. If your titles are specific, detailed, and accurately describe your products, Google's matching becomes more precise from the start.
For example, "Blue Shirt" as a product title will match to thousands of irrelevant queries. "Tommy Hilfiger Men's Slim Fit Oxford Button-Down Shirt in Navy Blue, Size Large" gives Google extremely specific signals about what your product is, which dramatically reduces irrelevant matches. Better titles mean fewer negatives needed, which means less maintenance work.
Negative keywords in Google Shopping are search terms you explicitly tell Google to exclude from triggering your Shopping ads. Because Shopping campaigns do not use traditional keyword targeting (instead relying on your product feed data to match with search queries), negative keywords are your primary mechanism for preventing your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches. They stop you from paying for clicks from people who were never going to buy your product.
In your Google Ads account, navigate to your Shopping campaign, then go to "Keywords" and select the "Negative Keywords" tab. You can add negatives at the campaign level or ad group level. You can also create shared negative keyword lists under "Tools and Settings" then "Shared Library" then "Negative Keyword Lists," which can be applied across multiple campaigns at once. For Performance Max campaigns, negative keywords can now be added directly at the campaign level with a limit of 10,000, or at the account level under Account Settings with a limit of 1,000.
For Standard Shopping campaigns, you can add up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign. For Performance Max campaigns (which include Shopping inventory), Google expanded the limit to 10,000 per campaign in early 2025, up from the previous 100 keyword cap. At the account level, you can add up to 1,000 negative keywords that apply across all campaign types.
Ideally, daily. At minimum, weekly. Every day that passes without reviewing your search terms report is a day of potential wasted spend. High-volume ecommerce accounts can see hundreds of new, unique search queries per day, and even a few irrelevant ones can add up to significant waste over time. This is one of the primary reasons many ecommerce businesses turn to automated solutions like groas, which monitors search terms in real time and applies negatives autonomously without any manual review needed.
Yes. Shopping negative keywords support broad match, phrase match, and exact match, just like Search campaigns. The key difference is that negative keywords do not match to close variants or misspellings. If you add "cheap" as a negative, the misspelling "cheep" will not be blocked. You need to add misspellings separately. Most experts recommend phrase match as the default for Shopping negatives because it offers the best balance of coverage and precision.
Campaign-level negatives only apply to the specific campaign where they are added. Account-level negatives apply across all eligible campaigns in your account, including Search, Shopping, and Performance Max. Use account-level negatives for universal exclusions like job terms, explicit content, or completely unrelated industries. Use campaign-level negatives for more targeted exclusions specific to certain product categories or campaign strategies.
Yes. As of 2025, Google fully supports campaign-level negative keywords in Performance Max with a limit of 10,000 per campaign. These negatives apply specifically to Search and Shopping inventory within PMax; they do not affect Display, YouTube, or other placement types. Google also rolled out full search term reporting for PMax, so you can now see which queries trigger your ads and make informed negative keyword decisions.
Start with these high-impact categories: free and bargain terms ("free," "cheap," "discount code," "coupon"), job-related terms ("jobs," "salary," "hiring," "career"), informational queries ("how to," "tutorial," "what is," "review"), DIY terms ("DIY," "homemade," "build your own"), and competitor brand names you do not sell. The starter list in this article gives you over 100 terms to begin with, but your search terms report is always the best source of negatives specific to your account.
Properly managed negative keywords improve Shopping campaign performance across every key metric. They reduce wasted spend by preventing irrelevant clicks, which directly improves ROAS. They increase click-through rate by ensuring your ads only show for relevant queries, which signals to Google that your products are a good match and can lower your CPCs over time. They improve conversion rate because the traffic reaching your site is more qualified. Industry benchmarks suggest that well-managed negative keyword lists can improve Shopping ROAS by 15 to 30 percent.
Yes, and this is where the real competitive advantage lies. Tools like groas use autonomous AI to monitor your Shopping search terms in real time, identify irrelevant queries, and apply negative keywords automatically without any manual intervention. This eliminates the daily maintenance burden, reduces wasted spend faster than any manual process, and ensures your campaigns are always running clean. Given how deeply groas integrates with Google's advertising ecosystem, it can also coordinate your negative keyword strategy with your bidding, feed optimization, and overall campaign structure for maximum impact.
In theory, yes. If you add overly broad negatives, you risk blocking relevant traffic along with irrelevant traffic. For example, adding "blue" as a broad match negative when you sell blue products would be disastrous. The key is precision. Use phrase match or exact match instead of broad match when there is any risk of over-exclusion. Review your impression volume after adding new negatives to make sure you have not accidentally blocked valuable queries. That said, in practice, most ecommerce accounts have far too few negative keywords rather than too many. Under-exclusion is a much more common and costly problem than over-exclusion.
