Ask a Malaysian business owner what went wrong with their Google Ads and you often get the same answer. The budget ran out by the third week and the enquiries that arrived were the wrong sort. Someone then suggests adding negative keywords, and a list of thirty terms goes in over a weekend.
Sometimes that fixes it. Often it quietly does something worse, the account stops wasting money and stops producing enquiries at the same rate, and nobody can tell which of the thirty terms caused which half of that result.
The problem is that negatives get treated as housekeeping when they are actually a spending decision. Each one is a permanent instruction to refuse traffic. This piece covers what negatives really control, where in the account to put them, the waste they usually catch, the customers they can accidentally block, and the point at which adding more stops paying. The video below runs through the mechanics in the interface, which is a useful thing to have seen before the strategy makes sense.
Adding and Managing Negative Keywords Inside Google Ads
Source video: Google Ads Negative Keywords Tutorial, on YouTube
PART 1 · DIAGNOSE
What Negative Keywords Actually Control
IN BRIEFNegative keywords exclude search terms from your campaigns so you spend only on the searches that matter to your customers. They are an exclusion instrument, not an optimisation one, a different job from the one match types do when they set how far a search can drift before your ad becomes eligible at all.
Google describes the purpose plainly: negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns so you can focus on the keywords that matter to your customers. The word doing the work is exclude. Nothing about a negative keyword makes a remaining click cheaper or better.
Three things sit outside their control, and confusing any of them with exclusion is where accounts go sideways:
- What you pay for the clicks you keep. That comes from the auction and ad quality. Removing bad traffic frees budget, which is not the same as reducing your cost per click.
- Whether your ad deserves the click. A perfectly filtered search still meets whatever copy you wrote, which is why the strength of your responsive search ads keeps mattering after the list is built.
- Whether the visit converts. On-intent traffic landing on a vague page produces nothing except a cleaner search terms report.
There is a real cost on the other side too. Google’s own guidance warns that using too many negative keywords means your ads might reach fewer customers. That warning is easy to skip past because it sounds like boilerplate. It is the whole trade-off in one sentence.
BENCHMARK BRIEFING 1 OF 4
How the Three Negative Match Types Behave
IN BRIEFNegative match types share the names of the positive ones and behave differently. Google states that negative keywords do not match to close variants, so plurals, synonyms and word forms must be added by hand. Casing and misspellings are handled automatically. Most half-working negative lists in Malaysian accounts fail on exactly this point.
| Negative match type | How you write it | Your ad is blocked when the search… | Still gets through |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broad (the default) | office cleaning | contains all your terms, even in a different order | searches with only some terms, and word forms like “office cleaner” |
| Phrase | “office cleaning” | contains all your terms in the same order, extra words allowed | the same words reordered, such as “cleaning office” |
| Exact | [office cleaning] | is exactly those terms, same order, nothing extra | anything with an added word, such as “office cleaning KL” |
Aggregated by IZI Digital Marketing from Google’s published documentation on negative keywords, 2026. Malaysian service phrasing added for context.
Read the right-hand column first. It is the one that explains why a list of thirty negatives can look thorough and still let the same rubbish through every week.
The practical instruction: negative exact match is the safest default when you are blocking one specific unwanted search, and negative broad is the one to reach for when a word is unwanted in every combination. Adding “percuma” or “free” as a broad negative blocks the whole family. Adding it as exact blocks precisely one search string and almost nothing else.
Not sure whether your negative list is doing anything at all?
The evidence sits in your search terms report over the last ninety days, not in the length of the list. See how a certified search team audits it
PART 2 · DESIGN
Where to Apply a Negative Keyword
IN BRIEFGoogle offers four levels: account, shared list, campaign and ad group. The level decides how far the block travels and how hard it is to undo later. Choosing it deliberately is part of building a first campaign properly rather than something to sort out once the mess appears.
Google confirms that an account-level negative keyword list applies automatically across all eligible search and shopping inventory in your account, including Performance Max campaigns. That reach is the attraction and the risk in equal measure.
DECISION BOX · WHICH LEVEL TO BLOCK AT
| What you are blocking | Apply it at | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Terms you never want, anywhere, “jawatan kosong”, “percuma” | Account level | One place to maintain, and it covers Performance Max too |
| A themed block reused across several campaigns | Shared negative list | Edit once, applies everywhere you attached it |
| A service you do not sell in this campaign | Campaign level | Keeps the term available to a campaign that does sell it |
| Steering traffic between your own ad groups | Ad group level | Sends each search to the ad and page written for it |
Verdict: Ask whether the term is unwanted by the business or unwanted by this campaign. Business-wide goes to the account level. Campaign-specific stays where it can be undone without collateral damage.
BENCHMARK BRIEFING 2 OF 4
Where Off-Intent Clicks Come From in Malaysia
IN BRIEFOff-intent traffic in Malaysian search accounts is not random. It clusters into a handful of recognisable groups, and the same groups appear whether the advertiser sells aircond servicing or corporate training. Knowing the clusters lets you write a starter list before the account has spent anything, which is a normal part of how a paid search programme gets set up.
| Cluster | Share of off-intent clicks | Trigger words seen in Malaysian accounts | Block at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free and do-it-yourself | About a third | free, percuma, DIY, cara sendiri, template | Account |
| Job seekers | About a quarter | jawatan kosong, vacancy, hiring, internship, gaji | Account |
| Students and researchers | Roughly one in five | apa itu, meaning, assignment, contoh, adalah | Account |
| Wrong tier or wrong product | About one in seven | second hand, terpakai, rental, wholesale, part time | Campaign |
| Outside the service area | Roughly one in eight | town and state names you do not cover | Campaign |
Illustrative model by IZI Digital Marketing, built on Google’s published guidance that negative keywords exclude search terms and that account-level lists apply across all eligible search and shopping inventory. Planning estimates for building a starter list, not measured client results.
Two things are worth noticing about the shape. The largest cluster is people who were never going to pay for anything, and the smallest are people who might have paid you under different circumstances. That ordering is why the first version of a negative list can be written confidently and the last version cannot.
The Malay-language triggers matter more than most advertisers expect. Malaysians search in both languages, often within the same session, and an English-only negative list leaves the cheaper half of the waste untouched.
PART 2 · DESIGN
The Negatives That Block Real Customers
IN BRIEFOver-blocking is invisible. A wrongly excluded search produces no impression, no click and no line in any report, so nothing tells you it happened. Google warns directly that too many negative keywords mean your ads reach fewer customers, and that warning has no accompanying metric.
Three blocks look sensible on a Monday and cost enquiries by the following quarter:
- Blocking “price” and “cost”. Someone asking what a service costs is often closer to buying than someone browsing the category. If those searches convert badly, the honest problem is usually a page that refuses to discuss money.
- Blocking “murah” and “cheap” outright. Price-sensitive is not the same as unqualified. A small business searching for affordable help may still be the exact customer you want.
- Blocking a competitor’s brand name. People comparing you against a named alternative are deep in a buying decision, not lost.
Consultant’s Note
A pattern worth naming, because it repeats in inherited accounts. The enquiries were poor, so a long negative list went in. Volume fell, which looked like success because cost per enquiry improved. Six months later the account was spending less and producing fewer customers, and the list had grown to a point where nobody could say which entry did what. The safeguard is dull but effective: date every negative you add, and never add more than one batch between reviews. A block you cannot trace is a block you cannot reverse.
BENCHMARK BRIEFING 3 OF 4
A Twelve-Week Rhythm for a New Negative List
IN BRIEFNegative keyword work is front-loaded and then thins out fast. The heavy lifting happens in the first fortnight of a campaign; by the third month the list should be nearly stable and your attention should have moved to the offer and the landing page.
| Period | Review the search terms report | Negatives typically added | What you are watching |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1–2 | Every two or three days | The bulk of the list | Obvious off-intent clusters and any term burning budget |
| Weeks 3–6 | Weekly | A steady trickle | Whether the same clusters keep reappearing in new wording |
| Weeks 7–9 | Fortnightly | Few | Cost per enquiry settling, and the first removal candidates |
| Weeks 10–12 | Fortnightly | Almost none | Whether the remaining problem is traffic or the page |
Illustrative model by IZI Digital Marketing, built on Google’s published guidance that the search terms report shows the terms that triggered your ads and is the recommended source of negative keyword ideas. Planning estimates for review cadence, not measured results.
If your list is still growing at the same rate in month four as it was in week one, something upstream is wrong. Usually the keywords themselves are too broad for the budget, and you are trying to fix a targeting decision with an exclusion list.
Adding negatives every week and still not seeing the enquiry cost move?
At that point the constraint has usually moved somewhere else in the account. See what an ongoing search engagement covers
PART 3 · DEPLOY
Mining the Search Terms Report for Negatives
IN BRIEFThe search terms report shows the terms people actually searched before your ad appeared, and Google names it as the place to find negative keyword ideas. It doubles as free demand research for your organic pages, which is why it belongs in the same review cycle as your SEO audit checklist.
You will find it under the Campaigns icon, in the Insights and reports menu, listed as Search terms. Work through it in three passes, in this order:
- Cost pass. Sort by spend, highest first. Any term with real money against it and no conversion is a candidate, unless it is an early-stage research query you are deliberately funding.
- Pattern pass. Look for the repeated word rather than the individual search. One “jawatan kosong” query is noise; eleven of them is a cluster that deserves a single broad negative.
- Opportunity pass. Terms converting well that you never targeted become new keywords, not negatives. This pass is the reason the report is worth opening even in a clean account.
One mechanical detail catches people out. When you add negatives directly from this report, Google applies them as negative exact match by default. That is deliberately conservative, and it means a term you meant to block everywhere is only blocked in one precise form until you change the match type yourself.
BENCHMARK BRIEFING 4 OF 4
Four Gaps Negative Keywords Do Not Cover
IN BRIEFNegative keywords have documented limits, and every one of them produces a “but I blocked that” conversation eventually. Four gaps account for most of those moments, and all four are stated openly in Google’s own documentation rather than discovered the hard way.
| Gap | What Google states | What it means for your account |
|---|---|---|
| Close variants | Negative keywords do not match to close variants or other expansions | Add plurals, singulars and synonyms yourself; casing and misspellings are handled for you |
| Very long searches | An ad may still show if the negative term falls after the sixteenth word of a search | Rare, but it explains the occasional blocked term appearing in your report |
| Display and Video ceiling | A maximum of 1,000 negative keywords is considered at account level for Display and Video | Exclusion lists cannot be your main control on Display; placement choices have to do the work |
| Performance Max scope | Performance Max negative keywords apply to Search and Shopping inventory only | A negative will not stop the same campaign appearing across its other channels |
Aggregated by IZI Digital Marketing from Google’s documentation on negative keywords and its guidance on negative keywords in Performance Max campaigns, 2026.
The close variant rule is the one that costs money quietly. Blocking “flowers” does not block “flower”, and the equivalent gap exists in every list built by someone assuming negatives behave like the positive keywords beside them.
PART 4 · DRIVE
When Adding More Negatives Stops Paying
IN BRIEFStop when your search terms report reads as mostly on-intent and your cost per enquiry has been stable for a full month. Past that point, the next improvement almost always lives in the offer or the page, not the exclusion list, usually a conversion problem on the page wearing a targeting costume.
The signal is simple enough to check monthly. If the last twenty negatives you added blocked terms that had each spent almost nothing, you are now doing admin rather than optimisation.
There is a second, less comfortable signal. If the traffic is clean and the enquiries still are not arriving, negatives have finished their job and something else has not started. Deciding which constraint you are actually facing before touching the account again is the reason IZI works audit-first rather than tweak-first.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Negative Keywords FAQ
1. How many negative keywords should a small Malaysian account have?
Fewer than most people assume. It depends on how broad your positive keywords are, a tightly targeted account may need only twenty or thirty. Google warns that too many negatives mean reaching fewer customers, so treat a very long list as a symptom of loose targeting rather than proof of careful management.
2. Do negative keywords lower my cost per click?
No, and expecting them to is a common disappointment. They remove searches from eligibility, which frees budget for the traffic you kept. Your cost per click is still decided in the auction. What usually improves is cost per enquiry, because the same spend now reaches better-matched searches.
3. Should negatives go at account level or campaign level?
Account level for anything the business never wants, campaign level for anything only this campaign does not want. Google confirms account-level lists apply automatically across all eligible search and shopping inventory, including Performance Max, so the convenience is real, and so is the risk of a broad block nobody remembers making.
4. Do I need to add plural and Malay versions separately?
Yes, for word forms and synonyms. Google states that negative keywords do not match close variants, so “flowers” will not block “flower”. Casing and misspellings are handled automatically. In a Malaysian account this means listing both the English and Malay wording of anything you genuinely want excluded.
5. Can I remove a negative keyword later if enquiries drop?
You can, and you should review for removals as routinely as for additions. The difficulty is diagnosis, not mechanics, a blocked search leaves no trace in any report. Dating each negative as you add it is the only cheap way to work backwards when volume falls unexpectedly.
Not sure whether your account is wasting spend or blocking customers?
A Blueprint session reads your search terms report and your existing negative list side by side, then names what to add, what to remove, and what to leave alone this quarter. You leave with the decision made, not a task list.