Skip to content

Monthly Google Ads Full Negative Keyword Audit

Cadence: Monthly, 2nd week Duration: ~1 hour Trigger: "Run the monthly Ads full audit" Deploys changes: Yes (with Slack approval via War Room pipeline)

Purpose

The daily War Room handles yesterday's search terms. This monthly audit steps back and reviews the entire negative keyword list for structural health: duplicates, redundancies, over-blocking, under-blocking, and strategic alignment.

Audit Steps

1. Full Inventory

Pull the complete negative keyword list across all levels: - Account-level negatives - Campaign-level negatives (per campaign) - Ad-group-level negatives (per ad group) - Shared negative lists

Total count, broken down by level and match type.

2. Duplicate Detection

Find exact duplicates (same text + same match type at the same level). These waste list space and create confusion. Propose removal.

3. Redundancy Analysis

Find negatives where a broader match already covers a narrower one: - PHRASE "criminal defense" already blocks EXACT "criminal defense" — the EXACT is redundant - Account-level negative already blocks campaign-level duplicate

4. Over-Blocking Review

Identify negatives that may be blocking good traffic: - Negatives containing practice area terms (car accident, truck, etc.) - Single-word negatives that are too broad - Negatives that conflict with active keywords - Geographic terms that might block legitimate local searches

5. Under-Blocking Review

Analyze the last 30 days of search terms for patterns that slip through: - Recurring irrelevant categories not yet covered - New spam patterns - Competitor terms that should be negative

6. Strategic Alignment

  • Are negatives consistent across all campaigns?
  • Should any campaign-level negatives be promoted to account level?
  • Are shared negative lists being used effectively?

Benchmark

The April 14, 2026 audit found 6,247 negatives could be reduced to ~3,521 with no loss of protection. Use that as the baseline. Track list size month over month.