“Free” had been sitting in a negative keyword list for fourteen months, blocking a meaningful share of the account’s best traffic, and nobody on the current team could tell us why it was there. We found the answer eventually, in a Slack thread from over a year before we ever touched the account: a short-lived promotion had used the word “free” in its landing page copy, someone added it as a negative keyword to stop the promotion from cannibalizing paid conversions elsewhere in the account, and then the promotion ended two weeks later. The negative keyword didn’t end with it. It stayed, forgotten, filtering out every search containing “free” — including “free shipping,” “free trial,” and “free consultation,” three phrases that together represented a meaningful chunk of the account’s highest-intent traffic.
Why this happens on almost every account we inherit
A negative keyword list gets built once, carefully, during onboarding or a major campaign launch, when someone is paying close attention to exactly this kind of detail. After that, it has no owner. Bid strategy has an owner — someone checks it weekly, because a bad bid shows up immediately in cost data. Ad copy has an owner, because someone’s job is literally to write ads. The negative keyword list sits underneath both of those, silently shaping what the account is even allowed to bid on, and nobody’s job description includes revisiting it.
What else we’ve found, beyond “free”
The “temporary exclusion that outlives its reason” pattern shows up constantly, in different forms. A geo-exclusion added during a regional stock shortage, left in place two years after the product was back in stock everywhere. A competitor’s brand name added as a negative during a legal dispute that was settled eighteen months earlier. An audience exclusion meant to stop overlap with a since-cancelled retargeting campaign, still quietly narrowing the account’s reach for no active reason. None of these are dramatic mistakes. All of them compound, silently, for as long as nobody looks.
The monthly review we now run on every account
Four questions, every month, on every negative keyword and audience exclusion in the account: When was this added, and does that date correspond to a reason still in effect today? Is it blocking any search terms currently generating impressions elsewhere in the account — a sign it might be too broad? Does the person who added it still work on the account, and if not, does anyone remember why it’s there? And, bluntly: if we removed it right now, would anyone notice within a week? If the honest answer to the last question is no, it’s a strong candidate for removal.
Why this is worth the least interesting hour of the month
It’s not glamorous work. It doesn’t produce a chart anyone puts in a deck. But on the account that started this post, removing one forgotten negative keyword recovered a low six-figure amount of previously-blocked annual search volume, at the account’s existing conversion rate — from deleting a single line in a settings panel. We haven’t found an equivalent return anywhere else in a PPC account for the same amount of effort.