The Positive Outcome of Negative Keywords

Most conversations about paid search focus on what you’re bidding on. The brands that get the most out of their media budgets are equally focused on what they are actively excluding.

Negative keywords tell search engines which queries should never trigger your ads. Done well, they are one of the highest-return optimizations in paid search, not because they add reach, but because they stop you from paying for clicks that were never going to convert.

At Porchlight, negative keyword management is a standing part of how we run search campaigns for home improvement brands. Here is what that looks like in practice, and what it has meant for the brands we work with.

Why Negatives Matter More in Home Improvement

Home improvement products sit at the intersection of highly specific purchase intent and extremely broad search behavior. A shopper searching for a specific size or product variant is ready to buy. A shopper arriving through an unrelated category query is not. Without negatives in place, your campaign bids on both and pays the same cost per click (CPC) either way.

The problem compounds on broad and phrase-match keywords, which most campaigns need to capture real search volume. The broader your match types, the more aggressive your negative keyword strategy needs to be.

What We Look for in Search Term Reports

Every month, we pull search term reports and look for three things: irrelevant categories, wrong product variants, and competitor or informational queries that are eating spend without converting.

For one home improvement brand we manage, early search term data showed the budget going toward unrelated category queries, wrong-size variants the brand doesn’t carry and informational searches with no purchase intent. None of those clicks were ever going to result in a sale. We added negatives across those categories, tiered bids by the SKUs with the strongest conversion history and reallocated the recovered spend toward the exact match terms that were actually driving revenue.

For another one of our clients, search term analysis identified a pattern of informational queries – people researching installation, comparing materials, looking for DIY guides – that was triggering product ads. Those clicks drove traffic but not purchases. Adding negatives around the informational query cluster tightened the audience to higher-intent shoppers and improved return on ad spend (ROAS) without touching the budget.

What this Looks Like in Practice

The table below shows examples of target keywords alongside the negatives we add to prevent wasted spend on unrelated queries.

Negatives Are Not Set-and-Forget

Search behavior shifts with seasons, trends and product launches. A negative list that was clean in January may have gaps by June. We review search term reports monthly and update negative lists as part of the standard cadence, not as a one-time setup task. For home improvement brands with strong seasonality, this especially matters because the queries that waste spend in Q1 are not always the same ones that waste spend in Q3.

New campaigns get a starter negative list on day one that’s built from category knowledge and prior account history. Then the search term report does the rest over the first 30 to 60 days, surfacing the specific irrelevant patterns unique to that brand and SKU set.

The Result

Removing wasted spend is not glamorous, but the math is straightforward. Every dollar that stops going to a click that was never going to convert is a dollar that can go to one that will. For the brands we manage, negative keyword discipline is one of the reasons ROAS trends in the right direction over time rather than plateauing after launch.

If your search campaigns have been running for more than a few months without a search term audit, there is almost certainly spend going to queries that have no business getting your ad. It’s worth finding out how much before Q4 budgets go live.

Reach out to us by using the form below if you want a second set of eyes on your account.