AshleyRosaworld
BANNED
- Dec 21, 2025
- 95
- 39
I’m running a fairly successful campaign for a clinic and it’s been going well and about a week or two ago I started seeing if I could maybe squeeze more performance for less money by adding more negative keywords for things that from my perspective are obviously not purchase intent such as people asking “what is…” and “when to…” and “how is it…” etc basically Wikipedia intent of patients trying to get informed. But I think in the process I strangled the campaign because according to Google 50% of my ad spend was towards “other keywords” which they conveniently won’t list out, yet supposedly those actually convert higher than my actual campaign.
I nuked all negatives today and the campaigns are back to doing well right away with new calls, appointments and conversions, although clearly spending on search terms that I’m pretty sure won’t convert, even competitors, but either the algorithm is too smart and knows how to find customers in that noise, or I’m too dumb for negative keywords.
Have you found that negatives strangle campaigns or that the black box of the algorithm is better left un constrained at least in some niches like medical using exact and phrase match only?
I nuked all negatives today and the campaigns are back to doing well right away with new calls, appointments and conversions, although clearly spending on search terms that I’m pretty sure won’t convert, even competitors, but either the algorithm is too smart and knows how to find customers in that noise, or I’m too dumb for negative keywords.
Have you found that negatives strangle campaigns or that the black box of the algorithm is better left un constrained at least in some niches like medical using exact and phrase match only?
