Google Ads · Negative Keyword Review
25 Negatives,
And Why Only 25
We reviewed 15,659 search terms across a full year of Shopping and Search plus 90 days of Performance Max. Almost all of them survived.
All Time Trading|12 Months Shopping & Search|90 Days Performance Max
Section 01
The Bottom Line
We are recommending 25 phrase negatives, worth about $127 a month. They block competitor, marketplace and discount retailer searches for brands you do not carry.
That number is small on purpose. A phrase negative blocks every future search containing that phrase, including the ones that buy, so the review was built to protect first and cut second.
Recommended Negatives
25
Out of 15,659 search terms reviewed.
Spend They Block
~$127/mo
450 clicks across 273 searches, none of which ever sold.
Protected Orders At Risk
Zero
No recommended phrase touches a protected converter.
Revenue Hard Protected
$330,704
242 converting terms the rule places out of reach.
What we left untouched
Any order above a $100 value, any search carrying bulk or wholesale, your brand searches, and a 3,125 term cluster that looks like waste and is actually returning 28 times its spend.
The honest framing
$127 a month is roughly 0.5% of search term spend. Worth doing because it is free and clean. It is not a growth lever and we are not presenting it as one.
Section 02
Our Filters
Every term started as protected. To end up on the recommended list, a search had to survive all six filters below, and every one of them exists to stop us from blocking something profitable.
0
Start with every raw search term, over a full year
Twelve months of Shopping and Search, joined to 90 days of Performance Max. We went wider than a single quarter so that seasonal demand, back to school and winter included, could not hide a problem or manufacture one.
15,659
terms in scope
$62,246 spend
1
Converting terms are protected, but they have to earn it
A conversion alone is not enough. A converting term is hard protected if its average order value is above $100, or if the search contains bulk or wholesale. That second clause matters because a wholesale buyer placing one smaller first order still signals a wholesale relationship. It protected 30 searches on its own.
324 terms converted. 242 clear this bar and are untouchable.
$330,704
242 protected terms
2
The 82 that did not clear the bar, examined not assumed
The remaining 82 converting terms are at $100 or below with no bulk or wholesale signal, so the rule makes them eligible to cut. We priced that rather than assuming it. Cutting all 82 would save $349 and give up $6,459, and the terms are socks, tee shirts and sweatpants. Core catalog. We cut none of them.
19x
return on the eligible set
3
Your own brand is never a negative
Searches for All Time Trading by name are people already looking for you. Excluded automatically rather than judged on relevance.
15
brand terms excluded
$4,163 in spend
4
Looks like waste, is not waste
Thousands of people search "usa map" and land on a learning placemat printed with a map of the United States. It reads as a disaster on the surface, tens of thousands of clicks at a fraction of a percent. Underneath, schools find it and buy cases. Spanish variants like "mapa de estados unidos" are the same buyer. A conventional sweep would have cut the whole cluster.
28x
3,125 terms
$616 returned $17,413
5
Verified against the live product feed
A brand only becomes a candidate once we confirm you do not stock it, checked against the current feed rather than from memory. Wrangler, Disney, Marvel and Pokemon came back stocked and were pulled, joining Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, Gildan, Luvs, Huggies and Yacht Smith from the earlier review.
4
stocked brands
pulled off this pass
6
The phrase guardrail, run last
A phrase negative blocks every search containing it, forever. So for each surviving candidate we re aggregated every search containing that phrase, converters included, not just the empty ones that flagged it. Anything reaching a protected converter is pulled, even over a fraction of a conversion.
This is where the full year paid for itself. "five below" and "dollar tree" both looked clean over 90 days and both were pulled once the year was in view: "five below backpacks" converted, and dollar tree picked up 0.67 conversions. A quarterly review ships both. "dr scholl" was pulled the same way, because "dr scholl's sandals for women" bought at a $3,013 order value.
63 phrases tested. 11 held here, 4 stocked, 21 below a $5 floor, and 2 removed by judgement rather than by data. 25 remain.
63 → 26
tested to recommended
Section 03
The Recommended Negatives
25 phrase negatives that cleared all six filters. Every one has zero conversions across every search containing it, over the entire window, and every one is verified as a brand or marketplace you do not stock.
nike
alibaba
dr leonard's
new era
5 below
oriental trading
goodfellow
carhartt
pampers
costco
888 lots
target
dhgate
crye precision
crocs
dollardays
contarmarket
faire
shein
dollar general
e4hats
comfort colors
dollar days
minmaxdeals
temu
What we pulled ourselves, and one to confirm. We removed wholesale central from the list. A phrase negative on it would only ever block that exact two word sequence, never "wholesale t shirts", but we would rather not have the word wholesale anywhere on a negative list for this account. It cost $37 to be careful. We also held liquidation off entirely, worth $69, because a liquidation buyer may be someone you want. The one to confirm is comfort colors, a blank apparel brand rather than a competitor, which sits closer to your core category than the rest of the list.