Straight answers for local service businesses
Review negative keywords weekly for the first month your ads run, then move to every two weeks. Once the account settles and wasted clicks slow to a trickle, monthly is enough. On top of that fixed schedule, check right away any time you change budget, add a service, launch a new campaign, or a season turns.
Here is the short version. Weekly for the first month a campaign runs. Every two weeks after that. Monthly once things are quiet and your wasted clicks have dropped to a trickle.
That is it. You do not need a daily habit, and you do not need to pay someone to do it every morning.
A more useful way to think about it is by spend, because a dollar of waste hurts a small budget much more:
If you spend $300 a month and you are reviewing daily, you are spending your own labor to protect small money. If you spend $3,000 a month and you review twice a year, you are almost certainly paying for clicks from people who will never hire you.
Because that is when Google is still guessing what your business does.
When a campaign is new, the system has no history on your account. It casts wide. That is when you see the weird stuff: someone searching for a plumbing job posting, someone looking for a YouTube tutorial, someone in a town three hours away. A plumber in Medford launches a drain cleaning campaign on Monday and by Friday the search terms report shows "how to snake a drain myself" and "plumber salary."
Those searches show up early and they show up in volume. Catch them in week one and you keep the money. Catch them in week ten and you have already paid for ten weeks of them.
After about a month, the pattern settles. New junk still appears, but slower. That is your signal to stretch the interval.
Same steps every time. Do them in order and you will not overthink it.
That is the whole job. Ten minutes, most weeks less. The mistake people make is skipping step one and adding negatives from memory or from a blog list. Your account has its own leaks. Look at yours.
The calendar is the floor, not the whole plan. These events should send you straight to the search terms report within a few days, no matter when you last looked:
Yes, and it is more common than you would think. The danger is not the time spent. It is the itch to block something every single time you look.
If you review weekly and feel like you failed unless you added five negatives, you will start blocking terms that were fine. Words like "near me," "estimate," "small," or "weekend" look unqualified on a screen and convert on a phone.
Two guardrails:
Blocking a bad click saves you one click. Blocking a good keyword can cost you a $4,000 job. The math is not symmetrical, so lean conservative.
Two signs. First, your reviews get boring. When you open the search terms report and almost everything on it is a real customer search, your list is mature. Second, your cost per call trends down or holds steady while your budget stays flat.
If you review negative keywords every two weeks and keep finding brand new categories of waste, something upstream is off. Usually it is a keyword that is too broad, or location targeting set to the wrong radius, or a campaign type doing things you did not ask for.
Put the monthly one on the calendar with a reminder. Not because it is hard, but because it is the kind of task that quietly slides for six months while your budget keeps spending.
If you would rather not be the one in the search terms report on a Sunday night, that is fair. Just make sure whoever handles your ads can show you the list of terms they blocked last month and why.
Open your campaign, go to the Keywords section, and choose Search terms. It shows the actual phrases people typed before your ad appeared, which is different from the keywords you chose.
Use a shared account-level negative list for the universal stuff like job searches, DIY, and wrong towns. Keep service-specific blocks at the campaign or ad group level so you do not accidentally shut off a service you do offer.
There is no magic number, and large lists are normal for mature accounts. The risk is not quantity, it is match type. One careless broad match negative can do more damage than a thousand precise ones.
Yes, and it matters more there because you have less control over targeting. You get less search term detail than in a standard search campaign, so check what you can see and add account-level negatives for the obvious waste.
A starter list saves you money on day one, but it cannot know your service area, your competitors, or the odd searches specific to your trade. Use a template to start, then let your own search terms report guide you from there.
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