If you run Google Ads for your window cleaning round, there is a good chance you are paying for clicks from people who were never going to book you.

Not because the ads are bad. Because Google will happily show your advert to anyone whose search looks vaguely related to window cleaning — including the lad looking for a job, the homeowner trying to do it themselves, and the bloke down the road who wants to buy a round off you.

Every one of those clicks costs you the same as a real enquiry. The fix is a negative keyword list, and it is one of the few jobs in an ads account you can do yourself in an evening.

What a negative keyword actually does

A normal keyword tells Google "show my advert when someone searches this". A negative keyword tells it the opposite: "if their search contains this word, do not show my advert at all".

That is the whole idea. You are not changing your bids or rewriting your ads. You are drawing a line round the searches you never want to pay for.

It matters most on broad and phrase match keywords, which is what most accounts are running. If you have "window cleaning" in there on broad match, Google decides what counts as close enough — and its idea of close enough is a lot wider than yours.

Find the ones actually costing you money

Before you copy anyone's list, look at your own account. In Google Ads, go to your campaign, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. That report shows the real searches people typed before clicking your advert, which is not the same as the keywords you added.

Set the date range to the last three months so you have enough to see a pattern. Then read down the list. Anything that made you wince is a candidate.

You can add negatives straight from that screen — tick the search term and choose to add it as a negative keyword. Do that little and often and the list builds itself.

The list every window cleaner should start with

These are the groups that come up again and again on exterior cleaning accounts. Add them as negatives and you cut out a big chunk of the rubbish before it ever costs you a click.

People looking for work, not a cleaner:

• jobs, job, vacancy, vacancies, hiring, recruitment
• salary, wage, wages, pay, hourly rate, how much do window cleaners earn
• apprenticeship, training, course, courses, qualification

People planning to do it themselves:

• how to, DIY, yourself, tips, guide, tutorial, youtube
• homemade, vinegar, washing up liquid, best way to

People buying kit or a business:

• water fed pole, pole system, trolley, backpack, purifier, resin, DI vessel
• equipment, supplies, wholesale, for sale, second hand, used, ebay
• round for sale, business for sale, franchise, customers for sale

Business services, not cleaning:

• insurance, public liability, software, app, invoicing, CRM
• leaflets, marketing, advertising, website, SEO

Free and freebie searches:

• free, cheap, cheapest, discount, voucher

Be careful with that last group. "Cheap" is worth blocking on most rounds, but "free quote" is a perfectly good search. If you block "free" outright you lose those too, so block "free" only as a phrase you have actually seen wasting money, or block the specific term "free window cleaning" instead.

Jobs you do not do:

This one is personal to you. If you do not do commercial high rise, abseiling, cherry pickers, solar panels, oven cleaning or pressure washing driveways, add those words too. There is no point buying a click for work you will only turn down.

Broad, phrase and exact — which to use

Negative keywords have match types just like normal ones, and the default is a bit counter-intuitive.

• Broad negative (just the word, no punctuation) blocks any search containing that word in any order. Best for the obvious ones: jobs, salary, DIY, ebay.
• Phrase negative (in "quote marks") blocks searches containing that exact run of words. Good for things like "round for sale".
• Exact negative (in [square brackets]) blocks only that search and nothing else. Use it when a word is risky on its own.

When in doubt, start with phrase. Broad negatives are powerful and easy to over-apply.

Where to put the list

You can add negatives at campaign level or ad group level, and there are also shared negative keyword lists you can apply to several campaigns at once.

For most one-van rounds, a single shared list applied to every campaign is plenty. Keep it in one place, add to it when you spot something, and you are not maintaining four copies of the same thing.

Where ad group level earns its keep is when you are running separate ad groups for separate services — window cleaning, gutters, conservatory roofs. Then you can stop your gutter ad group showing for window cleaning searches and vice versa, so each advert matches what was actually typed. That is a bigger job than a negative list though, and it is really a campaign structure question.

The ones people block by mistake

Two warnings, because over-blocking is quieter and more expensive than under-blocking.

First, watch out for words that appear in your own town or street names. Block "free" broadly and you can knock out searches from anywhere with "free" inside a place name. It is rare, but it happens.

Second, do not block your own service words in a panic. Plenty of people search "window cleaning prices" or "window cleaning cost" and they are genuine customers doing their homework before they ring round. Those are not time-wasters, they are people at the shopping stage.

After any big change to a negative list, check your impressions a week later. If they have fallen off a cliff, you have blocked something you needed.

When negatives will not fix your problem

Worth being straight about this. Negative keywords stop you paying for the wrong people. They do not make the right people ring you.

If your search terms report is already clean and you are still not getting work, the problem is further down the line — the advert, the page they land on, what happens when they do get in touch. Tidying negatives will not touch any of that.

And if you are spending very little each month, the honest answer is that a negative list might save you a couple of clicks and no more. It is worth an hour of your time either way, but do not expect it to transform a budget that was always going to be tight.

A simple routine

Add the starter list above. Then, once a week for the first month, open the search terms report, read the last seven days, and add anything daft. After that, once a month is fine.

It takes ten minutes and it is the single easiest way to stop your budget leaking. Every click you stop paying for is budget left over for someone who actually wants their windows done.