The negative keyword list you should write before launch
Twelve categories that waste money in almost every service-business account, and how to exclude them before the first click.
Negative keywords are usually treated as maintenance: launch, wait, read the search terms report, exclude the obvious waste. That works, but it pays for the education with live budget, and the same dozen categories show up in nearly every service-business account.
Writing the list before launch is not a substitute for reading the report later. It is a way of not paying twice for a lesson the whole industry has already learnt.
Why pre-launch beats post-hoc
Early spend is the most expensive spend in the account, because it is also the data the bidding strategy learns from. Queries you would never have chosen still teach the system what a conversion looks like, and a launch fortnight full of job-seekers and students distorts more than the invoice.
A pre-launch negative list is not a prediction. It is the accumulated waste of every similar account, excluded before it becomes yours.
Where to put them
Most of these belong on a shared account-level list, so a new campaign inherits them the day it is created. A smaller set belongs at ad group level, where the job is not excluding waste but stopping two intents from bleeding into each other.
Keep the two purposes separate. Mixing intent-separation negatives into the account-wide waste list is how accounts end up quietly excluding traffic they wanted, in a campaign nobody was looking at.
What not to exclude
Resist excluding research-stage queries wholesale. “How much does X cost” looks informational and frequently is not — in high-consideration services it is often the last question before an enquiry.
The same applies to problem-symptom queries. Someone searching the symptom rather than the service name may simply not know your vocabulary yet, and excluding them removes the part of the market that has not been taught to search for you.
Two weeks after launch, read the search terms report properly and treat every unexpected recurring query as a question: is this waste, or is it an intent we have not built for? The list you wrote before launch handles the first case. Only reading handles the second.
Build a campaign and read the recommendation with sources. Nothing launches without you.