- Stop reactively adding single negative keywords from your search term report. You need to proactively build 'negative themes' based on user intent (e.g., job seekers, students, DIYers) to get ahead of wasted spend.
- The high CPCs in London mean every wasted click hurts more. A sloppy negative keyword strategy that might be tolerable elsewhere will cripple your budget here.
- Your biggest budget leak is likely using Broad Match keywords without a comprehensive, pre-built negative keyword list. Control your match types to control your costs.
- In this letter, I've included a 'Search Term Triage' flowchart to give you a daily system for managing new search terms, and a calculator to show you how much of your budget is at risk from using the wrong match types.
- Focus on London-specific negatives to filter out tourists, people in boroughs you don't serve, and other locally-irrelevant searchers. This is where you gain a real edge.
You're pouring money into Google Ads to target customers in London, and it feels like you're just setting fire to a pile of cash. Every day, your budget evaporates on clicks from students doing research, people looking for jobs, and tyre-kickers searching for the 'cheapest' version of what you sell. It's frustrating and, frankly, unsustainable in one of the world's most expensive advertising markets.
The standard advice you'll find online is to 'check your search terms report and add negatives'. This is like putting a plaster on a broken leg. It's a reactive, lazy approach that ensures you're always one step behind, perpetually paying for irrelevant clicks before you can block them. You're not just losing money; you're training Google's algorithm to find more of the wrong people for you.
The real problem isn't just the individual keywords you're failing to exclude. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of searcher intent and a lack of a proactive, systematic strategy. To stop wasting money, you need to think like a bouncer, not a cleaner. You need to build a fortress of negative keywords *before* the wrong people even get to the door, rather than cleaning up their mess afterwards. I'll show you how to build that fortress, specifically for the unique challenges of the London market.
Why is my London ad budget disappearing so fast?
Let's be brutally honest. A wasted click in London is not the same as a wasted click in Leeds or Bristol. The cost per click (CPC) for competitive commercial keywords in the capital can be astronomical. We're talking £10, £20, sometimes even £50+ for a single click in sectors like finance, legal, or high-end B2B services. When the stakes are this high, every single irrelevant search that triggers your ad is a significant financial wound.
Your current strategy of waiting for bad terms to appear in your search report means you're willingly paying these high prices for useless traffic. If a student searching for 'financial modelling examples' clicks your ad for 'financial modelling services London', you could have just spent £25 on absolutely nothing. Do that a few times a day, and you've wasted hundreds of pounds by the end of the week. This is precisely why understanding your budget for UK B2B ads is so important before you even start.
The solution is to stop thinking about individual words and start thinking in 'Negative Intent Themes'. These are categories of searchers who will never, ever buy from you, no matter how good your landing page is. By building lists of keywords related to these themes from day one, you block the vast majority of waste before it even has a chance to happen.
What are the most common types of wasted clicks?
I call them the Four Horsemen of Budget Waste. Almost every irrelevant click you're paying for will fall into one of these four categories. Your first job is to build a negative keyword list for each one and apply it to all your campaigns as a shared list. It's the single most effective action you can take right now.
1. The Job Seeker
These people are not your customers. They see your company name in an ad and think you're hiring. They are looking for careers, not your services. Every click is 100% wasted money.
-> Negative keywords to add: `job`, `jobs`, `career`, `careers`, `hiring`, `recruitment`, `vacancy`, `vacancies`, `salary`, `salaries`, `cv`, `resume`, `employment`, `work for`
2. The Student / Researcher
This group is looking for free information for their assignments, research projects, or personal learning. They have zero commercial intent. They are looking for definitions, examples, and templates, not a paid solution.
-> Negative keywords to add: `what is`, `how to`, `example`, `examples`, `template`, `templates`, `diagram`, `free`, `download`, `pdf`, `university`, `college`, `course`, `tutorial`, `study`, `research`, `definition`
3. The DIYer / Tyre-Kicker
This person is convinced they can do it themselves or is only interested in the absolute rock-bottom price. If you are a premium service, they are not your customer. They'll waste your time and your ad budget.
-> Negative keywords to add: `cheap`, `cheapest`, `free`, `discount`, `deal`, `DIY`, `forum`, `reviews`, `vs`, `alternative`, `torrent`, `ebay`
4. The Irrelevant Searcher
This is a catch-all for searches that are just plain wrong. They might be looking for a competitor you don't want to bid on, a location you don't serve, or a variation of your service you don't offer.
-> Negative keywords to add: `[competitor name]`, `[irrelevant borough/city]`, `[service you don't offer]`, `near me` (if you are a national/online business), `in person` (if you are online only)
Getting these four lists in place is your foundation. But to truly master your London campaigns, you need to go a level deeper and tackle the nuances of the city itself. A lot of these issues come down to fundamental mistakes that cause targeting nightmares that can destroy your ad performance from the very beginning.
Click
The Job Seeker
Keywords: 'career', 'salary', 'hiring'
The Student
Keywords: 'example', 'what is', 'research'
The DIYer
Keywords: 'cheap', 'free', 'forum'
The Irrelevant
Keywords: 'competitor', 'wrong location'
How do I stop wasting money on searches specific to London?
Targeting "London" as a location and hoping for the best is an amateur mistake. London isn't one market; it's dozens of hyper-local markets rolled into one, each with its own quirks, costs, and customer profiles. To succeed, your negative keyword strategy must be as sophisticated as the city itself.
Filter Tourists from Residents: If you offer a service for London residents (e.g., estate agent, private healthcare, school tutoring), you must actively filter out the millions of tourists who pass through. Their searches look similar, but their intent is completely different. An American tourist searching for a 'private doctor in Knightsbridge' for a minor issue is a different customer to a resident looking for a long-term GP.
-> London-specific negatives: `tourist`, `visitor`, `on holiday`, `short stay`, `travel guide`, `what to do in`
Master the Boroughs: Just because you serve London doesn't mean you serve *all* of London. A plumbing company based in Hackney is unlikely to want a job in Hounslow. Relying on location targeting alone isn't enough. You must use negative keywords to block searches from areas you don't cover. This also helps you avoid bidding against businesses in those areas, which can drive up your costs. It's a simple fix that so many businesses get wrong.
-> Example negatives for a North London business: `croydon`, `bromley`, `sutton`, `kingston`, `south london`, `se1`, `sw19`
Understand Commuter vs. Resident Intent: People search for services near their office as well as their home. If your business model relies on one or the other, you need to account for it. For example, a dry cleaner near Canary Wharf might add negative keywords for residential suburbs to focus on the lunchtime office worker crowd. Conversely, a home-improvement service should probably negative keyword major business districts like `The City` or `Canary Wharf`.
Getting this level of granularity right is the difference between a profitable campaign and a money pit. It's the secret to actually getting a positive ROI on ads in London, not just generating expensive clicks.
How can I build a system to manage negative keywords?
Having great negative lists is one thing; maintaining them is another. The search landscape is always changing. You need a simple, repeatable daily process to manage new search terms that slip through your net. I call this the Search Term Triage. It takes 15 minutes a day and will save you a fortune.
Open your Google Ads account, go to the "Keywords" tab, and then "Search terms". Filter for the last day's activity. For each term that got clicks, you make one of three decisions:
1. KEEP: The search term is highly relevant and reflects perfect customer intent. Don't just leave it; click the checkbox next to it and add it as an Exact Match keyword. This tells Google, "This is gold. Go and find me more people who search for exactly this."
2. KILL: The search term is obviously irrelevant. It's from a Job Seeker, a Student, or is otherwise completely useless. Do NOT just add the full search term as a negative. Identify the single word that makes it irrelevant (e.g., in 'accountant jobs in london', the word is 'jobs'). Add that single word as a Broad Match negative. This is far more powerful as it will block hundreds of future irrelevant variations.
3. QUARANTINE: The search term is ambiguous. It's not obviously wrong, but it's not perfectly right either. For example, if you sell high-end office furniture, the search 'office chairs london' is ambiguous. It could be a business buyer or a student looking for a cheap chair for their flat. Don't kill it immediately. Let it get a few more clicks to gather more data. If it doesn't convert after a reasonable spend (e.g., 2-3x your target cost-per-acquisition), then kill it.
This simple system turns a reactive, messy task into a proactive, strategic ritual. It's a core part of the process we use to stop clients from wasting their ad spend and start generating profitable results.
Is there more to it than just negative keywords?
Absolutely. A long and complicated negative keyword list is often a symptom of a deeper problem: your keyword selection and match type strategy is too lazy. If you are relying heavily on Broad Match keywords, you are essentially asking Google to go wild and find any search it thinks is vaguely related to your term. This is incredibly risky and expensive in the London market.
Think of it like this:
- Broad Match: You're leaving your front door wide open and relying on a bouncer (your negative list) to throw people out. Some undesirables will always get in.
- Phrase Match: You've closed the door but left it unlocked. People can get in if they say the right phrase, but you still need the bouncer for those who try to trick their way past. This is a much better starting point.
- Exact Match: You've got a locked door with a strict guest list. Only the people you've explicitly invited can get in. This offers maximum controll, but you might miss out on some good guests you didn't know about.
A smart London strategy starts with a foundation of Phrase and Exact match keywords for your most important, highest-intent terms. You should only use Broad Match in very specific, controlled campaigns (like Performance Max, or a test campaign with a small budget) and ONLY when you have your fortress of negative keyword lists already in place. Your reliance on broad match is probably the main reason you're wasting money on the wrong keywords in the first place.
What should I do right now to fix my account?
Theory is great, but you need action. Here is a prioritised checklist of what you should do this week to stop haemorrhaging cash and build a profitable Google Ads account for the London market. Tbh this isn't easy stuff, it takes time and experience to get right, which is why many businesses decide to get help.
This is the main advice I have for you:
| Priority | Action | Why It Matters | Tool Needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (Highest) | Build and apply the 'Four Horsemen' negative keyword lists (Job Seekers, Students, DIYers, Irrelevants). | This is the fastest way to plug the biggest holes in your budget. It immediately blocks the most common sources of waste. | Google Ads (Shared Negative Lists) |
| 2 | Implement the daily 'Search Term Triage' process. | Turns a reactive task into a proactive system for continuous improvement and protects your budget from new threats. | Google Ads (Search Terms Report) |
| 3 | Audit your keyword match types. Pause most Broad Match keywords. | Fixes the root cause of why you need so many negatives. Gives you back controll over who sees your ads. | Google Ads (Keywords Report) |
| 4 | Create and apply a London-specific negative list (irrelevant boroughs, tourist terms etc). | Refines your targeting for the unique challenges of the London market, improving lead quality and reducing costs. | Google Ads, Local Knowledge |
| 5 | Review your landing page to ensure it converts the traffic you're paying for. | Getting the right clicks is only half the battle. If your page doesn't convert, you're still wasting money. This is a common issue with London campaigns where poor landing page optimization kills ROI. | Your Website, Analytics |
Executing this strategy requires vigilance, expertise, and a deep understanding of how search intent translates into profit or loss. It's not a 'set it and forget it' task; it's a constant process of refinement and defence, especially in a market as dynamic and costly as London.
If you're reading this and feeling overwhelmed, that's understandable. This is complex work. Many founders and marketing managers simply don't have the time or specialised knowledge to build and maintain this kind of defensive system while also running their business. An expert can implement these strategies far more quickly and effectively, often saving you more in wasted ad spend than their fee costs within the first few months.
If you'd like a professional pair of eyes to audit your Google Ads account, identify your biggest budget leaks, and build a robust negative keyword strategy tailored to your London business, consider scheduling a free, no-obligation consultation. We can walk you through your own data and show you exactly where your money is going and how to fix it.
