Negative keywords stop your Google Ads from showing for searches that will never book a tour. For a tour operator the worst offenders are free-activity searches, job searches, competitor names and informational queries. A shared negative list, built once and refined weekly, usually removes the most obvious waste within the first month.
This guide gives a practical starter list for tour and activity companies, explains the match types that trip people up, and sets out a weekly routine you can run in about twenty minutes. If you are still building your first campaign, read our starter campaign structure for tour operators first, because negatives work best when campaigns are split by destination and intent.
Why tour searches attract so much irrelevant traffic
Travel language is loose. Someone typing “northern lights” might want a tour, a forecast, a photography tip, a free viewing spot or a job as a guide. A broad or phrase-match keyword such as “northern lights tour” can still be matched to searches that contain extra words you would never choose, such as “free”, “jobs” or “how to photograph”.
The cost is not only wasted clicks. Irrelevant clicks lower your click-through rate on the keywords that do matter, give the bidding system noisy data, and make every report look worse than the real picture. A tight negative list is one of the cheapest improvements in a travel account because it costs nothing except attention.
How negative keywords work (and what they do not do)
Google explains the basics in its help page About negative keywords. The points that matter most in practice are these:
- A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad when a search includes that term (or the term in the way the match type specifies).
- Negative keywords can be applied at ad group level, campaign level, or through a shared negative keyword list that you attach to several campaigns.
- Negatives behave differently from normal keywords. As far as we know from Google’s documentation and our own accounts, a negative does not automatically block close variants, plurals or misspellings, so you add those yourself.
That last point is the one that catches people. If you add the negative “job” and a searcher types “jobs”, you should not assume the second is blocked. Add both, and check the current behaviour in the help page above, because Google changes matching rules from time to time.
The three match types for negatives
Negative keywords use broad, phrase and exact match, but the logic is different from positive keywords.
- Negative broad match: the ad is blocked if the search contains all your negative words, in any order. Negative “free tours” blocks “tours free in Lapland” but not “free walking map”.
- Negative phrase match: the ad is blocked if the search contains the words in that exact order, possibly with extra words around them.
- Negative exact match: the ad is blocked only when the search is exactly that phrase and nothing else.
A useful rule: use broad negatives for single words that are never relevant (“jobs”, “vacancies”, “wallpaper”), and use phrase or exact negatives when a word is harmless in other contexts. For example, “free” is a bad word for a paid sled-dog safari, but “free cancellation” is a phrase that buyers like. Blocking the single word “free” could stop you showing for people who are ready to book. Use phrase negatives such as “free tour” or “free things to do” instead.
A starter negative list for tour and activity companies
Build this as a shared list called something like “Universal negatives” and attach it to every search campaign. These are example categories; check each against your own offer before adding it.
Job and career searches
jobs, job, careers, vacancies, hiring, salary, internship, volunteer, work as a guide, seasonal work. These come up constantly in tourism destinations where people search for work in the same places they might search for tours.
Free and low-intent informational searches
free tour, free things to do, free entry, wikipedia, pdf, map, history of, facts about, definition. Some of these are legitimate for content marketing, but they are poor signals for paid clicks on a booking page.
Reviews, complaints and customer-service searches
refund, complaint, contact number, phone number, login, my booking, manage booking. If these searches include your own brand name, people are existing customers and you do not need to pay for them. If they include another company’s name, they are looking for that company.
Adjacent products you do not sell
This depends on your offer. A snowmobile operator might add “snowmobile for sale”, “snowmobile rental long term” and “snowmobile parts”. A boat-tour company might add “boat for sale”, “boat hire without skipper” and “fishing licence”. Write these by looking at your actual search terms rather than guessing.
Destination mismatches
If you operate in one destination, add the neighbouring ones you do not serve. If you operate in a named town, remember that some place names exist in several countries. Searchers looking for a similarly named place elsewhere will click your ad and leave.
Competitor and OTA names: a decision, not an automatic negative
Should you block searches that include the names of marketplaces such as GetYourGuide or Viator? It depends on your strategy. Some operators want to appear there, to catch people comparing options, while others find that these clicks are expensive and rarely convert. Our breakdown of what OTA commission really costs is a good place to start, because the right answer depends on your margin on a direct booking.
A sensible approach is to put marketplace names into a separate campaign with its own small budget and judge it on cost per booking, rather than adding them as negatives everywhere. If the numbers are poor after a couple of months, add them as negatives to your main campaigns.
A weekly search-terms routine
Negative lists are never finished. A short, regular routine does more than a big clean-up once a year.
- Open the search terms report for the last seven days, sorted by cost, and filter to terms with clicks but no conversions.
- Mark each term as relevant, irrelevant or unsure. Relevant terms with no conversion yet may simply need more time.
- For irrelevant terms, choose the smallest word or phrase that blocks the problem, rather than the entire search. Blocking one useful word to remove one bad query is a poor trade.
- Choose the level: shared list for universal problems, campaign level for destination-specific ones, ad group level for conflicts between your own ad groups.
- Choose the match type. Single clearly irrelevant words are usually broad; ambiguous ones are phrase or exact.
- Write a one-line note in a spreadsheet with the date, the term and the reason, so that next month you can see why a negative exists.
In the first two months of a new campaign we would review weekly. After that, fortnightly is normally enough for a small budget. This routine also feeds your content plan. Informational searches that waste ad clicks often make good blog topics, which cost nothing per click once published. We cover that idea in our guide on SEO for tour operators.
Using negatives to stop your own campaigns competing
When you run several campaigns or ad groups for similar keywords, they can compete for the same searches. A common case is a general “Lapland tours” campaign and a specific “husky safari” campaign. If both show for “husky safari tour”, you lose control over which ad and landing page the searcher sees.
The fix is a cross-negative: add “husky safari” as a phrase negative to the general campaign so that the specific campaign handles those searches. Keep a simple map on paper showing which campaign owns which theme. It prevents accidental overlap and makes results easier to read.
Mistakes that cost bookings
- Blocking a word that appears in your own tour names. Check every negative against your product list before adding it. A negative “night” can block “night photography tour”.
- Adding negatives from a single day of data. A search term with one click and no booking is not evidence. Look at several weeks, or at terms with enough clicks to matter.
- Forgetting seasonality. “Cheap” may be useless in peak winter but fine for a shoulder-season offer. Review the list at the start of each season.
- Copying a generic list from the internet. Lists written for e-commerce will block terms that matter to tourism, such as “cheap” or “second hand” in unrelated contexts.
- Never pruning. Review the list twice a year and remove anything that no longer reflects your offer.
How much will negatives save?
We would not promise a percentage, because it depends entirely on how loose your keywords were to begin with. As a rough illustration only: if an account spends 1,000 euros a month and a fifth of clicks come from searches that could never book, tightening those out frees 200 euros to spend on the searches that can. The saving appears as better cost per booking rather than a lower bill, because the budget is redirected, not removed.
It also pairs well with sound conversion tracking. If you cannot see which searches led to bookings, you cannot judge which negatives are safe. Our guide to GA4 conversion tracking for tour booking widgets covers the setup. For operators who want help running campaigns and the weekly review, our Google and Meta ads management for travel brands is built around exactly this routine.
Frequently asked questions
How many negative keywords should a tour operator start with?
There is no magic number. Start with a shared list of thirty to fifty clear universal negatives such as jobs, careers and free-activity phrases, then grow it from your search terms report. Quality matters more than size.
Should I add negative keywords before launching a campaign?
Yes, add the obvious ones first, but expect to learn most of the useful ones after the campaign has run for a couple of weeks and you can see real search terms.
Do negative keywords work in Performance Max campaigns?
Negative keyword options in Performance Max have been more limited than in standard search campaigns and the rules have changed over time, so check Google’s current documentation for your account. Our guide to Performance Max for tour operators covers the wider trade-offs.
Can negative keywords hurt my campaign?
Yes, if they block searches that would have converted. That is why we suggest checking each one against your product names and keeping a log of why you added it.
How often should I review the list?
Weekly for the first two months of a campaign, fortnightly afterwards, and again at the start of each season when the mix of searches changes.
Where to start this week
Create a shared list, add the job, free-activity and customer-service terms that clearly do not apply to you, attach it to every search campaign, and book twenty minutes in your calendar each week for the search terms report. After a month you will have a list that reflects how real travellers search for your tours, and a cleaner set of numbers to judge your campaigns by.