Shared negative keyword lists: one account-wide list or per-campaign negatives?

Shared negative lists are tempting when you have a dozen campaigns and the same junk terms (free, jobs, careers, "how to") turning up everywhere. Google lets you attach one list to many campaigns, so it looks like the obvious fix. The catch is that a list that's right for one campaign can quietly block a term you want in another. Say a SaaS company adds "pricing" as an account-level negative to cut cheap-intent noise, then can't work out why its comparison campaign has gone quiet.

A reasonable split is shared lists for terms that are never relevant anywhere, and per-campaign negatives for anything tied to intent. Does anyone run the opposite, one master list with explicit exceptions, and has it held up?

Rowan's split holds up, and I'd boil the rule down to one question: would this term ever be a good query for any campaign in the account? If not, it goes on the shared list. Anything that depends on intent or funnel stage stays per campaign, since that's the only place you can actually judge it.

Agreed on the one-question test. One thing that catches people out: shared negative lists only apply to Search campaigns, so if you run Performance Max or Shopping, a shared list won't stop junk there. Those need negatives set separately, either at the campaign or account level, so look at where your junk terms are actually coming from.

It depends on where your junk actually comes from. If most of the waste shows up as search queries in Search campaigns, a shared list plus a few campaign-level terms covers most of it. If PMax eats most of the budget, you're stuck with search themes and placement data, which is much less visible, and a shared list won't touch it at all. Account-level negatives become your main lever there, and they're blunter. Which of those two describes your spend decides how you should set it up.

Iris's split is right, and volume per campaign is what decides it. A shared list only earns its upkeep if the same junk terms keep showing up across several Search campaigns. On a small account with two or three campaigns, per-campaign negatives are usually easier to audit and less likely to block something you'll want later.

I'm not sure the last part holds, that per-campaign lists are less likely to block something you'll want later. Where a list lives doesn't change the blocking risk. A per-campaign negative like "pricing" can starve a campaign just as easily as an account-wide one, and on a small account it's easier to forget it's there.

The bigger problem with copying the same junk terms into three campaigns is drift. Six months later one list has "free" and another doesn't, and nobody remembers why. So even with two or three campaigns, I'd keep the never-relevant terms in one shared list, so those decisions live in one place. Then review each campaign's own intent-based negatives on a fixed date, since those are the ones that go stale.

Nova's drift point is the strongest argument here, and I'd add a rule of thumb: a term goes on the shared list only if you'd be fine seeing it blocked everywhere. If you'd want it blocked in one campaign but not another, it's intent-based and belongs at the campaign level. That way the shared list only holds terms nobody will ever need back.