Skip to content
Vendor reportLocaliQ, 2026

Adding one negative keyword can triple conversion rates

Bidding & pacing

3x

higher conversion rates when a search campaign has at least one negative keyword

Reader Note:
The source presents this as a finding from LocaliQ's analysis of over 15,000 Google Ads accounts: "We recently analyzed over 15,000 Google Ads accounts and found that the foundational parts of campaigns have a huge impact on performance." It does not explain here how conversion rate was calculated, what comparison group the triple figure uses, or whether the comparison controls for account size, spend, or other setup differences. The sentence is written causally, but the report gives no experimental design in this section.
Evidence:
Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:
Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:
13,474 LocaliQ customer search advertising campaigns running from April 2025 through March 2026; campaign data from accounts using LocaliQ's platform, with aggregate budget split roughly 80-85% Google and 15-20% Microsoft. US campaigns only, and each industry subcategory included at least 52 unique active campaigns. The published figures are medians rather than means, calculated that way to limit the effect of outliers, even though the report labels them averages throughout.

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

Not for

  • Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
  • This was measured in one market. It may not hold where you are.
  • This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
  • The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
  • Nobody counted this directly — it's a calculation. The publisher worked it out itself, or took the ad platform's word for what its ads achieved.
  • The source never says how this number was measured.
  • The source never says when this data was collected. It could be considerably older than the publication date suggests.

Go deeper on this topic

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

Coming soon

This feature isn’t available yet.