I’ll be honest: I spent years in content marketing and SEO without giving paid marketing much thought. Organic was always my world. I understand it, I trust it, and I am good at it.
But as I’ve expanded into the paid side of marketing, I’ve started to see just how much money gets left on the table, not because campaigns are set up wrong, but because of what happens after they launch.
Shameless shoutout to Ellen Thompson, Respage’s CEO and Co-Founder, who recently taught me that the biggest culprit to this wasted money is negative keyword management. Or more accurately, the lack of it. If you’re brand new to this concept, I highly suggest reading her recent blog on this topic as she clearly lays out the basics. And if you’re still with me reading this one, I’ll lay out what’s happening to your ads budget, the costs of ignoring it, and where to start.
What's Actually Happening to Your Budget
Here’s the thing about Google Ads: your budget doesn’t just go toward the keywords you want. It goes toward any search term Google thinks is close enough.
So if you’re a conventional apartment community trying to show up when someone searches “2-bedroom apartments in [city],” you might also be showing up for “affordable housing in [city]” or “senior living apartments.” And if you’re not either of those things, every click from those searches is wasted money.
This is exactly why negative keyword management exists. You’re telling Google, “No, don’t show my ad for that.” But here’s the problem: most people set it and forget it.
They build the campaign, add a few obvious negatives, launch it, and move on. The budget keeps running. The wasted spend keeps adding up. And nobody looks at the search terms report often enough to catch it.
The Real Cost of Ignoring It
Let me give you a concrete example of what can go wrong.
Imagine a property spending $2,000 a month on Google Ads. The leads look okay on the surface. But when you dig into the search terms report, you find that the vast majority of spend was driven by people searching for the property’s own name.
That means the property was paying for branded traffic, clicks from people who already knew who they were and were actively looking for them. Traffic that would likely have come in anyway through organic search, for free.
Nobody caught it because nobody looked. The search terms report wasn’t reviewed, the negative keyword list wasn’t updated, and two thousand dollars a month was going toward conversions that cost nothing to earn.
This isn’t a rare scenario. It happens all the time, and it’s completely avoidable.
Why This Keeps Getting Skipped
Negative keyword management isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like growth work. There’s no big creative moment or launch day energy attached to it.
It’s also genuinely time-consuming. To do it right, you have to regularly pull your search terms report, read through what people actually typed to trigger your ad, and make judgment calls about which terms to exclude. Some of those calls are obvious. Others require real context about your property, your market, and who you’re trying to reach.
That combination, tedious and judgment-heavy, is exactly why it falls through the cracks. It’s the kind of task that’s easy to push to next week, and then the week after that.
But the cost of skipping it is real. And it compounds the longer you wait.
What Good Negative Keyword Management Actually Looks Like
This is the 80/20 rule of Google Ads performance. If someone on your team is consistently reviewing search terms and adding negative keywords, that alone accounts for the majority of waste reduction. The rest is fine-tuning.
Here’s what the process should look like in practice:
- Check the change history. Go to Google Ads and, in the far left-hand side menu, select Campaigns. You should see an option in the Campaigns menu that says Change History. Click that and look for changes such as “10 negative exact match keywords added.”
- Review your search terms report regularly. Not once a quarter. At minimum, monthly. Weekly is better, especially if you’re running a significant budget or a new campaign.
- Add negatives proactively. Common ones for multifamily include anything related to affordable or income-restricted housing, senior living, student housing, or short-term rentals, if those don’t apply to your property. Also think about job-related searches, competitor names where appropriate, and, yes, your own property name.
- Don’t add your branded terms as negatives. This sounds obvious, but it’s a real mistake people make. If someone is searching for your community by name, you want to show up. Accidentally blocking your own brand in search terms can quietly tank your performance without triggering an obvious alarm.
- Make it someone’s job. This work only happens consistently if it’s assigned and accountable. Whether you’re doing it yourself or managing someone on your team, it needs to be a recurring task with a clear owner.
Why You Still Need a Human Doing This
There’s a reason ads haven’t been fully automated, even as AI handles more and more in the marketing stack.
Negative keyword decisions require context. A search term like “low income apartments near me” might be an obvious negative for a luxury property, but less clear for a workforce housing community. “Senior-friendly apartments” is different from “senior living.” These calls require someone who understands the property, the audience, and the intent behind the search.
No algorithm can fully replicate that judgment. You need a person actually reading the terms, thinking about who’s searching and why, and making a call. That’s not a knock on automation. It’s just the reality of what this task requires.
What Multifamily Marketers Should Take Away From This
If you’re a marketing manager or marketing leader overseeing paid search for apartment communities, here’s the bottom line:
You don’t have to be a Google Ads expert. But you do need to make sure this is getting done. That means asking the right questions, building the right habits into your team’s workflow, and understanding enough about how search terms and negative keywords work to know when something’s off.
The campaigns that perform well over time aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated bidding strategies. They’re the ones where someone is paying attention, consistently, and cleaning up the waste before it becomes a problem.
A Simple Starting Point
Pull your search terms report today. Look at what people actually typed to find your ad. If you see terms that have no business driving traffic to your property, add them as negatives.
That one action, done consistently, is worth more than most of the optimization work that tends to get prioritized over it.
Paid search is complex. I’m still learning it myself. But this part is one of the clearest examples I’ve come across of where consistency beats strategy. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to show up and do the work.
This Feels Too Daunting?
I get it. Negative keyword management is one of those tasks that sounds simple in theory but adds up quickly in practice. Between reviewing search terms, making judgment calls, and keeping up with it consistently, it is a real time commitment, and not every team has the bandwidth to stay on top of it.
Respage has been managing apartment advertising for multifamily clients for over two decades. Our PPC pros know how to get your community in front of the right prospects, people who are actively searching and ready to move. Before we ever touch a campaign, we take the time to learn about your community and neighborhood so the work is grounded in real context, not guesswork.
If Google Ads feels like a black box, or if you just want to make sure the work is actually getting done right, let’s talk.
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