The negative keyword lists I load into every agricultural machinery Google Ads account before it spends a dollar

Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 23 Sept 2026 · 7 min read

Why is my Google Ads budget going on people who will never buy a tractor?

Because Google is generous with what it thinks you meant. You bid on "tractor for sale" and it happily shows your ad to someone typing "tractor colouring pages" or "tractor driver jobs Dubbo". Broad match and loose phrase match have made this worse over the last few years, not better.

In my experience, a new agricultural machinery account with no negative keywords wastes somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of its spend in the first month. On a $3,000 monthly budget that's up to a thousand dollars paying for clicks from people who will never walk onto your yard.

That's why I don't treat negatives as a clean-up job for month three. They go in before launch. Every account. The search term report still gets read weekly after that, but you start with the obvious rubbish already blocked.

The starter lists I load on day one

I split negatives into shared lists at the account level so they apply to every campaign and I don't have to remember to add them each time. Six lists cover most of the waste in farm equipment leads campaigns.

Some of these hit harder than others. Jobs and toys are the big ones in my experience, because tractors and headers are things people love, and people who love them search for them for all sorts of reasons besides buying one.

Should I block words like used, parts and hire?

This is where I see people get it wrong in both directions. They either block nothing or they get trigger happy and block words that bring in real money.

Parts, service, hire and used are not rubbish searches. They're just different jobs. If you run a parts counter or take trade-ins, someone searching "second hand header price" could be a very good lead. They just shouldn't land in your new-machine campaign with your new-machine budget.

My rule is simple. If you don't sell it, block it account wide. If you do sell it, block it from the campaigns where it doesn't belong and give it its own campaign with its own budget and its own landing page. That way a used-stock enquiry gets judged on used-stock numbers, and your new-machine cost per lead doesn't get muddied.

How I keep the lists working after launch

Starter lists get you about 70 percent of the way. The rest comes from reading the search term report, and nobody else is going to do that for you.

Match type matters here. I add most negatives as phrase match so "toy tractor" also blocks "green toy tractor for sale". I use exact match negatives sparingly, mostly to stop one campaign stealing traffic from another. And I'm careful with single broad negatives like "used", because a broad negative on that word blocks every search that has it anywhere in it.

Your negatives should change with the season

Rural buyers don't search the same way all year. In the lead-up to harvest the search volume shifts to parts, repairs and hire because blokes are fixing what they've got, not buying new. That's exactly when a new-header campaign with loose negatives gets flooded with "header belt" and "knife section" searches.

I tighten the new-machine campaigns before busy windows and loosen them once the buying window opens. For most broadacre areas that means the list gets another look in late winter before spraying, and again in September and October before harvest.

Judge the lists by sales, not form fills

Here's the trap. A campaign full of junk search terms often shows more conversions, not fewer. Someone after a spray nozzle chart fills in your form asking for a price on nozzles. Google counts that as a lead, and on paper your cost per lead looks great.

That's why I track through to the actual sale. Enquiry, then sales-qualified lead, then quote, then sold machine, all tied back to the keyword and search term in the CRM. For machinery enquiries, a form fill usually costs somewhere between $60 and $180. What matters is what each sales-qualified lead costs, and what each sold machine costs, and tight negatives are one of the fastest ways to bring both down. The same goes for Meta Ads if you run them alongside, but that's a post for another day.

Written by

Michael Nadalin

Founder, Market Lead & Harvest Lead

Michael is the founder of both Market Lead and Harvest Lead, building lead and sales systems for agriculture and machinery businesses across Australia and the USA.