Every vacation rental account leaks money into jobs, DIY, long-term rentals, and software searches — a standing search-terms ritual plugs the leak before it compounds.
Every vacation rental account starts with the same protective set: jobs/careers/salary/hiring; cheap/free; long term/annual/monthly lease/apartment/tenant; timeshare; cleaning services; property management software and the PMS brand names (searches for software tools, not managers); course/license/how to become. Ten minutes of negatives saves the first hundred dollars of waste.
Search terms report, last 30 days, sorted by spend. Week two and week four after any launch, then monthly forever. Put it on the calendar or it won’t happen — query rot is silent.
Three buckets: block (zero booking intent — jobs, DIY, research), watch (ambiguous — “[town] rentals” could be long-term), promote (converting queries that deserve their own exact-match keyword and tailored ad). The promote bucket is where accounts quietly get better.
Account-level lists for universal junk, campaign-level for cross-campaign traffic control (brand terms negative in non-brand campaigns), ad-group level sparingly. A shared library list applied everywhere keeps it maintainable.
Negative phrase “rental” would block everything — negatives don’t expand like positives, so be surgical: negative exact for ambiguous single words, negative phrase for junk patterns.
Keep a one-line log: date, terms blocked, 30-day spend they’d consumed. That log is your proof of work — and after a quarter, it’s usually a number that justifies the whole ritual.
Performance Max needs its own patrol: read its search-terms insights hard in the first 30 days, and watch channel distribution (a healthy launch runs ~98% Search; one that opens 50% Display is spending your budget on wallpaper). For big accounts, batch the work with AI — we’ve swept 35,000+ search terms in a single pass and pulled the negative list out the other side.
Open the search terms report, last 30 days, sorted by cost. Block the obvious junk today and put the monthly ritual on your calendar before you close the tab.
This is the exact kind of work we do for vacation rental brands every day. Bring us the property mix and the market — we’ll bring the system.
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