The fastest way to stop wasting money in a Google Ads search campaign is to open the search terms report once a week, add the irrelevant queries as negative keywords, and promote the converting queries into their own tightly themed ad groups. On most small accounts that routine takes about 30 minutes, and it is the single highest-return maintenance task we know of in paid search.
This is the exact routine we use, including the thresholds we apply before excluding a term, the match-type mistakes that quietly block good traffic, and a simple way to organise negatives so they do not turn into a mess after a year.
What is the search terms report, and why does it matter?
Your keywords are what you bid on. The search terms report shows what people actually typed before they saw and clicked your ad. The two are not the same thing. With phrase and broad match in particular, Google is allowed to show your ad for queries that it considers close in meaning to your keyword, and “close” is sometimes generous.
A plumber bidding on “emergency plumber” might see clicks from “plumber salary”, “plumbing courses” and “how to become a plumber”. None of those people will ever book a call-out. Every one of those clicks is paid for. The search terms report is where you find them.
You will find it in Google Ads under Insights and reports, then Search terms. Set the date range to the last seven or fourteen days for a weekly review, and add the columns for clicks, cost, conversions and conversion value if they are not already showing.
How do you run the 30-minute weekly routine?
We split the half hour into three blocks of roughly ten minutes each. Keep the order; it matters, because cutting waste first frees budget that the later steps put to better use.
Minutes 0 to 10: sort by cost and find the leaks
Sort the report by cost, highest first. Read the top 30 to 50 queries. For each one, ask a single question: if this person had called or filled in a form, would we have wanted that lead? If the answer is clearly no, tick the box next to the term. Do not worry yet about which negative keyword to add; just mark the rows.
Typical patterns we see in almost every account:
- Job seekers and students: “jobs”, “salary”, “course”, “training”, “internship”, “how to become”.
- Do-it-yourself intent: “how to”, “diy”, “tutorial”, “template”, “free” when you sell a paid service.
- Wrong product or wrong place: a brand name you do not carry, a city you do not serve, a rental when you sell.
- Research-only intent: “what is”, “definition”, “meaning”, “wikipedia”.
Minutes 10 to 20: choose the right negative match type
This is where most people make expensive mistakes. A negative keyword does not behave like a normal keyword. Negative broad match only blocks a query if it contains all of your negative words, in any order, but it will not block close variants or synonyms. Negative phrase match blocks queries that contain your words in that exact order. Negative exact match blocks only that precise query.
Our working rules:
- Use negative phrase match for clear junk themes like “jobs” or “salary”. It is wide enough to be useful and narrow enough to be safe.
- Use negative exact match when a term is bad but a close cousin is good. Excluding “plumber course” as a phrase is fine; excluding the single word “course” as a phrase could block “driving course” if you happened to run a driving school.
- Use negative broad match sparingly, only for one-word junk you are certain you never want, and always check it against your best-converting queries first.
Before you save any new negative, search your converting terms for that word. If it appears in a query that produced a lead, do not add it as a broad or phrase negative. This one check prevents the most common self-inflicted wound: blocking your own customers.
Minutes 20 to 30: promote winners and log your changes
Now sort by conversions. Any query that converted twice or more, or converted once at a cost per lead below your target, is a candidate for promotion. Add it as an exact or phrase match keyword, ideally in an ad group built around that theme, and write an ad whose headline repeats the searcher’s own words. Higher relevance usually means a better Quality Score and a lower cost per click, though we would treat that as a tendency, not a promise.
Finish by writing one line in a change log: the date, how many negatives were added, which ones, and which terms were promoted. In three months, when someone asks why impressions dropped, this log will save an afternoon of detective work.
How much should a term cost before you exclude it?
A reasonable rule of thumb, which is our own reasoning and not an official Google threshold, is to avoid judging a query on fewer than 10 to 15 clicks unless it is obviously irrelevant. Obviously irrelevant means that it would be wrong even if it converted, such as “free” for a paid service. For queries that might be relevant, use your target cost per lead as a yardstick.
Say your target cost per lead is €40 and a query has spent €120 with no conversion. That is three times your target and a reasonable moment to either exclude it or move it to a lower bid. If a query has spent €12, it simply has not had a fair test yet. Leave it alone and look again next week.
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Irrelevant intent (jobs, DIY, free) | Exclude immediately, phrase match |
| Relevant, spent over 3x target cost per lead, no conversions | Exclude as exact match or lower bid |
| Relevant, under 10 clicks, no conversions | Leave and re-check next week |
| Converted at or below target | Promote to its own exact or phrase keyword |
Where should negative keywords live?
Adding negatives one by one at campaign level works for the first month. After that it becomes difficult to maintain. We recommend building shared negative keyword lists and attaching them to campaigns. A small account typically needs only three lists:
- Universal junk: jobs, salary, course, free, diy, wikipedia, and similar. Attach to every campaign.
- Competitor and brand names: if you do not want to bid on them. Attach to non-brand campaigns.
- Geographic exclusions: places you do not serve, if location targeting alone is leaking.
Keep campaign-specific negatives separate, and use them to stop two of your own campaigns from competing for the same query. If a generic campaign and a brand campaign both show for your company name, you are paying to bid against yourself.
What about Performance Max and broad match campaigns?
Performance Max gives you far less transparency, and until recently advertisers could not add account-level negatives easily. Google has been adding controls over time, so check what your account currently offers, including brand exclusions and account-level negative lists. Where a campaign gives you search category insights instead of exact queries, review those categories weekly and look for anything that does not match your business. If you are also weighing campaign types, our two-hour Google Ads account audit shows where we check these settings first.
With broad match and automated bidding, negatives matter even more, not less. Smart bidding learns from conversions, so if junk traffic produces a few low-quality conversions, such as a form fill from a job seeker, the system will go looking for more of the same. Clean negatives plus a sensible conversion definition keep the algorithm pointed at the right customers.
Common mistakes we see in the first review of a new account
- No negatives at all. Accounts that have run for a year without a single negative keyword are more common than you would expect.
- Overusing broad match negatives. One enthusiastic exclusion of a generic word can cut off a whole product line.
- Never looking at the “excluded” or “added” status. The report marks queries already added as keywords or negatives; ignoring that column leads to repeated work.
- Judging by clicks alone. A query with many clicks and no conversions might signal a landing page problem rather than a keyword problem. If good queries are not converting, check whether the page matches the ad message before blaming the keyword.
- Measuring only form fills. If phone calls are your main lead source, import them as conversions or the report will make your best terms look useless.
How often should you do this?
Weekly for the first two months of a new campaign or a new keyword set, then every two weeks once the account settles, and weekly again during peak seasons when budgets rise and sloppy matching gets more expensive. For lower-spend accounts, say under a few hundred euros a month, a monthly review is usually enough because there is not enough data to act on weekly.
The payoff is cumulative. Each negative you add stays in place permanently, so waste that you stopped in week two is waste you never pay for in week fifty. That is why cleaning the search terms report belongs on every list of ways to lower cost per lead without cutting spend, and why it is usually the first thing we do when we inherit an account.
Quick checklist
- Set date range to the last 7 to 14 days.
- Sort by cost; scan the top 30 to 50 queries.
- Mark irrelevant intent and add as negative phrase match.
- Check each new negative against your converting queries first.
- Sort by conversions; promote winners into tight ad groups.
- Keep shared negative lists tidy and log every change.
Thirty focused minutes a week, repeated, beats a one-off big audit every time. Treat the search terms report as a standing meeting between your keywords and reality.