Finding wasted spend in Google Ads search terms: a weekly routine

With phrase and broad match, one keyword can trigger ads for many different searches, and some of them will have nothing to do with what you sell.

In Google Ads, open Insights and reports, then Search terms, and look at the last 30 days. Sort by cost. For each expensive term, ask whether a person typing it could become a customer. For example, a software company bidding on “time tracking” may find its ads showing for “free time tracking template” or “time tracking job”, which bring clicks from people who were never going to buy.

Set a rule in advance so the decision does not depend on the mood of the day. A common starting point is a number of clicks with no conversion over a period long enough to judge. The right numbers depend on your conversion rate. As an illustration: if one click in twenty converts on average, ten clicks without a conversion is not yet unusual, while forty starts to be.

Allow for conversion lag. Someone may click today and sign up next week, and the conversion is then recorded against the original click, so very recent terms can look worse than they are. Leave the last few days out of the decision.

Negatives added months ago can start blocking searches you now want.

Go through your keyword list for keywords that cannot show because a negative blocks them; Google Ads also lists conflicting negative keywords among its recommendations. Remove or narrow the negative rather than the keyword.

Look for keywords that have spent over a long window, such as 90 days, without a conversion. Before pausing one, check two things:

1. 1Whether it brings conversions you track elsewhere, such as phone calls or leads that close later.
2. 2Whether its conversions are real customers: a form fill is not always a qualified lead.

If your CRM records which leads sales accepted, compare them by campaign and keyword, and consider importing those outcomes into Google Ads as offline conversions so bidding learns from them.

Write down each change: the date, what you added, removed or paused, and why. After a few weeks, compare cost per conversion and conversion rate over periods of the same length before and after. Seasonal shifts or a competitor’s bidding can move those numbers too, and without a log you cannot tell which of your changes helped.

On the Growth and Scale plans, GX360 runs this review every day. It reviews your search terms, negatives and keywords, flags terms that keep spending without converting, finds negatives that block converting searches, suggests keywords to pause and writes new search ads from the searches each ad group gets. Where your CRM is connected, it adds lead quality by campaign. Every change arrives as a change request, and nothing is applied to your account until someone on your team approves it. See the AI Google Ads agent or compare plans. Ad spend is separate from the plan price and is paid directly to Google.