You sell premium running trainers and bid on “running shoes”. Open your search terms report for the last 30 days and you find rows like these (example, redrawn, not a screenshot):
The highlighted row is the waste: 212 clicks, £180, no sales.
Nobody searching for cheap shoes was going to buy a £140 pair. Google matched your keyword to a search it judged close enough, and you paid for every click.
The search terms report lists what people typed before your ad appeared. Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what you paid for. The gap between them is where the waste sits.
3 kinds of waste
- Price mismatch. “Cheap”, “budget”, “free”, “discount” when you are a premium brand. These clicks convert at a fraction of the usual rate and teach the algorithm the wrong audience.
- Wrong product. Searches for things you do not sell, such as “barefoot shoes” or “trail running shoes” when you stock neither.
- No buying intent. Searches with no realistic purchase behind them, such as “free [category] tool for students”.
Find it in 5 steps
- Export. In Google Ads, go to Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms. Set the last 30 days and download it. For Performance Max, pick ‘Search terms and landing pages for Performance Max’ in the same report’s drop-down.
- Sort by cost, highest first. Look for terms that spent £10 or more with no conversions, or close to none. These come first.
- Check the volume. A term with hundreds of impressions and no clicks costs you nothing. A term with many clicks and no sales is the expensive one.
- Build the negative list. Use exact match for one specific bad term. Use phrase match for a pattern, such as “free”, “cheap” or “DIY”.
- Apply and check. Add the negatives at campaign level, or account level if the pattern applies everywhere. Next week, confirm the terms stopped appearing.
Back to the example: add “cheap” as a phrase negative and that £180 a month stops. Say a sweep finds 10 rows like it: that is £1,800 a month back.
At scale, it takes days
In our client work, an account with 40,000 search terms a month takes days to sweep by hand, which is when a Google Ads team helps.
Related reading
- Performance Max vs standard Shopping: where each campaign type shows search terms
- Meta ads vs Google ads for ecommerce: what each platform is good for
Running Performance Max too? Search terms are one check of several.
Quick answers
How often should I check my search terms report?
Weekly at minimum for active accounts. For accounts with high impression volume, tens of thousands of searches a month, a daily negative keyword sweep will pay back the time.
What is a negative keyword in Google Ads?
A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad for searches containing that term. If you sell premium running trainers and you're showing for 'cheap running shoes', adding 'cheap' as a negative stops that waste immediately.
Why does Google show my ad for irrelevant searches?
Broad match and smart bidding give Google discretion to show your ads for searches Google considers semantically related to your keywords. That discretion is broad, and the system optimises for conversions it can attribute, not necessarily the sales that matter to your margin.
What's the difference between search terms and keywords?
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people typed. The gap between them, how far Google has stretched your keyword, is where the waste lives.
How do I deal with Performance Max and search terms?
Performance Max now has its own view in the search terms report: choose 'Search terms and landing pages for Performance Max' from the drop-down. You can add up to 10,000 negative keywords per PMax campaign.
