Your search terms report is the most valuable document in your Google Ads account. Most brands never read it.
Google Ads is spending steadily, conversions are flat, and you have no idea what people actually searched to get there.
5 min read
There is a report inside Google Ads that tells you the literal words people typed before they clicked your ad and spent your money. It is called the search terms report, and in most ecommerce accounts it has not been read in months.
Analysis across paid search accounts has put the share of budget going to irrelevant keywords at around 15% on average, with practitioners routinely finding considerably more in accounts that have not been audited recently. For a brand spending $20,000 a month, the low end of that range is $3,000 — recurring, every month, indefinitely.
This audit takes about an hour and does not require any tooling beyond the Google Ads interface.
Why irrelevant traffic gets in at all
Match types have loosened steadily over the past several years. Phrase match now covers meaning rather than word order. Broad match covers intent as the system interprets it. The practical consequence is that the keyword you bought and the search you paid for can be surprisingly far apart.
This is not necessarily bad — looser matching finds demand you would not have thought to bid on. But it means the search terms report is no longer optional. It is the only place you can see what you are actually buying.
- Informational searches: 'how to clean suede boots' when you sell boots. The searcher wants an article, not a purchase.
- Competitor and marketplace terms: clicks from people looking for a specific rival, or for a marketplace listing.
- Wrong-product matches: your closest product is adjacent to what they wanted, and they bounce.
- Job and career searches, wholesale enquiries, and 'free' modifiers, which convert at close to zero for a retail store.
- Geographic mismatches where you cannot deliver.
The audit, step by step
- Open the search terms report and set the date range to the last 90 days. Ninety, not thirty — you need enough volume for low-frequency terms to appear.
- Sort by cost, descending. Not by impressions, not by clicks. You are hunting money.
- Read the top 200 rows. This is the part that cannot be skipped and the part everyone skips.
- Mark every term that could never lead to a sale of one of your products. Be strict — 'could a customer who typed this reasonably buy from me?' is the test.
- For each marked term, decide whether to add it as a negative keyword or to fix the underlying keyword that matched it.
- Add clearly irrelevant patterns to a shared negative keyword list applied across the account, not just to one campaign.
- Re-run the report in 30 days and check whether the same patterns have returned under different wording.
Building a negative keyword list that keeps working
Adding negatives one at a time as you spot them produces a list that is long, unstructured and impossible to maintain. Build it in categories instead.
| Category | Examples | Where to apply |
|---|---|---|
| Intent mismatch | free, diy, how to, tutorial, review, second hand, used | Account-level shared list |
| Employment | jobs, career, salary, hiring, internship | Account-level shared list |
| Wholesale and B2B | bulk, wholesale, distributor, supplier, manufacturer | Account-level, unless you sell B2B |
| Competitors | Named rival brands | Campaign-level, and reconsider quarterly |
| Wrong category | Product types adjacent to yours that you do not sell | Ad group level, precisely |
One caution: negatives are permanent until removed, and an over-aggressive list quietly strangles a campaign months later when nobody remembers adding the term. Review the account-level list once a quarter and remove anything that is now costing you real demand.
The four other places Google Ads leaks money
Shopping feed quality
For an ecommerce account, the product feed does the job keywords do in Search. Missing attributes, poor titles and stale availability data cause your products to show against the wrong queries — a targeting problem disguised as a data-entry problem. Titles that lead with the specific product type and key attributes outperform titles that lead with the brand name.
Location and schedule
Check that you are not paying for clicks in regions you do not ship to, and look at conversion rate by hour and day. Most stores have hours that convert at a fraction of their average, and few have ever adjusted for it.
Device performance
Mobile and desktop frequently differ by a factor of two on conversion rate for the same keyword. If you have never looked at device-level performance, you are almost certainly overpaying on one of them.
Quality Score on your top spenders
Quality Score reflects expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. A low score on a high-spend keyword means you are paying a premium on every click for a structural mismatch between the query, the ad and the page — usually fixable by tightening the ad group rather than raising the bid.
Common questions
How much Google Ads spend goes to irrelevant searches?
Analysis across paid search accounts has put the average at around 15% of budget on irrelevant keywords, with much higher figures common in accounts that have not been audited in the last 90 days. Your own search terms report is the only authority for your account.
How often should I check the search terms report?
Monthly for accounts spending meaningfully, quarterly at minimum. New irrelevant patterns appear continuously as match types adapt to changing search behavior.
Should negative keywords go at account, campaign or ad group level?
Universally irrelevant patterns — jobs, free, wholesale — belong in an account-level shared list. Terms that are wrong for one product but right for another belong at ad group level, where the precision is needed.
Can negative keywords hurt performance?
Yes, when the list grows over years without review. Over-broad negatives block real demand long after the person who added them has forgotten. Review the account-level list quarterly.
Does this apply to Performance Max campaigns?
Partly. Performance Max exposes search term insights rather than the full report, and supports account-level negative keywords and brand exclusions. The audit habit is the same; the controls are coarser.
How Glimmio handles this
Glimmio reads your Google Ads account through the official connection and surfaces the same patterns this audit finds by hand — spend concentrated in terms that never convert, keywords carrying a structural relevance penalty, and campaigns whose performance has drifted from their own baseline.
Each finding arrives with the account data behind it, and stays a recommendation until you approve it. Suggested negative keywords are shown as a list you review, not a change applied on your behalf.
- Manual approval by default — nothing runs unattended
- New campaigns and ads are always created paused
- 7-day recovery window on eligible changes
- 48 permissions across 13 roles, scoped per client account
Go deeper on this
The product pages and setup guides that cover what this article describes.
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