Practical guides on Google Ads search terms
Field-tested playbooks on negative keywords, Performance Max and wasted ad spend — how to find the searches draining your budget, and how to stop paying for them.
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Average Google Ads Wasted Spend per Month, Reconsidered
The famous "you waste a quarter of your budget" number mostly comes from how waste gets defined, not from your account. Here's how to measure your own waste rate and decide what's normal for an account like yours.
Latest articles
Google Ads AI Max Search Terms and the Controls That Work
AI Max lets Google match your Search ads to queries you never targeted, using your landing pages and ads as the signal. Here is how to find what it bought and which controls actually narrow it.
Google Ads Keyword Not Showing Impressions? Check Negatives
When a keyword gets no impressions, most guides tell you to raise the bid and fix Quality Score. Before you do, check whether one of your own negative keywords is quietly blocking every search that keyword would have matched.
Dynamic Search Ads Negative Keywords That Actually Hold
Dynamic Search Ads match searches to whatever is on your site, including blog posts, careers pages and support docs. Here is how page feeds, URL exclusions and negative keywords work together to keep the campaign on queries that can actually convert.
Smart Bidding Bad Data: How Junk Queries Skew Your Bids
Smart Bidding learns from every search term you let it pay for, junk included. Cleaning bad queries saves the wasted click, and it also fixes the numbers your targets are built on.
Low Volume Terms in the Search Terms Report Add Up
Almost no single one-click search term is worth your attention. Thousands of them together can be one of the biggest lines in your account, and term-by-term review will never catch up.
How to Analyze a Search Terms Report in 20 Minutes
Most advice says to sort the search terms report by conversions. That hides expensive terms whose conversions haven't arrived yet. This 20-minute triage starts with cost, reads the intent in the words, and keeps a watch list for terms that haven't had time to convert.
Google Ads Search Terms With No Clicks, and When to Block
A search term with impressions and no clicks costs you nothing today. Some of them cost you next month, and a few quietly skew the CTR you use to judge your ads. Here is how to tell them apart.
Performance Max New Customer Goal Won't Block Bad Queries
The new customer acquisition goal changes who Performance Max bids on. It doesn't change what they searched, so "how to clean leather boots" still gets paid for, and it can end up getting more budget.
Performance Max Branded Search Spend and How to Measure It
Performance Max often looks efficient because it takes credit for people who were already searching your brand name. Here is how to measure how much of that credit is real, using search term labels and a four-week before/after test.
Performance Max Negative Keywords Not Working? Here's Why
You added a negative keyword to Performance Max and the term still shows up in your reports. Usually the block worked and the report is misleading you. Sometimes the negative never covered that query in the first place. Here's how to tell which one you're dealing with.
Google Ads Invalid Clicks Refund: What You Actually Get
Google credits you for clicks it judges invalid: bots, duplicates, obvious fraud. It never refunds a real person who clicked your ad after searching for the wrong thing, and in most accounts that is where far more money goes.
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