How to Find and Fix Poor Performing Keywords in Google Ads

If your Google Ads campaigns are burning through budget without delivering results, poor performing keywords are usually the culprit. But "poor performance" isn't one-size-fits-all. A keyword might have solid clicks but zero conversions, or it might be racking up impressions with a click-through rate that barely registers. Either way, leaving these keywords unchecked means you're paying for traffic that isn't working.

This guide walks you through exactly how to identify underperforming keywords in Google Ads, diagnose what's actually causing the problem, and make changes that move the needle. You'll come away with a repeatable process you can run on any account, whether you're managing one campaign or fifty.

One important distinction before we dive in: in Google Ads, keywords are the terms you add to ad groups and bid on. Search terms are the actual queries users typed that triggered your ads. These are not the same thing, and mixing them up leads to the wrong diagnosis. We'll cover both throughout this guide.

Step 1: Pull the Right Data Before You Judge Any Keyword

Before you start pausing or adjusting anything, you need a clear view of what you're working with. Jumping to conclusions on thin data is one of the most common mistakes in keyword management, and it leads to decisions you'll regret in two weeks when performance swings back.

Start by navigating to Campaigns > Keywords in Google Ads. The first thing to do is set a meaningful date range. Thirty days is a reasonable minimum. For lower-volume accounts where conversions come in slowly, push it to 60 or 90 days. You need enough data to see a real pattern, not just a bad week.

Next, make sure you're looking at the right columns. The default column set in Google Ads won't give you everything you need. Add these manually if they're not already visible:

Impressions: How often your ad appeared for this keyword.

Clicks and CTR: How often people clicked, and at what rate relative to impressions.

Avg. CPC: What you're paying per click on average.

Conversions and Conv. Rate: How many conversions the keyword drove and how efficiently.

Cost/Conv.: What each conversion is costing you — this is your cost per acquisition (CPA) at the keyword level.

Quality Score: Google's 1–10 diagnostic rating for each keyword. Add this column from the Attributes section of the column picker.

Once you've built this view, save it as a custom column preset. It takes two minutes and saves you from rebuilding it every time you run an audit.

One more thing: if your account has significant traffic from Display Network or Search Partners, consider segmenting by network before drawing conclusions. Display traffic behaves very differently from Search, and lumping them together can make a Search keyword look worse than it actually is on Search alone.

Finally, resist the urge to act on keywords with fewer than 30 to 50 clicks. Low data volume creates misleading signals. A keyword with 8 clicks and zero conversions isn't telling you much — it just hasn't had enough traffic to show its hand yet.

Step 2: Define What "Poor Performance" Actually Means for Your Account

Here's where most audits go sideways. People look at a keyword, see a low CTR or a high CPC, and immediately label it a problem. But poor performance is always relative to your goals and your account's own benchmarks.

Before you flag anything as underperforming, set your thresholds. These will vary by account, industry, and campaign type, but here are the most useful ones to work with:

Cost/Conv. above your target CPA: If your target CPA is $50 and a keyword is consistently delivering conversions at $120, that's a clear signal. If it has no conversions at all and has already spent twice your target CPA, it's an even stronger one.

Conv. Rate significantly below account average: Calculate your account-wide conversion rate and use it as a baseline. A keyword converting at a fraction of that rate warrants investigation, even if it's technically converting.

CTR below 1–2% on Search: This is a rough benchmark for Search campaigns, though it varies considerably by industry and keyword type. A 0.3% CTR on a high-volume commercial keyword is a relevance signal worth digging into.

Quality Score of 3 or below: A low Quality Score means Google sees a mismatch somewhere in your keyword-to-ad-to-landing-page chain. It also means you're likely paying more per click than you should be.

It also helps to think about different failure modes, because they point to different fixes. A keyword with high spend and zero conversions is your biggest priority — that's budget leaving with nothing to show for it. A keyword with high impressions but low CTR suggests a relevance problem: people are seeing your ad but not clicking, which usually means the ad copy isn't matching their intent. A keyword with very low impressions might not be a performance problem at all — it could be a budget constraint, a bid that's too low, or a Quality Score that's suppressing your ad rank.

A simple rule of thumb: if a keyword has spent more than twice your target CPA with zero conversions, treat it as a strong candidate for action. That doesn't automatically mean pause — it means investigate.

One nuance worth keeping in mind: not every low-CTR keyword is failing. Branded terms and navigational queries often have lower CTRs than commercial-intent keywords, and that's expected behavior. Judge keywords against comparable intent, not a single universal standard.

Step 3: Check the Search Terms Report to See What's Actually Triggering Your Keywords

This is the step most advertisers skip, and it's usually where the real story lives.

Navigate to Keywords > Search Terms in Google Ads. This report shows you the actual user queries that triggered each of your keywords. A keyword can look perfectly acceptable at the keyword level while quietly triggering a stream of irrelevant search terms that inflate your costs and drag down your conversion rate.

Sort the report by Cost descending. This puts the most expensive queries at the top, which is where you want to start. You're looking for a few specific patterns:

Queries with no commercial intent: Informational searches like "what is [product]" or "how does [service] work" rarely convert for most advertisers. If a broad match keyword is pulling in these queries and you're paying for them, that's wasted spend.

Competitor brand names you're not intentionally targeting: If your keyword is triggering searches for a competitor's product name and you haven't made a deliberate decision to target that traffic, it's worth excluding.

Geographic mismatches: Queries that include locations you don't serve can slip through, especially with broad match keywords.

Queries that belong in a different ad group: If a search term would be better served by a different ad group with more relevant ad copy, flag it for restructuring rather than just adding it as a negative.

Every irrelevant search term you find is a candidate for a negative keyword. Negative keywords added at the campaign level apply to all ad groups within that campaign. Negative keywords added at the ad group level apply only to that specific ad group. Choose the right level based on how broadly you want to block the term. You can also add frequently used negatives to a shared negative keyword list if you want to apply them across multiple campaigns efficiently.

This step is also where Keywordme can genuinely speed things up. Instead of exporting the search terms report to a spreadsheet and managing negatives separately, Keywordme lets you review search terms and add negatives or promote high-intent queries to positive keywords directly inside the Google Ads interface. For accounts with long search terms reports, that's a meaningful time saving.

Step 4: Diagnose Quality Score Issues on Underperforming Keywords

Quality Score is a diagnostic tool, not a metric to optimize in isolation. But when a keyword has a low score, it's telling you something specific about where the breakdown is occurring.

Quality Score runs from 1 to 10 and reflects Google's assessment of three components: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience. Each component is rated Above Average, Average, or Below Average. To see the breakdown, hover over the Quality Score bubble next to any keyword in the Keywords tab.

Each component points to a different fix:

If Expected CTR is Below Average: Google predicts your ad is unlikely to be clicked relative to other ads for that query. This usually means your keyword is too broad and is triggering searches where your ad isn't a strong match, or your ad copy isn't compelling enough for the intent behind that keyword. Tightening the match type or rewriting the ad to better address the search intent are the first things to try.

If Ad Relevance is Below Average: The keyword doesn't closely match the theme of the ad group it's in. This is often a structural problem. The keyword may have been added to a catch-all ad group rather than one built around a specific theme. Moving it to a more tightly themed ad group with tailored ad copy usually resolves this.

If Landing Page Experience is Below Average: Users who click through aren't finding what the keyword implied they would. Check whether the landing page content actually addresses the search intent, whether the page loads quickly on mobile, and whether the user experience is smooth. A mismatch here hurts both Quality Score and conversion rate simultaneously.

The key principle: fix the root cause before you pause. A keyword with a Quality Score of 4 that's in the wrong ad group isn't a bad keyword — it's a misplaced one. Moving it and updating the ad copy can turn it into a productive keyword. Pausing it just removes the opportunity without solving the structural problem.

For more detail on how Quality Score is calculated and what Google uses it for, the Google Ads Help documentation on Quality Score is the authoritative reference.

Step 5: Decide Whether to Pause, Adjust, or Restructure Each Keyword

Once you've pulled the data, reviewed the search terms, and diagnosed any Quality Score issues, you're ready to make decisions. There are four main actions available to you, and the right one depends on what you found in the previous steps.

Pause the keyword when it has meaningful spend, zero or near-zero conversions, no clear path to a Quality Score improvement, and the search terms it triggers are consistently irrelevant. Pausing is the right call when the keyword is structurally misaligned with your goals and there's no obvious fix short of a full rebuild.

Adjust bids when a keyword is converting but at a cost above your target CPA. Rather than pausing a keyword that's generating real conversions, reduce the bid to bring the cost in line with your targets. This is especially worth doing when the keyword has meaningful conversion volume — pausing it entirely would remove conversions, not just reduce cost.

Change the match type when a broad match keyword is triggering a wide range of irrelevant search terms. Switching to phrase match or exact match narrows the trigger set without removing the keyword from your account entirely. This is often a better first step than pausing, because it preserves the keyword's conversion history and gives you a chance to see if tighter matching improves performance. When you make this change, add the keyword in the new match type and pause the old version — more on that in Step 6.

Restructure when a keyword has mixed performance because it's in the wrong ad group. If the Ad Relevance component of its Quality Score is Below Average, the keyword likely needs to move to a more tightly themed ad group with ad copy written specifically for it. This takes more work upfront but often produces a lasting improvement in both Quality Score and conversion rate.

Whatever action you take on a keyword, pair it with negative keyword additions for the irrelevant search terms you identified in Step 3. If you pause a keyword without adding negatives, the same irrelevant queries will often start triggering through other keywords in your account, and the budget problem reappears.

Keywordme is particularly useful at this stage. It lets you apply match type changes and add negative keywords in bulk directly from the search terms report, without switching between tabs or exporting data. For accounts with large search terms reports, this cuts the time this step normally takes considerably.

Step 6: Apply Changes and Document What You Did

Making the changes is straightforward. Documenting them is what most people skip — and it's what makes future audits actually useful.

In Google Ads, pause keywords using the status toggle in the Keywords tab. Adjust bids directly in the Bid column. Add negative keywords either through the Search Terms report (select the term, click "Add as negative keyword") or through the Negative Keywords tab at the campaign or ad group level.

For match type changes, follow this process: add the keyword in the new match type as a new entry, then pause the original version. Don't edit the match type in place on an existing keyword. Editing in place can make it harder to track what changed and when, and it disrupts the keyword's status history in your reporting.

Now, the documentation. After every round of changes, record what you changed, why you changed it, and what performance threshold triggered the decision. Google Ads has a built-in Change History tool that captures a log of account changes automatically, but it doesn't record your reasoning. Keep a simple external log — even a shared spreadsheet works — with the keyword, the action taken, the date, and the metric that prompted the decision.

Two additional habits that pay off over time:

Use labels in Google Ads to tag paused keywords with the date and reason for pausing. When you're auditing the account six months later, you'll know exactly why that keyword was stopped and whether the circumstances have changed.

Set a review date. Bid adjustments and match type changes need two to four weeks of data before you can evaluate whether they worked. Note the review date in your log so you don't forget to close the loop.

One more principle worth following: avoid making too many changes to the same campaign at once. When you change bids, match types, and ad copy simultaneously, it becomes very hard to tell which change drove any shift in performance. Isolate your variables where you can.

Putting It All Together: Your Repeatable Keyword Review Process

Here's the full process in sequence:

1. Pull keyword data with the right columns and a meaningful date range — at least 30 days, more for lower-volume accounts.

2. Set your performance benchmarks before labeling anything as underperforming — target CPA, account-average conversion rate, and Quality Score thresholds.

3. Review the Search Terms report to find what's actually triggering your keywords — sort by cost and flag irrelevant queries as negative keyword candidates.

4. Diagnose Quality Score component issues — Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience each point to a different fix.

5. Decide on an action for each underperforming keyword: pause, adjust bids, change match type, or restructure into a better ad group.

6. Apply changes, document your reasoning, and set a review date.

Run this process monthly for active campaigns. For high-spend accounts where budget is moving fast, a weekly cadence makes sense. The goal isn't to pause everything that looks bad on a single metric. It's to understand why a keyword is underperforming and address the actual root cause.

Over time, this process builds a cleaner account: tighter ad groups, stronger Quality Scores, and a negative keyword list that actively protects your budget from irrelevant traffic. The accounts that perform best aren't the ones with the most keywords — they're the ones where every keyword has earned its place.

If you're managing multiple accounts or want to move through the search terms review faster, Keywordme handles the most time-consuming parts of this workflow — adding negatives, promoting search terms to keywords, and applying match types — directly inside Google Ads, without spreadsheets or tab-switching. Start your free 7-day trial and see how much faster your next keyword audit goes. After the trial, it's $12/month per user.