7 Ways Google Could Improve AdWords (And What You Can Do Right Now)

Google Ads has come a long way since its early days as AdWords, but if you've ever found yourself wrestling with the search terms report at 11 PM or manually copying negative keywords across campaigns, you know the platform still has some serious rough edges. The reality is that while Google keeps rolling out new automation features and AI-powered bidding strategies, many of the basic workflow improvements advertisers have been requesting for years remain unaddressed.

Here's the thing: these aren't minor annoyances. When you're managing campaigns with real budgets on the line, clunky interfaces and limited visibility don't just waste time—they waste money. The good news? Understanding exactly what's broken (and why) helps you work around these limitations more effectively while we wait for Google to catch up.

This guide breaks down the seven most-requested improvements to Google Ads that would genuinely transform how advertisers work, along with practical strategies you can implement right now to compensate for these gaps. Whether you're flying solo or managing dozens of client accounts, these insights will help you understand the platform's limitations and build more efficient workflows despite them.

1. Full Search Term Visibility

The Challenge It Solves

Back in 2020, Google made a controversial change to search terms reporting that fundamentally altered how advertisers could optimize their campaigns. They began hiding search queries that didn't meet certain volume thresholds, citing privacy concerns. The problem? These hidden queries still trigger your ads and consume your budget—you just can't see what they are.

For advertisers, this creates a massive blind spot. You're essentially flying blind on a portion of your spend, unable to identify wasteful queries or discover new keyword opportunities hiding in your data. It's like paying for a meal but only being allowed to see half the menu items you ordered.

The Strategy Explained

What advertisers really need is complete transparency into every search query that triggers their ads and costs them money. Not aggregated data, not sampled reports—the full, unfiltered list of actual search terms users typed before clicking your ads.

This visibility is critical for two reasons: identifying waste and discovering opportunities. Without seeing all your search terms, you can't effectively add negative keywords to prevent irrelevant clicks, and you can't spot high-performing queries that deserve their own dedicated campaigns or ad groups.

Implementation Steps

1. Download your search terms reports regularly and track the percentage of spend attributed to "(other)" queries—this shows you how much of your budget is going to hidden terms.

2. Use tighter keyword targeting as a workaround: exact match and phrase match keywords give you more control over what triggers your ads, reducing the impact of hidden queries.

3. Monitor your Quality Score and conversion data at the keyword level to identify potential issues even when you can't see the exact queries causing problems.

Pro Tips

Set up automated alerts when your "(other)" category exceeds a certain percentage of total spend—this signals you may need to tighten your targeting. Also, consider running small test campaigns with very specific phrase match keywords to gain visibility into what's actually converting in your niche.

2. Better Negative Keyword Management

The Challenge It Solves

Managing negative keywords in Google Ads is surprisingly painful for something so fundamental to campaign optimization. You're constantly switching between the search terms report, your negative keyword lists, and individual campaigns. Want to apply the same negative keyword across multiple campaigns? Get ready for a lot of clicking and copying.

The native interface offers negative keyword lists, but they're clunky to manage and don't sync automatically when you discover new junk terms. There's no easy way to audit which negatives are applied where, and bulk editing requires either manual work or diving into Google Ads scripts.

The Strategy Explained

What Google Ads needs is a centralized negative keyword command center—a place where you can see all your negative keywords across all campaigns, bulk-apply them with a single click, and instantly sync updates across your account structure. Think of it like a master control panel that lets you block waste at scale instead of playing whack-a-mole with individual campaigns.

This becomes especially critical for agencies managing multiple client accounts or advertisers running complex account structures with dozens of campaigns. The time savings would be massive, and the reduction in wasted spend even more significant.

Implementation Steps

1. Create a master negative keyword list in a spreadsheet that you update weekly based on search terms report reviews—this becomes your source of truth.

2. Build negative keyword lists in Google Ads organized by theme (competitor terms, job seekers, free/cheap modifiers, etc.) and apply them systematically across relevant campaigns.

3. Schedule a recurring weekly task to review your search terms report and update your negative keyword lists—consistency matters more than perfection here.

Pro Tips

Use broad match negatives sparingly and focus on phrase and exact match negatives for more precision. Also, create separate negative keyword lists for different campaign types—what you want to block in a brand campaign might be perfectly fine in a competitor campaign.

3. Granular Smart Bidding Control

The Challenge It Solves

Google's push toward automation and Smart Bidding has been relentless over the past few years. While automated bidding strategies can deliver results, they often feel like a black box. You set a target CPA or ROAS, cross your fingers, and hope the algorithm does its thing. When performance tanks, you're left guessing whether it's the bidding strategy, your targeting, your creative, or just the algorithm having a bad week.

The lack of transparency and control creates anxiety, especially when you're managing significant budgets. You can't see which signals the algorithm is prioritizing, you can't set guardrails to prevent runaway spending on specific placements, and you can't easily understand why the algorithm made certain decisions.

The Strategy Explained

Advertisers need Smart Bidding with guard rails—the ability to set maximum bids at various levels, exclude specific placements or audiences from automated bidding, and access detailed logs showing why the algorithm bid what it did on specific auctions. It's not about removing automation, it's about making it transparent and controllable.

Think of it like cruise control in a car. You want the automation to handle the tedious work, but you also want the ability to tap the brakes or override the system when you see danger ahead. Right now, Google's Smart Bidding is more like a self-driving car that won't tell you where it's going or let you touch the steering wheel.

Implementation Steps

1. Start with Target CPA or Target ROAS strategies instead of fully automated strategies like Maximize Conversions—this gives you at least some directional control.

2. Use portfolio bid strategies to group similar campaigns together, which gives the algorithm more data to work with and makes performance easier to track.

3. Set up custom alerts for when your actual CPA or ROAS deviates significantly from your targets—this helps you catch issues before they consume too much budget.

Pro Tips

Give Smart Bidding strategies at least two full conversion cycles (usually 2-4 weeks) to learn before making major changes. The algorithm needs time to gather data and optimize. Also, avoid making multiple changes simultaneously—if you adjust your target CPA and your ad copy in the same week, you won't know which change affected performance.

4. Improved Search Terms Report Interface

The Challenge It Solves

The search terms report is where the real optimization magic happens—it's where you discover wasteful queries to block and high-performing terms to promote. But the native Google Ads interface makes this critical task unnecessarily painful. The report loads slowly, especially for accounts with significant data. Filtering options are limited. And every action requires multiple clicks and page loads.

Want to add a search term as a keyword and simultaneously add it as a negative to other campaigns? You're looking at a multi-step process involving several different screens. Need to review hundreds of search terms? Hope you've got time to click through page after page, because bulk actions are limited and the interface wasn't designed for speed.

The Strategy Explained

What advertisers need is a search terms report that works like a modern spreadsheet—fast loading, inline editing, powerful filtering, and the ability to take multiple actions with a single click. Imagine being able to review your search terms, add the good ones as keywords with your chosen match type, add the bad ones as negatives across multiple campaigns, and move on to the next batch—all without leaving the page or waiting for multiple screens to load.

This isn't about adding fancy features. It's about making the core workflow smooth and efficient. Every unnecessary click in the search terms report multiplies across hundreds or thousands of optimization sessions per year.

Implementation Steps

1. Download your search terms report to a spreadsheet for complex analysis—the native interface is fine for quick checks, but serious optimization work is faster in Excel or Google Sheets.

2. Use custom filters to focus on high-impact opportunities first: sort by spend or impressions to find the queries that matter most, then work your way down.

3. Create a systematic workflow: review search terms weekly, flag terms for action (add as keyword, add as negative, or monitor), then batch-process your actions to minimize context switching.

Pro Tips

Focus on the search terms with the most spend first—optimizing a query that cost you $500 matters more than one that cost you $5. Also, look for patterns in your wasteful queries. If you're consistently seeing job seeker terms, that's a signal to build a comprehensive negative keyword list for that category.

5. Native Match Type Conversion

The Challenge It Solves

Match types in Google Ads have evolved significantly over the years, with broad match modifier being sunset and phrase match expanding to include broad match modifier behavior. But here's the frustrating part: there's no native way to convert existing keywords from one match type to another while preserving their historical performance data.

If you want to change a broad match keyword to phrase match, you have to add it as a new keyword and pause the old one. This means losing all your Quality Score history, performance data, and optimization signals. For accounts with thousands of keywords, this makes strategic match type adjustments prohibitively time-consuming.

The Strategy Explained

Advertisers need a simple "convert match type" button that changes the match type while maintaining all historical data and Quality Score. This would enable strategic testing of match type strategies without sacrificing the optimization signals you've built up over months or years.

The ability to quickly test whether your exact match keywords would perform better as phrase match, or vice versa, would unlock significant optimization opportunities. Right now, the friction of losing historical data makes these tests too risky for most advertisers to attempt.

Implementation Steps

1. When testing new match types, add them as new keywords alongside your existing ones rather than replacing them immediately—this lets you compare performance before committing to the change.

2. Use campaign experiments to test match type changes in a controlled way, splitting traffic between your original match types and your test match types.

3. Track your match type distribution across campaigns and regularly audit whether your current mix aligns with your control vs. volume goals.

Pro Tips

Start match type tests with your highest-volume keywords first—these will generate meaningful data faster. Also, remember that match types interact with your negative keyword strategy. Tighter match types require fewer negatives but may limit reach, while broader match types give you more volume but require more aggressive negative keyword management.

6. Cross-Account Management Features

The Challenge It Solves

If you're managing multiple Google Ads accounts—whether as an agency handling client campaigns or an in-house team managing multiple brands—you know the pain of repetitive work. You've built the perfect negative keyword list for one client, and now you need to manually recreate it for three others. You've developed a high-performing ad template, but applying it across accounts means copying and pasting dozens of times.

Google's manager account (MCC) structure helps with reporting and billing, but it doesn't solve the workflow problem. There's no shared library of templates, no way to bulk-apply changes across multiple accounts, and no efficient system for maintaining consistency across similar campaigns.

The Strategy Explained

What agencies and multi-account advertisers need is true cross-account management—shared libraries of negative keyword lists, ad templates, and campaign structures that can be applied across any account in your manager account with a few clicks. Think of it like a content management system for Google Ads, where you build once and deploy everywhere.

This becomes especially powerful for agencies running similar campaigns across multiple clients in the same industry. Instead of rebuilding your B2B SaaS campaign structure fifteen times, you'd build it once and customize it per client with minimal effort.

Implementation Steps

1. Build a master template library outside of Google Ads—document your best-performing campaign structures, ad copy frameworks, and negative keyword lists in a centralized location.

2. Use Google Ads Editor for bulk operations across multiple accounts—while not perfect, it's significantly faster than making changes through the web interface.

3. Create standardized naming conventions across all your accounts so you can quickly identify similar campaigns and compare performance across clients.

Pro Tips

Invest time in building comprehensive documentation for your campaign structures and optimization processes. When you're managing multiple accounts, consistency is your friend—it makes troubleshooting faster and knowledge transfer easier. Also, consider using labels extensively to tag campaigns by strategy type, making cross-account analysis more manageable.

7. Clearer Attribution Insights

The Challenge It Solves

Attribution in Google Ads has become increasingly complex as user journeys have grown more multi-touch. A user might click your brand keyword, then come back through a generic search, then convert through a remarketing ad. Which keyword gets credit? The answer depends on your attribution model, but understanding what's actually driving conversions versus what's just capturing demand at the end of the funnel is genuinely difficult in the native interface.

The attribution reports exist, but they're buried in the interface and difficult to interpret without a statistics background. For most advertisers, understanding which keywords are actually generating new demand versus which are just converting people who were going to buy anyway remains frustratingly opaque.

The Strategy Explained

Advertisers need simplified attribution views that clearly show which keywords are initiating customer journeys versus which are completing them. This doesn't mean dumbing down the data—it means presenting it in a way that enables action. Show me which keywords are bringing in new customers I wouldn't have reached otherwise, and which are primarily capturing existing demand.

Better attribution clarity would fundamentally change budget allocation decisions. Instead of over-investing in bottom-funnel brand terms that would convert anyway, advertisers could confidently invest in mid-funnel and top-funnel terms that actually grow the business.

Implementation Steps

1. Switch from last-click attribution to data-driven attribution if you have sufficient conversion volume—this gives you a more realistic view of keyword contribution across the customer journey.

2. Segment your keywords into clear funnel stages (brand, competitor, generic, informational) and analyze conversion rates and cost per conversion by stage to understand where you're most efficient.

3. Use the "Top conversion paths" report to identify common keyword sequences that lead to conversions, then optimize your bid strategy to support these multi-touch journeys.

Pro Tips

Don't make attribution changes during your peak season—switching attribution models can cause temporary performance fluctuations as the algorithm relearns. Also, remember that attribution models are most useful when you're comparing relative performance across keywords, not when you're trying to calculate exact ROI. Use them to guide budget allocation decisions, not to justify every dollar spent.

Putting These Insights to Work

Look, Google isn't going to fix all these issues tomorrow. Some of these limitations serve Google's business interests, others are genuinely complex technical challenges, and some are probably just not prioritized highly enough in their product roadmap. That's frustrating, but it's also reality.

The good news? You don't have to wait for Google to build the perfect platform before you can optimize effectively. Start by identifying your biggest time-wasters—for most advertisers, that's search term management and negative keyword workflows. These are the areas where inefficiency costs you the most, both in wasted time and wasted budget.

Focus on building systematic processes that work within the platform's limitations. A consistent weekly search terms review beats sporadic deep dives. A well-organized negative keyword library beats reactive blocking. Documented workflows beat institutional knowledge that lives in one person's head.

Here's the thing about Google Ads optimization: the advertisers who win aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest strategies. They're the ones who consistently execute the fundamentals efficiently. They review search terms regularly. They maintain clean negative keyword lists. They test systematically. They don't let the platform's limitations become an excuse for sloppy campaign management.

Tools that integrate directly into the Google Ads interface can bridge many of these gaps without adding another dashboard to your workflow. The best solutions work where you're already working, making the tedious parts faster so you can focus on strategy instead of clicking through endless screens.

Optimize Google Ads Campaigns 10X Faster—Without Leaving Your Account. Keywordme lets you remove junk search terms, build high-intent keyword groups, and apply match types instantly—right inside Google Ads. No spreadsheets, no switching tabs, just quick, seamless optimization. Manage one campaign or hundreds and save hours while making smarter decisions. Start your free 7-day trial (then just $12/month) and take your Google Ads game to the next level.

Finally, don't underestimate the value of providing feedback to Google through their official channels. While it might feel like shouting into the void, product teams do monitor these requests. The more advertisers consistently request specific improvements, the more likely they are to eventually get prioritized. Document your feature requests, submit them through Google's feedback forms, and encourage your team or agency colleagues to do the same.

The platform may have its limitations, but understanding exactly what those limitations are—and having practical workarounds ready—means you can optimize effectively regardless of what Google does or doesn't improve. Focus on what you can control, build efficient systems, and don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your campaigns will thank you for it.