How to Clean Up a Google Ads Account in 6 Steps

If your Google Ads account has been running for a year or more without a real cleanup, it's probably carrying dead weight: keywords that haven't converted since last spring, search terms that never should have triggered an ad, and ad groups that quietly overlap with three others. This guide walks you through a practical six-step process to clear that out. By the end, you'll have a leaner account with less wasted spend, tighter keyword targeting, and clearer performance data to make decisions from. You'll need editor or admin access to the account, plus at least 30-90 days of recent performance history to work from before you touch anything.

Step 1: Pull Performance Data and Set a Cleanup Baseline

Before you pause a single keyword, you need a benchmark to measure against. Open your campaign, ad group, and keyword-level reports in Google Ads and pull the last 30 to 90 days of data. If your account has seasonal swings, lean toward the 90-day window so you're not reacting to a temporary dip or spike.

Record the numbers that matter for cleanup decisions: cost, clicks, conversions, cost per conversion, and click-through rate. Save this as a static export or a screenshot-friendly view, since you'll want to compare it against post-cleanup numbers later.

Next, segment the data by device, network, and time of day. Google Ads lets you apply these segments directly in the reports view. This step often reveals where the real leaks are. For example, you might find that a campaign performs fine on desktop but burns budget on mobile with almost no conversions, or that display network placements are quietly eating spend meant for search.

A common mistake here is judging performance on too short a date range. A single bad day, a holiday weekend, or a short traffic dip can make a normally solid keyword look like a waste of money. Google's own guidance on optimization score and performance reporting emphasizes looking at trends over time rather than single-day snapshots, and that principle applies directly to cleanup work. Give yourself enough data to separate noise from a genuine problem.

Once you have this baseline, keep it somewhere you can return to. It's the only way you'll know, a few weeks from now, whether the changes you're about to make actually improved anything.

Step 2: Scrub the Search Terms Report for Junk

This is where most of the obvious waste hides. First, a quick distinction that matters for everything that follows: a keyword is the term you bid on, the one you added to your ad group. A search term is what someone actually typed into Google before your ad showed up. Broad and phrase match keywords can trigger ads on search terms that look nothing like what you intended, and that gap is exactly what you're hunting for.

Open the Search Terms report (under Insights and Reports, or through the Search Terms tab on the Keywords page) and sort by cost or clicks, then look at conversions next to each row. Search terms with meaningful spend or clicks and zero or near-zero conversions are your primary candidates for cleanup.

As an illustrative example: say you're bidding on the broad match keyword "ppc software," and the search terms report shows it's also pulling in clicks for "free ppc course" and "what is ppc marketing." Those are informational queries, not buying signals. The fix isn't to lower your bid on the keyword. It's to add those search terms as negative keywords so your ad stops showing for them at all.

Doing this manually means exporting the report, filtering in a spreadsheet, then flipping back to Google Ads to add each negative one by one. It works, but it's slow, especially if you're managing this across several accounts. This is one of the spots where Keywordme's one-click junk term removal is built to help: it works directly inside the Search Terms Report in Google Ads, so you can flag and remove wasteful terms without exporting anything or switching tabs. It doesn't make the judgment call for you, you're still the one deciding what counts as junk, but it removes the copy-paste step that eats up most of the time.

Whether you do this by hand or with a tool, the goal is the same: get through the report methodically rather than skimming the top ten rows and calling it done. Junk search terms tend to be spread thin across dozens of low-cost entries that add up.

Step 3: Build and Apply Negative Keyword Lists

Once you've identified the junk search terms, don't just bolt them onto one ad group and move on. Group them by theme, negatives that block irrelevant intent, negatives that block competitor brand names, and negatives that block informational or research-stage queries. Grouping this way makes the list reusable, and it makes it obvious later why a particular term was blocked, which matters when someone else on your team, or a client, asks about it.

For accounts with several campaigns targeting overlapping topics, apply these groups as shared negative keyword lists rather than adding them ad group by ad group. Google Ads supports shared lists at the account level specifically so you can apply one list across multiple campaigns at once, which saves you from re-adding the same negative five times as new campaigns launch. Check your account's shared library to see what lists already exist before creating duplicates.

The mistake to watch for here is being too aggressive with negative phrase matches. A broad negative like adding "free" as a negative phrase might feel efficient, but it can also block a converting search term like "free consultation quote" if that's part of your actual offer. Before you add a negative at the phrase or broad level, check what other search terms contain that word and confirm none of them are ones you'd actually want to keep. Exact match negatives are safer when you're not sure, since they only block that specific phrase rather than anything containing it.

Review your negative lists every time you do a cleanup pass, not just when you create them. Search behavior shifts, and a negative that made sense six months ago might now be blocking a query pattern that's become relevant to a new product or service you offer.

Step 4: Fix Match Types and Cut Keyword Overlap

Keyword overlap is a quieter form of waste than junk search terms, but it adds up. It happens when two or more keywords, sometimes in the same ad group, sometimes in different campaigns, end up competing for the same search terms. When that happens, you're essentially bidding against yourself, which drives up your CPC without adding any real reach.

To find this, look back at your search terms report and check which keywords are triggering the same queries. Google Ads' auction insights and the "Keyword" column in the search terms view will show you this overlap directly. It's most common when broad match keywords in one ad group start triggering for terms that a phrase or exact match keyword in another ad group was already covering.

Once you spot overlap, decide on match type adjustments based on what the search terms report is actually showing you, not on a blanket rule. If a broad match keyword is reliably triggering the same handful of high-intent search terms, tightening it to phrase or exact match gives you more control over when it shows and usually improves relevance. If a broad match keyword is triggering a wide, unpredictable mix of search terms, that's a sign it needs either heavier negative coverage or a shift to phrase match rather than exact, so it still has room to find new relevant queries.

This is the other spot in the cleanup process where Keywordme fits in directly: you can apply match type changes right inside the Search Terms Report, without exporting to a spreadsheet or bouncing between the report view and the Keywords tab to make the edit. It's the same decision-making, just fewer clicks to execute it once you've made the call.

Step 5: Pause Underperforming Keywords and Ads

By this point you've cleaned up the search terms feeding your keywords and tightened match types. Now it's time to deal with keywords that simply aren't working, regardless of what triggers them.

Set a threshold before you start, rather than pausing based on gut feeling. A common approach: pause a keyword if it's spent more than three to four times your target cost per acquisition with zero conversions over your lookback window. The exact multiple depends on your sales cycle and average order value, but the point is to pick a number ahead of time and apply it consistently across the account, rather than eyeballing each row.

• Pause, don't delete: pausing a keyword keeps its historical performance data and Quality Score history intact, which matters if you want to reactivate it later or reference its past performance. Deleting a keyword removes that record.
• Check ad strength alongside keyword performance: a keyword that looks like it's underperforming might just be paired with a weak or disapproved ad. Check the Ad Strength label and the Policy status column in the same pass, since a "Poor" ad strength or a partial disapproval can drag down an otherwise reasonable keyword.
• Look at Quality Score components: if expected click-through rate or landing page experience is flagged as below average, that's often fixable without pausing the keyword at all.

Working through keywords and ads together in this step avoids a common trap: pausing a keyword that was never really the problem, when the fix was actually a new ad variation or an updated landing page.

Step 6: Consolidate Ad Groups and Refresh Ad Copy

Cleanup often reveals that an account has more ad groups than it needs. Over time, people add new ad groups for slight keyword variations instead of folding them into an existing one, and you end up with several ad groups all chasing the same intent.

As an illustrative example, imagine two ad groups: one built around "ppc tool" and "ppc software," the other around "ppc optimization tool" and "ppc management software." If the search terms report shows these are pulling in largely the same queries, they're probably better merged into a single ad group with one clear keyword theme, rather than split across two that are quietly competing with each other for impressions.

Once you've merged or trimmed ad groups, check the ad copy and assets tied to each one. After keyword changes, an ad written around a keyword theme that no longer exists in that group will feel disconnected from what's actually triggering it. Make sure each ad group has:

• Current responsive search ads that reflect the keyword theme now assigned to that group
• Sitelinks and callout assets that are still accurate and relevant
• Ad strength checked again after edits, since consolidating keywords can shift the relevance score

This step is less about cutting waste and more about making sure the account's structure actually matches what you just spent five steps cleaning up. A tight keyword list paired with a stale ad from a year ago is only a partial fix.

Step 7: Recheck Conversion Tracking and Budgets

Before you call the cleanup finished, confirm your conversion tracking is still working the way you think it is. If cleanup involved landing page changes, tag updates, or shifts in which pages ads point to, it's worth checking the Conversions page in Google Ads to confirm actions are still recording. A cleanup that quietly breaks conversion tracking will make every optimization decision after it unreliable.

With tracking confirmed, look at where budget is now sitting idle. Campaigns or ad groups you paused or trimmed likely freed up daily budget that's either going unspent or getting redistributed automatically in ways you didn't plan. Reallocate that budget toward the keywords and ad groups your baseline data from Step 1 showed were actually converting well.

Finally, decide on a repeat cadence. A weekly or biweekly recheck of the search terms report is enough to catch new junk terms and overlap before they accumulate into another six-month backlog. Treating this as a recurring task, rather than a one-time project, is really the difference between an account that stays clean and one that needs this same overhaul again next year.

Keeping the Account Clean After This Pass

Give it about a week after finishing this process, then pull your cost-per-conversion numbers again and compare them against the baseline you set in Step 1. You should see it trending down, even if the shift is modest at first. If it's not moving, revisit Step 2 and Step 4, since search term drift and match type overlap tend to creep back in fastest.

From here, the real work is keeping the search terms review on your calendar instead of letting it slide until the account is a mess again. Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme (then $12/month) to handle junk term removal, negative keyword building, and match type changes directly inside the Search Terms Report, so the weekly recheck takes minutes instead of a spreadsheet afternoon.