How to Eliminate Low-Quality Search Terms in Google Ads

Every Google Ads account bleeds a little budget on search terms that never should have triggered an ad in the first place. Someone types "free project management templates," your exact match keyword fires anyway, and you pay for a click that was never going to convert. This guide walks through a repeatable process for finding those low-quality search terms, deciding what to do with each one, and building an ongoing habit so the waste doesn't creep back. You'll need an active Google Ads account with at least a few weeks of search term data to work with, since a handful of clicks won't show a real pattern.

Step 1: Open and Filter the Search Terms Report

Start in the Search Terms Report, currently found under Insights and reports > Search terms in the Google Ads interface. Google reorganizes its navigation fairly often, so if that path doesn't match what you see, search "search terms" in the top account search bar and it'll take you there directly.

Once you're in, set your date range to at least 30 days, and pull 60 to 90 days if your account has the volume. A single week almost never has enough data to tell you whether a search term is a genuine problem or just a one-off fluke. Low-traffic accounts especially need the longer window, otherwise you'll end up making decisions based on two or three clicks.

Before you start scanning rows, customize your columns. At minimum, add:

• Cost, so you can see exactly how much each search term has consumed
• Conversions, to spot terms generating spend with nothing to show for it
• Conversion rate, which helps you compare terms of different volumes fairly

Sort by cost, descending. This puts your biggest spenders at the top, which is where the most obvious waste tends to hide. A term that's cost you $340 with zero conversions deserves attention long before one that's cost $4. This sorted, filtered view is your starting point for every step that follows, and it's worth bookmarking or saving as a custom report if you'll be running this process regularly.

Step 2: Spot the Search Terms That Are Actually Low Quality

Quick terminology check before you start flagging anything: a search term is the actual phrase someone typed into Google, while a keyword is the term you bid on in your account. Your keyword "project management software" can be matched to dozens of different search terms, some relevant, some not. This report shows you the search terms, which is exactly why it's the right place to hunt for waste.

With your report sorted by cost, look for two patterns. First, terms with meaningful spend and zero conversions over your full date range. "Meaningful" depends on your typical cost per conversion. If conversions usually cost you $40, a term that's spent $200 with nothing to show for it has had five real chances and missed every time. Second, look for terms that are obviously mismatched to what you're selling, regardless of whether they've converted yet. For a SaaS company selling project management software, terms like "free project management" or "project manager jobs" are illustrative examples of searches that signal the wrong intent entirely: one is price-shopping for free tools, the other is job hunting, and neither is a buyer.

One clarification worth repeating to anyone on your team: this exercise has nothing to do with Quality Score. Quality Score is Google's own metric estimating ad relevance, expected click-through rate, and landing page experience. What you're doing here is different: identifying search terms that waste spend or attract the wrong audience, independent of what Quality Score says about your keywords. A keyword can carry a great Quality Score and still be pulling in irrelevant search terms underneath it, so don't let one metric distract you from the other.

Step 3: Decide Between Negating, Pausing, or Restructuring

Not every problem search term gets the same fix, and treating them all the same is where accounts get messy fast.

If a search term is simply irrelevant to anything you offer, that's a candidate for a negative keyword. "Project manager jobs" has no path to becoming a customer no matter how you adjust bids or ad copy, so blocking it is the right call.

If the term is on-topic but just underperforming, the fix is usually different. Say your keyword "project management software" is matched to searches that are relevant but converting poorly compared to your other keywords. Rather than negating the search term itself, consider pausing or lowering bids on the underlying keyword driving that traffic, since the intent isn't wrong, the performance just isn't there yet.

Sometimes a search term reveals a real opportunity you're not set up to capture properly. If you keep seeing searches for "project management software for construction," that's a distinct, valid intent that probably deserves its own ad group or campaign with tailored ad copy and a matching landing page, rather than being served the generic version of your ad.

The mistake to watch for here is treating every irrelevant term as an automatic negative without checking whether it's an isolated blip or a repeating pattern. One stray irrelevant click might just be noise. If you see the same type of mismatched search term showing up week after week, that's a pattern worth fixing at the negative keyword or account structure level. Reacting to single data points wastes time and can lead to overly aggressive negative lists that block traffic you'll want back later.

Step 4: Add Negative Keywords at the Right Level and Match Type

Once you've decided a term deserves a negative keyword, two decisions determine whether it actually helps: the level you add it at, and the match type you choose.

For level, ask how widely the irrelevant term applies:

• Ad group level, if the term is only a problem for one specific ad group
• Campaign level, if it's likely to show up across several ad groups in that campaign
• Account level (via a shared negative list), if it's something you never want to trigger ads anywhere, like "free" or "jobs" for a paid B2B product

Match type matters just as much, and negative match types behave differently than the positive keyword match types you're used to. A negative broad match will block any search containing all the terms in your negative, in any order, while negative phrase match blocks searches containing that exact phrase or close variants, and negative exact match blocks only that specific search term. Because these mechanics get refined by Google periodically, it's worth double-checking current behavior in Google Ads Help before applying broad negatives at scale.

The biggest risk here is over-broad negatives quietly blocking traffic you actually want. Adding "free" as a negative broad match, for example, could unintentionally block a search like "free trial project management software" if that phrase matters to your funnel. When you're not sure how wide the blast radius should be, start with a narrower match type, phrase or exact, and watch what happens over the next couple of weeks before loosening it to broad. It's much easier to widen a negative later than to figure out which converting searches disappeared because a broad negative caught them by accident.

Step 5: Speed Up Cleanup with Bulk Actions Instead of Spreadsheets

If you're managing more than one or two campaigns, doing steps two through four by hand gets tedious fast. The typical manual workflow looks like exporting the search terms report to a spreadsheet, sorting and filtering there, then re-uploading a negative keyword list back into Google Ads. It works, but it's slow, and every extra hand-off is a chance to introduce a typo, apply the wrong match type, or add a negative at the wrong level.

This is the exact workflow Keywordme is built to replace. It's a Chrome extension that sits directly inside your Google Ads Search Terms Report, so instead of exporting anything, you review search terms right where Google already shows them to you. From there you can add negative keywords, apply match types, or build out new keyword groups with one click, without ever leaving the native interface. There's no spreadsheet step and no separate dashboard to log into.

This matters most for agencies juggling several client accounts, where consistent negative keyword hygiene across accounts is hard to maintain manually. Keywordme supports multi-account and team use, along with features like keyword clustering and bulk editing, so an agency can apply the same review discipline across every account without repeating the export-and-upload cycle each time. As of this writing, Keywordme runs on a flat $12/month per user pricing model with a 7-day free trial, which makes it easy to test against your own account before committing.

Whether you use a tool like this or stick with manual exports, the underlying decisions from steps two through four don't change. What changes is how much time it takes to act on them, which matters a lot once you're reviewing search terms weekly rather than once a quarter.

Step 6: Set a Recurring Review and Maintain a Master Negative List

A single cleanup session fixes today's waste, but search behavior keeps shifting, so the report needs a standing spot on your calendar. Weekly works well for accounts with meaningful daily spend; biweekly is usually fine for smaller accounts. Either way, pick a cadence and stick to it, since junk traffic drains budget quietly between checks and rarely announces itself.

As you find negatives that clearly apply across multiple campaigns, such as "free," "jobs," "DIY," or "cheap" for a premium product, add them to a shared negative keyword list in the shared library rather than re-adding them campaign by campaign. This gives you one place to manage universal exclusions and apply them to every relevant campaign at once, saving you from redoing the same work every review cycle.

It's also worth periodically auditing the negatives you already have in place, not just adding new ones. Search behavior changes, new product lines launch, and a negative keyword that made sense eight months ago can start blocking traffic that's become relevant again. If a campaign's traffic or conversions drop unexpectedly, check your negative lists before assuming the issue is bids or ad copy. An old, overly broad negative is an easy thing to overlook and an easy thing to fix once you spot it.

Once this cycle is running, the report stops being a source of anxiety and becomes routine maintenance. Check your search terms on the schedule you've set, confirm your negative lists are still catching the right traffic without blocking the good stuff, and only then think about scaling spend further. Adding budget on top of an account that's still leaking money on junk terms just means leaking more, faster.

If you want to cut the time this whole process takes, Keywordme lets you remove junk search terms, build high-intent keyword lists, and apply match types instantly, right inside Google Ads, with no spreadsheets and no switching tabs. Start your free 7-day trial (then just $12/month) and take your Google Ads optimization to the next level.