How to Filter Junk Search Terms in Google Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you're running Google Ads and wondering where your budget keeps disappearing, junk search terms are often the culprit. These are the irrelevant queries that trigger your ads—people searching for things you'd never want to pay for. Google's broad and phrase match settings give your campaigns reach, but they also open the door to a lot of noise.

The Search Terms Report is where you go to clean that up. This guide walks you through exactly how to filter junk search terms, review what's wasting your budget, and turn those findings into negative keywords that protect your spend.

A quick note on terminology before we start, because this matters: search terms are the actual queries users typed into Google that triggered your ads. Keywords are the terms you bid on in your ad groups. These are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to the wrong fixes. Throughout this guide, we'll use both terms precisely.

Whether you're managing one campaign or dozens across multiple clients, the core process is the same. It just comes down to how fast and consistently you do it. By the end of this guide, you'll know how to spot irrelevant search terms, apply filters to surface the worst offenders quickly, and add negatives at the right level—whether that's ad group, campaign, or a shared list. We'll also cover how tools like Keywordme can cut down the time you spend on the manual parts of this workflow.

No fluff. Just the steps.

Step 1: Open the Search Terms Report in Google Ads

The Search Terms Report lives inside the Google Ads interface, and getting to it correctly is the first thing to sort out before you do anything else.

To navigate there, go to the left-side navigation in Google Ads and click Campaigns. From there, select either a specific campaign or leave it at the "All campaigns" level, then click the Search terms tab. That tab shows you the actual queries users typed before your ad appeared—not the keywords you're bidding on, but what real people searched for.

This distinction is important. You might be bidding on "emergency plumber London," but the Search Terms Report might show you that your ad also triggered for "plumber salary London" or "how to become a plumber." Those are the junk terms you're here to find.

Set your date range before you start filtering. A minimum of 30 days is a good baseline. Shorter ranges can miss low-frequency junk terms that still add up in cost over time. For high-spend campaigns, 60 to 90 days gives you a broader view of patterns. For campaigns that have been running for less than a month, use whatever data you have.

Check your scope. If you're viewing "All campaigns," you'll see search terms from every campaign in the account. If you've selected a specific campaign, you'll only see terms from that one. Neither is wrong—it depends on your goal. When you're doing a broad account audit, start at the all-campaigns level. When you're troubleshooting a specific campaign, scope down to it directly.

For agencies managing multiple client accounts, you'll need to run this process per account. There's no cross-account search terms view in the native Google Ads interface.

Once you've confirmed the right date range and scope, you're ready to start filtering. Don't skip these setup steps—reviewing the wrong date range or the wrong campaign scope is one of the most common reasons people miss obvious junk terms.

Step 2: Apply Filters to Surface the Worst Offenders Quickly

Staring at an unfiltered list of search terms is overwhelming. A busy account can generate hundreds or thousands of unique queries in a month. Filtering is how you cut through that noise and focus on what's actually costing you money.

In the Search Terms Report, look for the funnel icon near the top of the table. That's Google Ads' built-in filter tool. Click it to add filter conditions.

Here are the most useful filters to apply when hunting for junk terms:

Sort by Cost (descending) first. Before you apply any filter, sort the table by Cost from highest to lowest. This surfaces the search terms burning the most budget at the top of the list. You want to fix the expensive problems before the cheap ones.

Filter by Conversions = 0 with significant spend. Set a filter for "Conversions < 1" combined with a cost threshold that matters to your account (for example, cost greater than your target cost-per-acquisition). This surfaces terms that have spent real money without producing anything.

Filter by Search term contains known junk patterns. Use the "Search term contains" filter to look for words that commonly appear in irrelevant queries. Some patterns worth checking, depending on your business type:

Job-seeker terms: 'jobs', 'salary', 'careers', 'hiring', 'apprenticeship'

Informational queries: 'how to', 'what is', 'DIY', 'tutorial', 'guide'

Price-sensitive or freebie seekers: 'free', 'cheap', 'discount' (context-dependent—sometimes these are your customers)

Wrong audience signals: competitor brand names you're not intentionally targeting, unrelated industry terms triggered by broad match

These are illustrative patterns, not an exhaustive list. Every account has its own junk term fingerprint based on the industry, keyword strategy, and match types in use.

One common pitfall to avoid: don't filter by impressions alone. A search term with 10 impressions but a high cost-per-click can still waste meaningful budget. Always tie your filtering back to cost and conversion data, not just volume.

The goal at the end of this step is a manageable, filtered list of search terms that clearly don't match what your target audience would search before buying. That's your working list for the next step.

Step 3: Identify and Categorize What You're Looking At

With a filtered list in front of you, the next step is to make decisions—not just flag everything as junk. A useful mental framework is to sort what you see into three buckets.

Bucket 1: Definitely irrelevant. These are queries with no commercial intent, the wrong audience, the wrong geography, or no logical connection to your offer. Examples include job-seeker queries, informational searches from people clearly not in buying mode, and competitor brand names you have no interest in targeting. These go straight to negatives.

Bucket 2: Possibly relevant. These are borderline terms. They might convert, but they haven't yet—or you don't have enough data to know. Before adding these as negatives, check the conversion column. A term that looks odd might still be sending you customers. If it has spend but zero conversions and you've had enough clicks to draw a conclusion, it probably belongs in Bucket 1. If it's new with minimal data, hold off.

Bucket 3: Worth keeping or promoting. These are search terms with actual conversions or strong engagement signals. These are candidates to add as positive keywords in your ad groups, which gives you more control over how you bid on them and what ad copy they match to.

To illustrate the first bucket: imagine a plumbing services advertiser whose broad match keywords are triggering ads for "plumbing jobs near me." The person searching that term is looking for employment, not a plumber to fix their pipes. That's a clear junk term—wrong audience, wrong intent, zero value to the advertiser.

Don't add negatives based on gut feeling alone. Always check the conversion data before making a call. This is especially important for terms that look unusual but are in a niche where buying behavior doesn't follow obvious patterns.

Once you've mentally sorted your list, you're ready to take action on the Bucket 1 terms.

Step 4: Add Junk Terms as Negative Keywords

This is where the actual cleanup happens. In the Search Terms Report, use the checkboxes on the left side of the table to select the junk terms you've identified. Once you've selected them, click the Add as negative keyword button that appears.

Google Ads will prompt you to choose two things: the level and the match type. Both decisions matter, and getting them wrong can either leave junk terms running or accidentally block traffic you want.

Choosing the Right Level

Ad group level: The negative only applies within that specific ad group. Use this when a term is irrelevant for one ad group but might be fine for another. Most granular option.

Campaign level: The negative applies to all ad groups within the campaign. Use this when the term is irrelevant for the entire campaign regardless of ad group.

Negative keyword list (shared library): The negative is added to a reusable list that you can apply to multiple campaigns. Use this for terms that are universally irrelevant across your account—job-seeker terms, for example. We'll cover this more in Step 5.

Choosing the Right Match Type for Negatives

Negative keyword match types work differently from positive keyword match types. They don't have close variant matching in the same way—exact match negatives are more literal.

Exact match negative ([free plumber]): Blocks only that precise query. Use when you want surgical precision and the term has a specific form that's irrelevant, but variations might be fine.

Phrase match negative ("free plumber"): Blocks any query containing that exact phrase in that order. A good middle ground for most situations.

Broad match negative (free plumber): Blocks queries containing both words in any order. Use carefully—this is the most aggressive option and can inadvertently block legitimate traffic if the words in your negative appear in queries you actually want.

For more detail on how negative keywords work and when to use each match type, the guide to negative keywords in Google Ads covers the mechanics in depth.

After saving: The selected terms will no longer trigger your ads going forward. They won't retroactively remove past spend, but they will stop the bleed from that point on.

Step 5: Build Reusable Negative Keyword Lists

Adding negatives one at a time to individual campaigns works, but it doesn't scale. If you're managing multiple campaigns—or multiple client accounts—you'll find yourself repeating the same additions over and over. Shared negative keyword lists solve that.

To access them, go to the Tools icon in the top navigation, then Shared Library, then Negative keyword lists. From here you can create new lists, add keywords to existing ones, and apply lists to one or more campaigns at once.

A useful way to organize shared lists is by theme:

Competitor brand names: A list of competitor names you don't want to trigger on (unless you have a deliberate conquesting strategy)

Geography exclusions: Location-specific terms if you're running national campaigns but seeing queries from areas you don't serve

Once a list is built and applied to a campaign, any new terms you add to that list are automatically applied to all campaigns using it. That's the real efficiency gain—you update the list once, and it protects every connected campaign.

Schedule regular reviews. Monthly is a reasonable minimum for most campaigns. Weekly reviews make sense for high-spend campaigns or during periods when you've recently expanded match types. Google's matching evolves over time, and new junk terms will always appear.

Keep a running note of recurring junk term patterns you spot. When you launch new campaigns, you can apply your existing shared lists from day one rather than waiting for junk terms to accumulate.

Step 6: Speed Up the Workflow with Keywordme

The process described in the steps above is correct and it works. But if you're doing it manually across multiple campaigns or client accounts, it takes a meaningful amount of time each week. Clicking through checkboxes, choosing levels and match types one by one, and exporting to spreadsheets to track patterns adds up.

Keywordme is a Chrome extension built specifically to speed up this workflow. It integrates directly into the Google Ads Search Terms Report, so you're working inside the native interface rather than switching between tabs or tools.

Here's what it changes about the process:

One-click negative keyword additions: Instead of selecting terms, clicking "Add as negative keyword," choosing a level, choosing a match type, and confirming—Keywordme lets you do this in a single click. For a list of 30 junk terms, that's a significant time difference.

Bulk editing: You can process multiple search terms at once, applying the same action to a batch rather than handling each one individually. If you're not familiar with how bulk editing works in Google Ads generally, the guide to bulk editing in Google Ads gives useful context.

Match type application within the interface: Apply exact, phrase, or broad match negatives without leaving the report view.

Multi-account and team support: For agencies running the same search term review workflow across many client accounts, this is practically useful. Multiple team members can work across accounts without coordination friction.

Keywordme doesn't make autonomous changes to your campaigns. Every action is user-reviewed and user-initiated—you're still in control of what gets added or removed. It just removes the repetitive clicking that makes the manual process slow.

The extension is available at $12/month per user with a 7-day free trial. If you're spending more than an hour or two per week on search term reviews, it's worth testing during your next scheduled review session to see how much time it saves your workflow. For agencies managing several clients, the case for PPC workflow optimization becomes even more compelling at scale.

Putting It All Together

Here's the full process in one place:

1. Open the Search Terms Report in Google Ads (Campaigns > Search terms tab). Set your date range to at least 30 days and confirm you're viewing the right campaign scope.

2. Apply filters using the funnel icon. Sort by Cost descending. Filter for zero-conversion terms with meaningful spend. Use "Search term contains" filters for known junk patterns like 'jobs', 'free', 'how to', and others relevant to your industry.

3. Categorize what you find into three buckets: definitely irrelevant, possibly relevant (needs more data), and worth keeping or promoting as positive keywords.

4. Add junk terms as negative keywords. Choose the right level (ad group, campaign, or shared list) and the right match type (exact, phrase, or broad) based on how precisely you need to block the term.

5. Build shared negative keyword lists organized by theme. Apply them across campaigns to avoid repeating the same work on new campaigns.

6. Repeat on a regular schedule. Monthly at minimum. Weekly for high-spend accounts.

Filtering junk search terms is not a one-time cleanup task. It's ongoing campaign maintenance. Google's matching evolves, new search behaviors emerge, and campaigns expand into new territory. The advertisers who stay on top of their Search Terms Report consistently tend to run cleaner, more efficient accounts over time.

If you're seeing a persistently high volume of junk terms despite regular reviews, that's often a signal to revisit your match type strategy. Overly broad keywords at the campaign level will keep generating noise no matter how diligently you add negatives. The comparison of broad match versus exact match keywords is worth reading if that's the situation you're in.

For a faster way to run this entire workflow without leaving the Google Ads interface, Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme and run your next search term review directly inside Google Ads—no spreadsheets, no tab-switching, just faster optimization.