How to Pause Underperforming Keywords in Google Ads (Step-by-Step)

TL;DR: Pausing underperforming keywords in Google Ads means identifying keywords that drain budget without delivering conversions, then disabling them so your spend shifts toward what actually works. This guide walks you through exactly how to do that: from pulling the right data to making the call on what to pause and when.

If you've ever stared at your Google Ads account wondering why your cost per conversion keeps climbing while results stay flat, underperforming keywords are usually a big part of the story. Not every keyword you bid on will be a winner. Some pull in irrelevant clicks, some carry sky-high CPCs with zero conversions, and some just never find their footing no matter how long you wait.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does require a clear process. You need to know which metrics to look at, what thresholds actually matter, and how to avoid pausing keywords that just need more time or a different approach. Pausing too aggressively can hurt performance just as much as ignoring bad keywords entirely.

This guide is designed to be practical and scannable. Whether you're a freelancer managing a handful of accounts or an agency owner overseeing dozens of campaigns, you'll walk away with a repeatable workflow for identifying and pausing keywords that are actively costing you money. We'll also cover how tools like Keywordme can speed up execution significantly when you're working inside the Google Ads interface and don't want to mess around with spreadsheets. If you're also looking at the best ways to reduce wasted spend in Google Ads more broadly, this process fits directly into that workflow.

Step 1: Set Your Performance Benchmarks Before You Touch Anything

Before you open a single report, you need to define what "underperforming" actually means in your account. This sounds obvious, but it's where most people skip ahead and make bad decisions.

A keyword with a $60 CPA might be perfectly acceptable in one account and a disaster in another. It all depends on your margins, your target CPA, and what the business can actually sustain. There's no universal threshold you can pull from a generic blog post and apply directly. Your benchmarks have to be account-specific.

Here are the three core metrics to define before you start evaluating keywords:

Target CPA: What's the maximum you're willing to pay for a conversion? Set this number explicitly. If your target CPA is $40 and a keyword is consistently delivering conversions at $120, that's a clear signal. If you don't have a defined target, use your account average as a starting point.

Minimum conversion threshold: How many clicks should a keyword accumulate before you conclude it won't convert? This depends on your account's overall conversion rate. If your account converts at 5%, you'd need roughly 40 to 60 clicks before drawing conclusions. At a 1% conversion rate, you'd need more. The point is: don't pause a keyword after 10 clicks and call it dead.

Quality Score floor: A Quality Score below 4/10 is a red flag. It means Google considers your keyword, ad, and landing page poorly aligned, which drives up your CPC significantly. Keywords with low Quality Scores and no conversions are doubly expensive.

One more thing: set a minimum data window. In most accounts I audit, 30 days is the floor. For lower-volume accounts, 60 to 90 days gives you a more reliable picture. Pausing a keyword after two weeks because it hasn't converted yet is usually premature, especially in accounts with limited daily traffic.

Write your benchmarks down before you start. This keeps your decisions consistent and makes them defensible if a client asks why you paused something. Before locking in your benchmarks, it also helps to understand how to prioritize keywords by ROI potential so your thresholds reflect actual business value rather than arbitrary numbers. "I followed a defined process" is a much better answer than "it just felt slow."

Step 2: Pull Your Keyword Performance Report with the Right Filters

Now that your benchmarks are set, it's time to pull the data. Head to your Google Ads account and navigate to the Keywords tab under a specific campaign or across all campaigns.

First, set your date range. Minimum 30 days for most accounts. If you're in a lower-volume account, extend to 60 or 90 days to make sure you have enough data to work with.

Next, make sure you have the right columns visible. Here's what you want to see:

Conversions: The most important column. This tells you directly whether the keyword is doing its job.

Cost / Conv.: Your actual CPA for each keyword. Sort this column descending to surface your most expensive non-converters first.

Clicks and Impressions: Clicks tell you how much data you have. Impressions help identify keywords that are getting seen but not clicked.

CTR: Low CTR on a high-impression keyword often signals an ad relevance issue rather than a keyword problem.

Quality Score: Adds context to cost. A keyword with a low QS is paying more per click than it should.

Search Impression Share: Useful for understanding whether a keyword has room to grow or is already showing as much as possible.

Once your columns are set, apply a clicks filter. Set it to 50 or more clicks minimum. This removes keywords that simply haven't had enough traffic to evaluate yet, keeping your list focused on keywords where you actually have something to work with.

Here's a move that often saves accounts from bad decisions: before drawing conclusions, cross-reference the Search Terms Report. A keyword might look like it's underperforming because it's matching to irrelevant queries, not because the keyword itself is the problem. That's a negative keyword issue, and the fix is adding negatives, not pausing the keyword. We'll come back to this in the next step.

Also worth doing: segment by device or match type before making final calls. A keyword that tanks on desktop might be converting well on mobile. Pausing it entirely would throw out the good performance with the bad. Check the segmentation before you commit. If you want to go deeper on finding new opportunities while you're in the data, the Search Terms Report is also a powerful source for new keyword ideas.

Step 3: Diagnose Why a Keyword Is Underperforming

This step is where most guides skip ahead and tell you to just pause whatever isn't converting. That's the wrong move. Not every underperforming keyword should be paused. Many need a different fix first.

Think of it like a doctor diagnosing symptoms. The symptom is "not converting." The cause could be five different things, and the treatment depends on the diagnosis.

Here's how to read the signals:

Low CTR with high impressions: Your keyword is showing up but people aren't clicking. This is almost always an ad copy or relevance issue. The keyword is surfacing in relevant searches, but your ad isn't compelling enough. Pausing the keyword won't fix this. Rewrite the ad first.

High CTR with zero conversions: People are clicking but not converting. This points to a landing page or audience mismatch. The keyword is doing its job of generating interest, but something after the click is breaking down. Again, pausing the keyword won't fix a landing page problem.

High CPC with low Quality Score: This is a bid strategy and ad relevance issue. A bad Quality Score inflates your CPC. Before pausing, consider whether improving the ad copy or landing page alignment could bring the QS up and make the keyword viable.

Keyword triggering irrelevant search terms: In most accounts I audit, this is the most common culprit with broad match keywords. A keyword like "project management" in an account selling niche construction software will match to all kinds of irrelevant queries: student project tools, general productivity apps, freelance platforms. The keyword isn't the problem. The match type and missing negatives are. Check the Search Terms Report and clean junk search terms with negative keywords before you pause anything. This is one of the reasons campaigns stop converting even when keywords look reasonable on paper.

The case for pausing is strongest when: the keyword has sufficient data, you've already tried optimization (ad copy, landing page, negatives), and performance still hasn't improved. If you haven't tried fixing it yet, fix it first.

Step 4: Make the Pause Decision Using a Simple Scoring Framework

Once you've diagnosed the issue and confirmed the keyword itself is the problem, you need a consistent way to decide whether to pause. Here's a simple framework that works across account types.

Run through these three checks for each keyword you're evaluating:

Check 1: Clicks vs. CPA threshold. Has the keyword accumulated enough clicks to be statistically meaningful (your minimum threshold from Step 1), and is the Cost/Conv. more than 2x your target CPA? If yes, that's a strong signal.

Check 2: Quality Score below 4. A low QS compounds the cost problem. It means you're paying more per click than competitors with better-aligned ads, and you're already not converting. That's a double hit.

Check 3: Is this keyword covered by a better-performing variant? If you have both a broad match and an exact match version of the same keyword, and the exact match is performing well while the broad match is bleeding budget, pausing the broad match is a clean call.

If two or more of these checks are true, pause the keyword. If only one is true, consider optimization before pausing.

One important exception: brand-adjacent keywords and assisted conversions. Some keywords that show zero direct conversions are actually contributing earlier in the funnel. Before pausing anything that touches your brand or a high-intent category, check the Search attribution report in Google Ads. Look at assisted conversions to see if the keyword is playing a supporting role. Pausing a keyword that drives assisted conversions without checking attribution is a mistake that can quietly hurt overall account performance.

For agency owners: build this framework into a reusable template or checklist your team uses on every account. The mistake most agencies make is letting individual account managers apply different logic to the same problem. Standardizing the scoring criteria means your whole team makes consistent decisions, which matters a lot when you're managing negative keywords across multiple campaigns and accounts simultaneously.

Step 5: Execute the Pauses Efficiently

You've done the analysis. You know what to pause. Now let's execute cleanly.

The standard method in Google Ads: go to the Keywords tab, check the box next to each keyword you want to pause, click the Edit button or the status dropdown, and set the status to Paused. Simple enough when you're dealing with three or four keywords.

When you're pausing 10 or more keywords at once, use the bulk method. Apply your filters first (clicks threshold, date range, match type), then use the select-all checkbox at the top of the list to grab everything in the filtered view. Then bulk edit the status to Paused. This is where bulk editing in Google Ads saves real time and is worth understanding properly.

If you're using Keywordme, this whole process moves significantly faster. The Chrome extension lets you take action directly inside Google Ads' Search Terms Report without exporting to spreadsheets or switching between tabs. For agencies handling multiple client accounts, the multi-account support means you can apply the same workflow across accounts without the repetitive log-in and log-out cycle. It's built for exactly this kind of PPC workflow optimization.

Two rules that matter regardless of how you execute:

Always label and note your pauses. Add a label with the date and a brief reason: "Paused [date] - exceeded 2x CPA threshold, QS below 4." This is critical for account audits, client reporting, and your own memory when you come back to this account in three months.

Pause, never delete. Deleted keywords lose all historical data permanently. That data is valuable for seasonality analysis, future audits, and understanding account history. Paused keywords retain everything and can be reactivated anytime. There's no good reason to delete.

Step 6: Monitor the Impact and Know When to Revisit

Pausing keywords is not a "set it and forget it" action. You need to verify that the pauses actually improved performance, and you need to know when to revisit what you've paused.

After executing pauses, check account-level metrics after 7 to 14 days. Specifically, look at:

Average CPA: Did it improve? If pausing your worst-performing keywords didn't move the CPA needle, the issue is elsewhere, likely landing page quality, bidding strategy, or audience targeting.

Conversion rate: Should increase if you've removed keywords that were generating low-quality clicks.

Impression share on remaining keywords: Budget freed up from paused keywords should flow toward your better performers. If impression share on your converting keywords didn't increase, check whether campaign-level budget caps are the constraint.

Signs the pauses worked: lower average CPA, higher conversion rate, same or better impression share on your remaining keywords. Signs something else is wrong: CPA didn't change after pausing. That means the real problem is somewhere other than the keywords you paused. Worth reading through why your Google Ads cost per conversion might be high and why your overall spend might be elevated if the numbers aren't moving.

Set a calendar reminder to review paused keywords every 60 to 90 days. Seasonality shifts, new product launches, or changes in your target market can make a previously paused keyword worth testing again. When you revisit, it's also a good opportunity to refresh and prune underperforming keywords more broadly across the account. Paused doesn't mean dead forever. It means "not right now."

FAQ: Common Questions About Pausing Keywords in Google Ads

How many clicks should a keyword have before I pause it? Enough to be statistically meaningful relative to your account's conversion rate. If your account converts at 5%, you'd want at least 40 to 60 clicks before concluding a keyword won't convert. At a 1% conversion rate, you'd need considerably more. There's no single universal number that applies to every account.

Should I pause or delete underperforming keywords? Always pause, never delete. Paused keywords retain historical data and can be reactivated whenever you need them. Deleted keywords are gone permanently, along with all the performance history attached to them. There's no upside to deleting.

Will pausing keywords hurt my Quality Score? No. Quality Score is keyword-specific. Pausing a keyword doesn't affect the Quality Scores of your other keywords. Your active keywords will continue to be evaluated on their own merit.

What if all my keywords are underperforming? That's a campaign structure or targeting issue, not a keyword-level problem. If everything is underperforming, look at your match types, your negative keyword lists, your landing page alignment, and your bidding strategy before pausing everything. Pausing all your keywords doesn't fix a structural problem, it just stops your ads from running.

Can I pause keywords in bulk in Google Ads? Yes. Filter your keyword list, select all matching keywords using the checkbox at the top, then use the Edit menu to change the status to Paused. If you want to make this process faster and avoid exporting to spreadsheets, tools like Keywordme let you take bulk actions directly inside the Google Ads native interface.

How often should I audit keywords for performance? Monthly at minimum for active campaigns. Agencies managing multiple accounts often benefit from a weekly quick-scan workflow to catch keywords that are burning through budget before they do too much damage. The more accounts you manage, the more important it is to have a standardized process you can run quickly.

Your Pre-Flight Checklist Before You Close the Tab

Pausing underperforming keywords isn't just housekeeping. It's one of the most direct ways to improve your Google Ads efficiency without touching your budget. The process comes down to four things: knowing your benchmarks, pulling the right data, diagnosing the real problem, and executing cleanly.

Before you wrap up, run through this checklist:

✅ Benchmarks defined: target CPA, minimum click threshold, Quality Score floor

✅ Keyword report filtered with a meaningful date range and click volume minimum

✅ Root cause diagnosed: is it the keyword, the ad copy, or the landing page?

✅ Pause decision made using a consistent scoring framework

✅ Pauses executed with labels and notes for future reference

✅ Follow-up review scheduled for 7 to 14 days out

✅ Calendar reminder set for a 60 to 90 day paused keyword review

If you're managing multiple accounts and this process feels slower than it should, Keywordme was built specifically to cut this kind of work down. You can take bulk actions directly inside Google Ads without exporting anything, switching tabs, or rebuilding logic in a spreadsheet every time. It's faster, cleaner optimization right where you're already working.

Start your free 7-day trial and see how much time you get back on your next keyword audit.