How to Remove Low-Performing Keywords from Google Ads (Step-by-Step)

If your Google Ads campaigns are burning through budget without delivering results, low-performing keywords are often the culprit. These are keywords that rack up clicks, impressions, or spend without generating conversions — or keywords that simply never get triggered at all. Either way, they drag down your Quality Score, inflate your cost per conversion, and make it harder to see what's actually working.

This guide walks you through exactly how to identify and remove low-performing keywords in Google Ads, step by step. You'll learn which metrics to look at, how to set meaningful thresholds, when to pause versus when to delete, and how to keep your keyword list clean on an ongoing basis. Whether you're managing a single campaign or dozens of client accounts, the process is the same — and once you have a system for it, it takes far less time than you'd think.

A quick note on terminology before we dive in. In Google Ads, a keyword is what you bid on in your campaign settings. A search term is the actual query a user typed that triggered your ad. When we talk about removing low-performing keywords here, we mean the keywords in your campaign settings — not the search terms in your Search Terms Report (though cleaning up search terms is a related task worth doing separately).

By the end of this guide, you'll have a repeatable process for cutting keyword dead weight, reducing wasted spend, and focusing your budget on the terms that actually drive results.

Step 1: Pull the Right Data Before You Touch Anything

The single biggest mistake advertisers make when removing low-performing keywords is acting on too little data. You open the Keywords tab, see a keyword with no conversions, and hit pause — without realizing it only had three clicks over five days. That's not a pattern. That's noise.

Before you make any changes, set yourself up with a meaningful data window. Navigate to the Keywords tab in Google Ads and adjust your date range to at least 30 days. For accounts with lower traffic volumes, 60 to 90 days gives you a much clearer picture. The goal is enough data to distinguish a genuinely underperforming keyword from one that just hasn't had its moment yet.

Next, make sure you're looking at the right columns. The default view in Google Ads doesn't show everything you need. Add these columns if they aren't already visible:

Conversions: The most important signal. A keyword with spend and no conversions deserves scrutiny.

Cost and Cost/Conv.: These tell you how much you're paying per conversion — and whether that's sustainable given your margins or target CPA.

Clicks and Impressions: Low impressions might mean the keyword is too restrictive or being outbid. Low clicks on high impressions suggest a relevance or ad copy problem.

CTR: A significantly below-average CTR can signal poor keyword-to-ad alignment, which also affects Quality Score.

Quality Score: This one doesn't appear by default — you need to add it manually. Quality Score (rated 1 to 10) reflects Google's assessment of your expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Keywords with low Quality Scores cost more per click and can drag down overall account health.

If you suspect performance varies significantly by device or match type, use the segment options to break data down further. A keyword might look weak in aggregate but perform well on mobile, or vice versa. Drilling into those dimensions before cutting can save you from removing something that's actually working in a specific context.

Once you've set your date range and added your columns, you have the foundation you need. Don't skip this step — every decision in the steps that follow depends on having clean, complete data in front of you.

Step 2: Define What "Low-Performing" Actually Means for Your Account

There's no universal definition of a low-performing keyword. What counts as underperforming in a high-margin SaaS account looks very different from a low-margin e-commerce account. Before you start flagging keywords, you need written thresholds that make sense for your specific situation.

Here are the most useful performance signals to build your thresholds around:

Significant spend, zero conversions: This is the most common trigger. The question is how much spend qualifies as "significant." A reasonable illustrative benchmark is spending two to three times your target CPA with no conversion to show for it. So if your target cost per acquisition is $50, a keyword that's spent $100 to $150 with zero conversions is a strong candidate for review. Adjust that multiplier based on your industry and how much variance you typically see in conversion rates.

CTR well below your account average: If your account averages a 5% CTR and a keyword is sitting at 0.5%, that gap suggests the keyword isn't matching what users actually want — or that your ad copy isn't resonating with the intent behind that term. A low CTR also feeds into a lower Quality Score, which raises your CPCs.

Cost/Conv. well above your target CPA: If a keyword is converting but at three times your target CPA, it's technically "working" but not profitably. These keywords need a decision too — either bid adjustments or removal. If you're working through high CPA issues more broadly, the Keywordme blog post on why your Google Ads cost per conversion is so high covers this in more depth.

Zero impressions over 30 or more days: A keyword with no impressions isn't spending, but it's also not helping. This often means the keyword is too restrictive in match type, the bids are too low to compete, or it's redundant with another keyword already in the ad group. These are worth flagging separately from high-spend underperformers.

The other critical distinction to make here is between keywords that are underperforming and keywords that simply haven't had enough data yet. Don't cut a keyword after five clicks. If a keyword has had fewer than 30 to 50 clicks and your conversion rate is low, that's not a pattern — that's a small sample. Give it more time, or more budget, before making a removal decision.

Write your thresholds down. Seriously — even a quick note in a shared doc creates consistency across your team and prevents decisions based on gut feel rather than actual criteria.

Step 3: Sort, Filter, and Build Your Candidate List

With your thresholds defined, it's time to actually find the keywords that meet them. The most efficient approach is to work from the biggest budget drains first.

Start by sorting your keyword list by Cost in descending order. This surfaces the keywords that have consumed the most budget, which is where your attention will have the biggest impact. A keyword that's spent $500 with no conversions is a much higher priority than one that's spent $5.

From there, use Google Ads filters to isolate the candidates that match your thresholds. You can stack multiple filter conditions — for example, Cost greater than a specific amount AND Conversions equal to zero. This gives you a focused list without having to scroll through hundreds of keywords manually.

Also run a separate filter for keyword status. Filter for keywords with the status "Rarely shown due to low Quality Score." This status means Google is actively limiting how often these keywords enter the auction because their Quality Score is too low to compete effectively. These keywords may not be spending much, but they're still a drag on your account health. They're worth addressing even if they haven't burned through budget.

Before you decide to cut a keyword, check what search terms it's been triggering. Click through to the Search Terms view for any keyword you're considering removing. Sometimes a keyword that looks weak at first glance is actually triggering a handful of high-intent queries — and the fix might be to tighten the match type rather than remove the keyword entirely. Understanding match type optimization can help you make that call more confidently.

One more thing: don't just look at campaign-level data. Drill into the ad group level before making final decisions. A keyword might look weak in aggregate across the campaign, but if you look at a specific ad group, it could be performing well in that tighter context. Removing it at the campaign level would be a mistake.

By the end of this step, you should have a filtered, prioritized list of keyword candidates — sorted by spend impact and annotated with the reason each one is flagged.

Step 4: Decide — Pause, Remove, or Add as a Negative

Not every low-performing keyword deserves the same treatment. Before you take action, you need to make a deliberate decision for each flagged keyword: pause it, remove it, or address it through negative keywords.

Pausing stops a keyword from entering the auction but keeps its historical data intact. This is the safer default for most situations. If you later realize you paused something prematurely, you can reactivate it and pick up where you left off. Pausing is especially useful when you're uncertain — maybe the keyword underperformed during a slow season, or you want to revisit it after improving your landing page.

Removing is permanent. Once you delete a keyword, its historical performance data is gone from your active view. Reserve removal for situations where you're confident the keyword has no future in your account. Good candidates for outright removal include: duplicate keywords that exist in multiple ad groups unnecessarily, keywords that are clearly irrelevant to your offer and were likely added by mistake, and keywords that have been paused for 90 or more days with no plan to reactivate them. Removing these keeps your account cleaner without any real downside.

Adding as a negative keyword is a different mechanism entirely, and it's worth understanding the distinction clearly. If a keyword is underperforming because it's triggering irrelevant search terms, pausing or removing the keyword doesn't solve the underlying problem. Other keywords in your account might still trigger those same queries. The right fix is to add the problematic search terms as negative keywords to block them explicitly. Negative keywords can be applied at the ad group level, the campaign level, or the account level through shared negative keyword lists — depending on how broadly you want to block a query. For a deeper explanation of how negative keywords work and when to use them, the Keywordme blog post on what negative keywords are in Google Ads is worth reading before you start adding them.

One practical tip before you execute: if a keyword appears in multiple ad groups or campaigns, a bulk action will affect all of them. Check the scope of what you're changing before you confirm. It's easy to accidentally pause a keyword across five campaigns when you only intended to remove it from one.

The goal of this step is simple: every flagged keyword on your list should have a clear, deliberate action assigned to it — not a vague "maybe remove later."

Step 5: Execute the Changes in Google Ads

With your decisions made, execution is straightforward. Google Ads makes bulk editing easy once you know where to look.

In the Keywords tab, use the checkboxes to select the keywords you want to pause or remove. You don't need to do this one at a time. Once you've selected your keywords, click the Edit dropdown at the top of the table. From there, you can pause or remove all selected keywords in a single action. This works whether you're changing five keywords or fifty.

For negative keywords, the process is slightly different. Navigate to the Negative Keywords tab within your campaign or ad group. From there, you can add negative keywords manually, paste in a list, or apply them from a shared negative keyword list. Decide on the appropriate level before you add them: ad group level is most targeted, campaign level blocks the query across all ad groups in that campaign, and account-level shared lists apply the block everywhere. Broader isn't always better — over-blocking with account-level negatives can accidentally suppress traffic you actually want.

If you're managing multiple accounts or doing this kind of keyword cleanup regularly, the manual process inside Google Ads can get repetitive. Keywordme's Chrome extension is built for exactly this workflow — it lets you take these actions directly within the Google Ads interface, including one-click negative keyword addition, bulk keyword editing, and match type application, all without switching to spreadsheets or external tools. It works inside the Search Terms Report, which is where a lot of the negative keyword decisions naturally happen.

Whether you use a tool or work natively in Google Ads, the most important thing after executing changes is documentation. Note what you changed, why you changed it, and the date. A simple log in a shared doc or a note in your project management tool is enough. Google Ads also records changes automatically in the Change History tab (found under Tools and Settings), which is useful for correlating performance shifts with specific actions later.

Once your changes are live and documented, you're done with the active cleanup. The next step is watching what happens.

Step 6: Monitor Performance After the Changes

Making changes is the easy part. Interpreting what happens next requires a bit of patience.

Give the account at least one to two weeks after your keyword changes before drawing any conclusions. Auction dynamics don't shift overnight. Google needs time to adjust how your remaining keywords compete, and your conversion data needs time to accumulate. Checking performance the day after a cleanup and panicking about a dip in impressions is a common mistake — give it time.

When you do review performance, focus on these signals:

Cost/Conv. and conversion rate: These are the clearest indicators that your cleanup worked. If you removed keywords that were consuming budget without converting, your overall cost per conversion should improve as that budget shifts toward better-performing terms.

Average CPC: Removing low-Quality-Score keywords can sometimes improve your average CPC slightly, since those keywords were dragging down account-level quality signals.

Impression share: Watch this carefully. If removing keywords caused a significant drop in impression share that's affecting your goals, you may need to add replacement keywords or adjust match types on existing ones to recapture that coverage.

Use the Change History tab in Google Ads to correlate any performance shifts with the specific changes you made. If CPC drops the week after you paused a cluster of low-Quality-Score keywords, that's a signal your cleanup had a positive effect. If conversions dropped unexpectedly, Change History helps you identify which change might be responsible.

Set a calendar reminder to repeat this keyword review monthly. For high-spend campaigns or accounts with frequent search behavior changes, a weekly cadence makes more sense. Low-performing keywords accumulate over time — new search terms get matched to your keywords constantly, and what performed well three months ago may not be performing well today. Ongoing maintenance is part of the job.

Keeping Your Keyword List Clean Going Forward

Removing low-performing keywords isn't a one-time task. It's an ongoing discipline. Here's a quick recap of the six-step process to use as a repeatable checklist:

1. Pull data with a meaningful date range (30 to 90 days) and add the right columns: Conversions, Cost, Cost/Conv., CTR, and Quality Score.

2. Define your performance thresholds in writing — what spend level with zero conversions triggers a review, what CTR gap is too large, what Cost/Conv. is above your acceptable CPA.

3. Sort by Cost descending, apply filters to isolate candidates, and check the Search Terms view before deciding to cut.

4. Assign a clear action to each flagged keyword: pause, remove, or address with negative keywords.

5. Execute changes in bulk using the Edit dropdown, document what you changed and why, and verify in Change History.

6. Monitor for one to two weeks, watch Cost/Conv. and impression share, and adjust if needed.

For most accounts, a monthly keyword audit is the right cadence. High-spend or fast-moving campaigns benefit from weekly reviews. The goal isn't a perfect keyword list on day one — it's a progressively tighter, more intentional list over time.

If you want to move through this process faster without leaving Google Ads, Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme. The Chrome extension brings one-click negative keyword addition, bulk editing, and match type application directly into your Google Ads workflow — no spreadsheets, no tab-switching, just faster optimization right where you're already working. After the trial, it's $12 per month per user.