Search Terms Report Guide: How to Find Wasted Spend and New Keywords

Overview

If you manage Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, the search terms report is where platform targeting meets user language. Your keyword list is your plan. Search terms are what actually happened.

That distinction matters. Many accounts look organized on paper but still leak budget through broad matching, overlapping themes, or vague intent. A clean-looking campaign can still pay for irrelevant clicks if nobody reviews the search query report regularly.

Used well, the report helps with five jobs at once:

• Find wasted spend: irrelevant or low-intent queries that should become negatives.
• Expand coverage: strong converting searches that deserve their own keywords or ad groups.
• Clean up match types: queries that show where your current keyword strategy is too loose or too restrictive.
• Improve ad relevance: recurring themes that suggest better ad copy and landing page alignment.
• Support bid optimization: query patterns that deserve higher bids, lower bids, or different campaign treatment.

This is why search terms report analysis remains useful even as automation changes bidding and matching. Smart bidding can help with auction-time decisions, but it does not replace judgment about business relevance. A platform may find clicks. Your job is to decide which searches deserve budget.

For teams refining account structure, it also helps to pair this workflow with broader planning. If your campaigns are hard to read or themes overlap heavily, review Google Ads Account Structure Best Practices for Lead Generation alongside your search term review.

Core framework

Here is a durable framework you can use for google ads optimization and negative keyword optimization without overcomplicating the task.

1. Start with clean inputs

Before making decisions from the report, confirm that your tracking is usable. If conversion tracking setup is inconsistent, you may pause useful traffic or keep waste by mistake. At minimum, make sure your primary conversions reflect meaningful business outcomes and that your UTM strategy supports reporting across analytics tools.

If tracking is still being cleaned up, use search term review mainly for relevance control first, then make stronger bid and expansion decisions later. Query quality can be assessed even before attribution is perfect, but profitability decisions need better data.

2. Pull the report at the right level

Most advertisers review search terms at the campaign or ad group level, but the most useful cut is often by a combination of:

• Campaign
• Ad group
• Keyword
• Match type
• Device
• Conversion action, if available in your reporting workflow

This helps you answer better questions. Not just “What searches happened?” but “Which keyword and match type allowed this search through?” That is the heart of ppc keyword management.

3. Segment by intent, not just by metrics

A common mistake is to sort by cost and add negatives based only on spend. Cost matters, but intent matters first. Every search term you review usually fits one of four buckets:

• Clearly relevant and valuable — keep, monitor, and possibly promote.
• Relevant but too broad — keep available, but consider tighter match types, dedicated ad groups, or revised bids.
• Irrelevant intent — add as a negative keyword.
• Unclear intent — gather more data before acting.

This prevents overreaction. A query with no conversions is not automatically bad. It may simply lack volume or belong higher in the funnel. Likewise, a cheap click is not automatically good if it attracts the wrong audience.

4. Use a three-lens review: waste, winners, and structure

Every search term review should look through three lenses.

Lens one: waste. Look for terms that are mismatched to your offer. These often include research intent, jobs, free-seeking behavior, DIY interest, support requests, unrelated geographies, or adjacent products you do not sell. This is where you find wasted spend in Google Ads most reliably.

Lens two: winners. Look for queries with strong relevance, healthy conversion rate, solid lead quality, or strong downstream sales signals. These are candidates for ppc keyword expansion, tighter ad groups, more tailored ad copy, and stronger landing page alignment.

Lens three: structure. Look for recurring query themes that reveal account design problems. Examples include one ad group serving multiple intents, phrase and broad match pulling in the same traffic without clear control, or high-intent searches buried inside generic campaigns.

5. Turn findings into four action types

To keep the process consistent, classify each finding into one of four actions:

• Add negative keyword — campaign-level or ad group-level depending on scope.
• Add or promote keyword — create a more exact keyword target for proven searches.
• Adjust bids or budget priority — support bid optimization and ppc budget pacing around stronger intent.
• Improve message match — revise ad copy or landing pages for recurring themes.

A simple label system in a spreadsheet can make this fast: Exclude, Promote, Contain, Observe.

6. Decide negative keyword scope carefully

Not every bad query should become an account-wide negative. Scope matters.

• Account-level negatives are useful for universally irrelevant themes.
• Campaign-level negatives are best when a theme is wrong for one campaign but useful elsewhere.
• Ad group-level negatives help route closely related intent to the right destination.

This is especially important when building a negative keyword list for businesses with multiple services, locations, or audience segments. If you need starter ideas, Negative Keyword List by Industry: Starter Sets You Can Expand can help you build a more structured exclusion process.

7. Promote winning queries with intent in mind

When a search term performs well, do not just add it blindly as another keyword. Ask why it worked.

Did it show strong commercial intent? Did the wording match your landing page closely? Did it reveal a niche use case you had not highlighted? The best keyword expansion comes from preserving the original intent and building around it. That may mean:

• Creating a dedicated ad group
• Writing more specific responsive search ads
• Sending traffic to a more focused landing page
• Separating informational and transactional themes
• Applying different bid targets by intent band

This is where search terms report analysis supports quality score improvement indirectly. Better keyword-to-ad-to-page alignment usually improves relevance, even if quality score is not your main operating metric.

8. Review match type behavior, not just keyword performance

A useful search query report Google Ads review does not stop at “this keyword spent too much.” It asks which match type behavior is creating risk.

Examples:

• Broad match uncovering good net-new demand but also too much irrelevant traffic
• Phrase match stretching into adjacent intent categories
• Exact match capturing close variants that still deserve scrutiny

If one match type regularly introduces poor-fit traffic, the answer may be stronger negatives, lower bids, separate campaigns, or a more deliberate smart bidding strategy. Review automation as a partner, not a substitute for query control. For a balanced view of where software helps and where review still matters, see AI Tools for Google Ads: Where They Help and Where Human Review Still Wins.

Practical examples

The framework becomes easier when you see how the decisions work in real situations.

Example 1: Lead generation campaign with wasted spend

Imagine a local service business bidding on a phrase like “home security installation.” The search terms report shows queries including “home security jobs,” “DIY home security setup,” and “free home security system.”

These searches may generate clicks but carry the wrong intent. The action is straightforward:

• Add negatives for jobs and employment variants
• Add negatives for DIY and tutorial language
• Add negatives for free-seeking modifiers if they do not fit your offer
• Review whether match types are too broad for the budget available

This is classic wasted spend cleanup. It does not require perfect attribution. It requires clear business relevance.

Example 2: New keyword discovery from high-intent queries

Suppose a software advertiser bids on a broad theme around “project management software.” In the search terms report, one recurring query appears: “project management software for architects.” It has modest volume but stronger conversion quality than generic searches.

That search should not remain buried inside a catch-all ad group. Better actions would be:

• Create a dedicated keyword or keyword cluster
• Write tailored ad copy that mentions the use case
• Send traffic to a page that speaks to architects if possible
• Adjust bids to reflect stronger intent

This is ppc keyword expansion based on evidence, not brainstorming.

Example 3: Match type cleanup

You run a campaign for “accounting software for small business.” Your broad and phrase keywords are both triggering searches about personal finance tools, bookkeeping courses, and tax certification training.

The issue is not only the queries themselves. It is that your match types are allowing multiple adjacent intents into one campaign. A better cleanup plan might include:

• Adding negatives for education and training terms
• Separating software intent from learning intent
• Reducing bid aggressiveness on exploratory match types
• Promoting strong commercial searches into more controlled keywords

That improves paid search optimization because it narrows spend around commercially useful traffic instead of forcing the bidding system to learn from mixed signals.

Example 4: Search terms informing landing page optimization

Sometimes the report reveals that your keyword is right, but your message is too generic. If users repeatedly search “emergency plumber same day” and your ads and page only say “trusted plumbing services,” you have a message match gap.

In that case, the right move may not be a negative keyword or bid change. It may be landing page optimization for Google Ads and more specific ad copy. Search terms often expose the language users care about most urgently.

Example 5: Reporting and workflow discipline

If you manage multiple campaigns, create a lightweight review cadence and route findings into a central ppc reporting dashboard or tracker. A useful sheet might include:

• Date reviewed
• Campaign
• Search term
• Spend
• Conversions or lead quality notes
• Intent classification
• Recommended action
• Status

This makes the work repeatable and easier to hand off between team members. If your current reporting stack makes query review slow, compare your options in Best PPC Reporting Tools for Agencies and In-House Teams and Best Google Ads Management Tools for PPC Teams: Features, Pricing, and Who Each Tool Is Best For.

Common mistakes

Most search term work goes wrong in familiar ways. Avoiding these errors will make your review more useful.

Adding negatives too aggressively

One low-performing query is not always enough evidence. If intent is unclear, label it for observation instead of immediate exclusion. Overblocking can reduce reach and remove discovery paths that need more time.

Ignoring conversion quality

Not all conversions are equal. If possible, check whether search terms drive qualified leads, not just form fills. When offline conversion tracking is available, it becomes much easier to distinguish cheap noise from useful demand.

Treating the report as a cleanup task only

Many advertisers look only for waste. That leaves growth on the table. The report is also a source of keyword clustering for PPC, audience language, and new ad themes.

Reviewing too infrequently

Large accounts can waste meaningful budget between monthly reviews. Smaller accounts may not need daily checks, but they still benefit from a schedule. Volume and spend should determine cadence.

Making decisions without context

A search term that looks poor in one campaign may be perfectly useful in another. Always consider offer, geography, campaign goal, and landing page before excluding traffic.

Using search terms in isolation

The report is powerful, but it should connect to broader account decisions: ad testing, bid optimization, landing page changes, and account structure. On its own, it can only solve part of the problem.

When to revisit

The best search term workflow is not something you do once. It is something you return to whenever the inputs change. Revisit this process when:

• You launch new campaigns, products, services, or locations
• You change match type strategy or smart bidding strategy
• You see rising spend without matching conversion growth
• You notice declining lead quality despite stable volume
• You update landing pages or value propositions
• You restructure campaigns or ad groups
• Platform behavior changes and query matching feels looser or less predictable

For most accounts, a practical cadence looks like this:

• Weekly: review high-spend campaigns and obvious waste.
• Monthly: review for keyword expansion, match type cleanup, and message gaps.
• Quarterly: revisit account-level negatives, structure, and intent segmentation.

If you want a simple action plan, use this checklist during your next review:

1. Pull the latest search terms report for your highest-spend campaigns.
2. Sort by cost, conversions, and recurring query themes.
3. Label each search term: Exclude, Promote, Contain, or Observe.
4. Add negatives at the right scope.
5. Promote proven queries into tighter keyword targets where warranted.
6. Adjust bids, budgets, or campaign separation for high-intent themes.
7. Note ad copy or landing page language that should be updated.
8. Document changes so the next review builds on the last one.

That last step matters more than it seems. Search term work creates compounding value when it is documented. Over time, you build a stronger negative keyword list, a sharper keyword map, clearer intent segmentation, and better paid search optimization across the account.

In other words, the search terms report is not just a diagnostic tool. It is an operating habit. Review it consistently, and it will keep helping you cut waste, uncover demand, and improve the quality of your PPC campaign management as the market changes.