How to find wasted spend in the Google Ads search terms report

What the search terms report is

Your keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people really typed. With broad and phrase match, and with AI Max, one keyword can match hundreds of different searches, and some of them have nothing to do with what you sell. Google shows the terms in the search terms report: Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. It only lists terms "used by a significant number of people", so rare searches are grouped out of sight (Google Ads Help).

A rule that finds the waste

Sorting by cost is the start. The rule that separates waste from patience:

• the term has 0 conversions in the period, and
• it spent at least your account's average cost per conversion.

Why that threshold: a term that spent less than one average conversion may simply not have had its chance yet. A term that spent more than one average conversion and still has zero is behaving worse than your account as a whole. If your account doesn't track conversions, the rule has nothing to stand on. Fix tracking first; until then, 5 clicks without a sale is a rough stand-in.

The one question per term

For each term the rule flags, ask: do we sell that? If not, it is a negative keyword. If yes, keep it: the problem is probably the landing page or the price, not the search. Pick the match type on purpose: exact negative blocks only that search; phrase negative blocks every search that contains it.

Doing it faster

By hand this takes 20 minutes an account. Two free shortcuts:

• the free search terms check: drop the export, the rule runs in your browser, and you get a file for Google Ads Editor;
• the free daily script that emails you new waste every morning.

With many accounts, Ads MCP runs the same audit from your AI assistant, read-only.