I recently had a client who I help with SEO come to me to look at his Google Ads campaign, which another agency was managing.  I told him, as I tell everyone, just to stay on top of his negative keywords by keeping tabs of his search terms report every week or every month. When he asked his agency to send the report, they sent him the keywords report, which is significantly different. It is really important to know the difference. The keywords are what you tell Google you want to advertise for. The Search terms are the terms you actually show up for. Google gives themselves the rights to show your ads to what they view as “close variants” of your keywords, which can sometimes be way off base.  The fact that this agency didn’t even know what the search terms report was is scary. Just in the last two weeks I have seen some horrible variants from Google that they are relying more and more on their AI to take over. If you have a very straightforward industry, you may see less waste, but it is important to check, because I have seen companies that were wasting over 80% of their budget on search terms that they didn’t intend to show up for because Google’s AI determined that they were close variants. If you are focusing your ad dollars on specific concepts that you know convert well and google shows your ads for variants that do not, you can lose a lot of money. With that being said, below is how to quickly go in and look at your Google Ads search terms for a given period of time.

Checking Out the Search Terms You Paid For in Google Ads

Here are the quick steps to check it out once you have logged in to your Google Ads account.

  1. Go to “Insights and Reports” in the left column
  2. Choose “Search terms”
  3. Pick your time period. If you spend a lot on ads, you should probably do this weekly, but at least monthly.
  4. Sort by cost so you can see which search terms are costing you the most money.
  5. Find terms you don’t want to show up for and click the box to the left
  6. This will trigger that blue box to appear with the “Add as negative keyword” option.  Choose this.
    • If you don’t want to spend on that exact word or phrase, choose it as an exact negative keyword. If you don’t like the concept at all, go with phrase match.

Search Terms Add as Negatives for Google Ads

This should make your campaigns run much more efficiently and if you stay on top of this, you can stop from large budget leaks. Sometimes a certain phrase spikes in search volume and suddenly eats up your budget. Also, as we have seen more lately, Google starts letting more and more terms in that their AI “thinks” are relevant, even if they are not.  Stay on top of this and you will potentially save hundreds or thousands of dollars each year.

Give us a call if you need help managing your Google Ads.