Broad match plus smart bidding is the default posture in Google Ads now. That combination can work. It can also quietly spend real money on searches that were never going to buy anything.
The search terms report is where you find out which one is happening. Most teams open it when something looks off. That is too late, and by then the report is a swamp.
Here is the weekly workflow we run. It is fast, it catches waste early, and it leaves a paper trail.
Why weekly beats quarterly
A quarterly search terms cleanup is a half-day project. You face thousands of rows, fatigue sets in, and you start skimming.
A weekly pass is a short, focused session. Seven days of data is small enough to actually read, and bad queries get cut after one week of spend instead of twelve.
Waste also compounds. Every week a junk query keeps converting on accident or eating clicks, smart bidding learns from it. Weekly reviews keep the signal clean, which is the whole point of feeding an algorithm.
Put it on the calendar. Same day, same time, time-boxed. If it is not scheduled, it will not happen.
The weekly pass, step by step
Step 1: Pull a report worth reading
Open the search terms report for the last 7 days. Then filter before you read anything.
- Sort by cost, descending. Money first, curiosity later.
- Set a floor, such as terms above a minimum spend or click count for your account size. Everything below the floor waits until it crosses it.
- Exclude terms you have already reviewed and marked. More on marking below.
You are not trying to read every row. You are trying to read every row that matters this week.
Step 2: Sort each term into an intent bucket
Do not judge terms one at a time with fresh eyes each week. Use fixed buckets so every decision is a sorting job, not a debate. We use six:
- Target intent. This is exactly who we want. Leave it alone, or add it as a keyword if it deserves its own bid and ad.
- Adjacent intent. Related, plausible, unproven. Leave it running and watch it. Do not negative it out of nervousness.
- Wrong product. They want something you do not sell. Negative.
- Wrong customer. Job seekers, DIY searchers, students, people looking for free versions. Negative, usually at the account level.
- Research intent. Definitions, comparisons, how-it-works queries. Judgment call. Cheap clicks here can be fine for some businesses and poison for others.
- Junk. Gibberish, unrelated brands, obvious mismatches. Negative and move on.
Six buckets sounds like a lot. In practice, most terms sort themselves in two seconds. The buckets exist for the ones that do not.
Step 3: Act, then mark
Every term gets one of four actions: add as keyword, add as negative, watch, or ignore. Then mark the term as reviewed in your log so it never burns attention twice.
That marking step is what makes week five as fast as week one. Without it, you re-read the same ambiguous terms forever.
Negative lists vs campaign negatives
Where a negative lives matters as much as what it says. Get the placement wrong and you either leak waste into new campaigns or block traffic you wanted.
Shared negative lists, applied account-wide
Universal exclusions go in shared lists: jobs and careers terms, free-seekers, DIY terms, adult content, irrelevant brand names. Build the list once, apply it everywhere, and every future campaign inherits the protection on day one.
Keep these lists themed and named clearly. A list called "Negatives" that holds four hundred unrelated terms is where mistakes hide.
Campaign-level negatives for traffic routing
Campaign negatives are for steering, not just blocking. The classic case is brand versus non-brand: your brand terms go negative in the non-brand campaign so each query lands where you planned, with the bid and ad you planned for it.
If two campaigns can both serve on the same query, you do not control which one does. Campaign negatives give you that control back.
Ad group negatives, sparingly
Use these only for fine routing between tightly related ad groups. If you have hundreds of ad group negatives, the account structure is fighting itself and the fix is structural, not more negatives. That is a build problem, and it is the kind of thing we untangle in paid ads system builds.
One warning on match types
Positive keywords expand to close variants. Negatives mostly do not. Add plural and singular forms yourself, and add obvious rewordings.
And be careful with broad match negatives. A single overreaching one can silently block a whole vein of good traffic, and nothing in the interface will warn you.
Broad match discipline
Broad match is not set-and-forget. It is a delegation of query selection to Google, and delegation without review is abdication.
Our rules for running it:
- Never run broad match on top of conversion tracking you do not trust. The algorithm optimizes toward whatever you count, including the wrong things.
- Pair broad match with value-based or target-based bidding. Broad plus manual bidding is how accounts bleed.
- Judge broad match keywords by the search terms they buy, not by the keyword text. The keyword is a fishing license. The report shows what you actually caught.
- Expect the first weeks to be messy. Review more often while a broad keyword is new, then settle into the weekly cadence.
Broad match with a weekly negatives habit is a reasonable strategy. Broad match without one is a donation.
Write down every decision
Every negative added, every keyword promoted, every "watch this" gets a line in a change log: the date, the term, the action, and one sentence of reasoning.
This feels like overhead. It is the opposite. The log is what stops you from re-litigating the same term in October that you settled in June. It is what lets a teammate cover the review without a meeting. It is the record that explains a performance shift three months later.
A simple spreadsheet works. Better is a system where the report pull, the filtering, and the logging happen automatically, so the human minutes go entirely to judgment. That is the kind of plumbing we build in analytics and reporting systems, and it is why our management clients see every change we make, documented weekly, in a system they own.
Find out what your search terms are costing you
If nobody has run this workflow on your account in months, the search terms report is holding money. The fastest way to find out how much is a structured paid media audit, where we go through query quality, negative coverage, and match type discipline line by line and hand you a dollar-weighted plan you keep either way.
It starts with a short conversation about your account and your goals. Start with a Diagnostic Call.