Your Google Ads are paying for wine glasses

The searches you pay for aren't always the keywords you picked. That one sentence explains a lot of the wasted spend in the Google Ads accounts I look at.

This is episode two of Adtech & Martech Tip Tuesday, my weekly series where I take one setting or report and fix one thing in about a minute. Last week was location targeting. This week is the search terms report. I'd argue it's the most useful page in Google Ads, and most people never open it.

Your keyword is what you told Google to bid on. A search term is the exact thing a person typed into Google before your ad showed up. Depending on your match type, those two can be close neighbours or near strangers who happen to share a word.

Broad match is where the drift happens. Google says broad match can show your ads on searches that are variations of your keyword, and a variation can wander a long way from what you actually sell.

Google's own example is the one I use in the video, because it's hard to beat. You sell eyeglasses. Someone searches for wine glasses. Your ad shows up. They click, have a look, realise you don't sell anything you can pour a pinot into, and leave.

You still pay for that click. You pay for every one of them.

Nobody broke a rule there. Google matched the words, and the words were close enough. Close enough is the problem.

Mr. Mummu, who turns up in these posts now and then, once paid the boy over the fence two dollars a bag to clear "anything on the lawn that shouldn't be there". He was very proud of the wording. It saved him thirty seconds of explaining. By lunchtime the boy had filled four bags with weeds, a garden gnome, the hose nozzle and one deeply offended cat. Mummu paid eight dollars, released the cat and opened the notebook marked "Urgent", just under "coriander". He wrote: "Do not pick up: gnome." The next Saturday the boy came back with the other two gnomes. "You said gnome," he explained. "These are gnomes." Mummu stared at the bag for a long time. Then he added an "s".

Which is most of this tip, catch included.

How to find the leak

Open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. It's the list of real searches that triggered your ads, in the words people actually used.

Sort it by cost, highest first. The expensive surprises float to the top, which is convenient and slightly rude.

Anything you don't sell, tick the box and add it as a negative keyword, right there in the report. You don't need to leave the page or open a separate keywords screen. A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad when that word is in the search.

For words you'll never want on any campaign (wine, if you're the eyeglasses seller), save them in a negative keyword list and apply that list across your campaigns. One list, every campaign, and you're not repeating the same fix five times.

Now the catch that trips people up. Negative keywords don't match close variants. Your normal keywords are generous about plurals, small misspellings and near matches. Negatives are not. Add "wine" and Google won't automatically treat "wines" as the same thing.

Add the singular and the plural yourself, and any obvious synonyms. It's manual and a bit dull. Mummu learned it with gnomes. You can learn it with a spreadsheet.

My take? Check this report every week while a campaign is new, then monthly once it settles. New campaigns throw up the strangest searches in the first few weeks, and that's when a quick look saves the most money.

Where it falls short

One honest limitation. Negatives are blunt. If you get impatient and add "glasses" on its own, you've just blocked the people searching for eyeglasses, which is the one search you came for. Be specific. Exclude the word that's wrong ("wine"), not the word you share with it.

And a soft disclaimer, because every account is different: this is general education from what I see in audits, not advice for your specific account. Before you add a broad negative, glance at what it would block.

As for the video, it's about a minute long. The real screens come from an empty demo account, and the search terms report scenes are labelled as an illustration with made-up data, since an empty account has no searches to show. There's no client data anywhere in it. It's episode two of the series on my YouTube channel, and I'll drop it in the comments.

Stop paying for wine glasses.