Stop paying for clicks that cannot convert: a weekly search-term review

The search-term report shows the actual words shoppers typed before clicking your ad. It is the most honest document in your account, and it is usually where the most avoidable waste sits.

1Set a click budget per term from your own conversion rate

If your product converts about 10% of clicks into orders, you would expect roughly one order per ten clicks. A term that has taken two or three times that many clicks with no order has had a fair chance. The same term with only four clicks has not.

Work this out per product. A high-priced item with a low conversion rate needs far more clicks before you can judge a term than a cheap, easy-to-buy one.

2The weekly routine

1. Export the last 14 to 30 days of search terms for your discovery and broad campaigns.
2. Sort by spend. Start with the terms that cost the most; small amounts can wait.
3. Mark winners: terms converting at or better than your target ACOS. These graduate to your exact campaign.
4. Mark losers: terms past their click budget with no orders. Add them as negative exact (or negative phrase if the whole idea is wrong).
5. Mark the undecided: not enough data yet. Leave them and look again next week.

3Three kinds of waste to look for

• Irrelevant intent: the shopper wanted something your product is not (wrong size, type or use).
• Competitor brand names that you did not choose to target and that rarely convert.
• Overlap: the same term bidding in two of your own campaigns, so you compete with yourself.

4Be careful with negatives

A negative keyword is a permanent door closed until someone reopens it. Prefer negative exact over negative phrase when you are unsure, keep a log of what you added and why, and review the log every quarter. Seasonal terms in particular can look dead in the off-season and be valuable in-season.

This is the kind of habit that separates an account that gets steadily cleaner from one that just keeps spending.