Are You Getting Too Many ‘Junk’ Search Queries in Your Google Ad Campaign?

If you're not careful, it's easy to waste a lot of ads spend on 'junk' search queries in your Google Ad Search Campaign. That is, search queries or search terms that aren't relevant to your product or service.

It's important review your 'search terms' report and add these junk search terms as 'negative keywords'.

Why not just use exact match keywords in all of your ad groups to avoid this? You can but there might be a lot of good search terms you never thought of or never found while researching keywords that will be excluded this way. Also, if you want to eventually use automated bid strategies like Max Conversions, Target CPA or Target ROAS, these tend to work better with broad match keywords.

When adding negative keywords, I'll typically use 'phrase match' keyword match type for negative keywords since I feel like it's a bit more precise. Using broad match as negative keywords might end up blocking too many search queries.

Also, when you're adding negative keywords, try brainstorming and adding additional keywords that are similar to the ones you're adding as negative keywords.

This will help you to be a bit more preemptive and hopefully prevent you from receiving more junk search queries in the future.