The search-terms report is the difference between advertising on keywords and advertising on reality: it shows the literal searches that spent your money. Twenty minutes a week here outperforms every other optimization habit at owner scale.
The ritual
- Sort by cost, read every term that spent more than pocket change this week. Three buckets: converts (protect it), plausible-but-unproven (leave it, watch it), junk (kill it now).
- Kill junk with negatives at the right level — campaign-level for never-ever terms (jobs, DIY, free, other cities), ad-group level for terms that belong in a different ad group.
- Promote winners: a converting search that isn’t yet a keyword becomes one, in exact match, so you bid on it deliberately instead of catching it by accident.
- Write down one sentence: what this week’s report taught you about how customers actually phrase the problem. That language belongs in your ads and on your page.
Junk patterns to expect
Every local account leaks the same ways: job seekers (“electrician salary”, “hiring”), DIYers (“how to wire”, “yourself”), bargain-hunters mismatched to your model (“free”, “cheapest”), wrong geography, and competitor-brand searches you probably can’t convert. Our negative keyword starter list pre-blocks the universal ones so your budget skips the first month of paying to learn them.
Why weekly, not monthly
Junk spend compounds daily, and match types drift — a phrase keyword quietly matches stranger searches over time. Weekly catches leaks at coffee-money size; monthly catches them at car-payment size. Put it on the calendar; rituals that live in “when I get to it” don’t exist.