What the Search Terms report actually shows
Keywords are what you bid on; search terms are what people actually typed. The gap between them is where money is won or lost. If you bid on the broad keyword "dental clinic", your ad might show for "free dental checkup", "dental nurse jobs", or "cheapest tooth extraction" — none of which you want to pay for. The Search Terms report lists every real query that triggered your ads, with clicks, cost and conversions against each. It is the ground truth of where your budget went.
Finding it
In Google Ads: Campaigns → Insights & reports → Search terms (or select a campaign, then the "Search terms" view). Set the date range to the last 30 days. That is it — no special access beyond your own account, which you should always have owner-level access to anyway.
The 15-minute ritual
| Step | What to look for | Action |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Sort by cost (high→low) | The terms eating the most budget. | Check each is relevant and converting. |
| 2. Scan for irrelevance | "free", "jobs", "DIY", competitor names, wrong city. | These should be negative keywords. |
| 3. Spot spend with zero conversions | High-cost terms with 0 conversions over a meaningful window. | Question or exclude them. |
| 4. Find winners | Terms converting well that aren't yet keywords. | Add as targeted keywords. |
| 5. Note the ratio | Roughly what share of spend is on clearly relevant terms. | Track it month to month. |
What "good" looks like
In a well-managed account, the overwhelming majority of spend sits on clearly relevant, high-intent terms, and the negative-keyword list is long and growing. Poorly managed accounts commonly leak 30–50% of budget onto irrelevant search terms — which, on a typical Malaysian ad budget, is real money every month. If you see a graveyard of "free", "salary", "jobs" and unrelated-city terms with spend against them, your negatives are not being maintained.
The questions to ask your agency
Armed with this, you can ask three questions that instantly reveal an agency's standards: "How often do you review the Search Terms report?", "How big is our negative-keyword list and when did it last grow?", and "What share of our spend is on relevant terms?" A good agency answers immediately with specifics; a weak one gets vague. This is the practical version of the evaluation in our Google Ads agency guide.
What we do differently in client accounts
Search-terms review is a standing weekly task in the accounts we manage, not a quarterly clean-up — because negative-keyword maintenance is one of the highest-ROI activities in Google Ads and the first thing that decays when an account is left on autopilot. It is core to how we run Google Ads management, and it pairs with the healthcare-policy discipline in our clinic Google Ads post.
What to do about it
- Open your Search Terms report (Campaigns → Insights & reports → Search terms), last 30 days.
- Sort by cost and scan for irrelevant terms — flag anything with "free/jobs/DIY/competitor/wrong city".
- Note high-cost, zero-conversion terms.
- Ask your agency the three questions above and judge the specificity of the answers.
- Repeat monthly and watch the relevant-spend share improve.