We Measured Wasted Spend in 12 Google Ads Accounts. The Median Was 6.6%.
Every article about the search terms report tells you the same four things. Sort by cost. Filter for zero conversions. Add negatives. Review weekly.
Nobody tells you how much money is actually sitting there. So we measured it.
We ran automated audits across 12 live advertiser accounts over a seven week window, flagged every search term that was provably irrelevant, and added up what those terms cost. Here is what we found, including two things that contradict the standard advice.
The number
A median of 6.6% of search spend went to queries flagged as irrelevant.
The range was 0.14% to 19.15%.
That range matters more than the median. Here is how the 12 accounts distributed:
| Wasted spend | Accounts |
|---|---|
| Under 1% | 2 |
| 1% to 3% | 2 |
| 3% to 5% | 1 |
| 5% to 10% | 5 |
| 10% to 15% | 0 |
| Over 15% | 2 |
There is no typical account. There is a cluster around 5% to 10%, two accounts that are essentially clean, and two accounts hemorrhaging close to a fifth of their search budget.
The single largest advertiser in the set spent over $100,000 in seven weeks and wasted 0.14% of it. Two mid-size accounts spending a tenth as much wasted nearly 19%. Size does not predict waste. Attention does.
Pooled across the whole group, total waste came to 2.94% of total spend, because that one large well-managed account dominates the denominator. Both figures are true. The 6.6% median describes a typical account. The 2.94% describes the group as a whole.
How we defined irrelevant
This is where most waste estimates fall apart, so it is worth being specific.
A search term counted as wasted only if an audit produced an exact match negative keyword recommendation for that exact query, and only the money actually observed on that term during the window was counted.
Exact match matters. A broad or phrase negative covers a theme, and a theme includes queries nobody has examined individually. An exact match negative is a judgment about one specific search that was actually paid for.
Terms a human reviewed and rejected were excluded entirely. If someone looked at a flagged query and decided it belonged, it is not waste.
No projections. No annualized figures. No estimates of what might be hiding. Just observed cost on terms proven irrelevant, measured against spend from the same days.
This number is a floor
Three reasons the real figure is higher:
Google hides a large share of search terms. Queries below its reporting threshold never appear, so their spend cannot be examined by anyone, including us.
Performance Max data is newer and thinner. Query reporting only goes back to March 2023, high-volume terms get sampled, and low-volume ones are withheld like anywhere else.
Irrelevant is not the same as unprofitable. A search term can be perfectly relevant and still lose money on a weak landing page. That is a different problem and it is not in this number.
So 6.6% is what we could prove. Not what is there.
Finding one: the money is not in the big leaks
The obvious way to work a search terms report is to sort by cost and start at the top. Every guide recommends it. It feels productive because the first row is always something expensive and stupid.
In our data, 85.8% of all measured waste came from search terms with one click or fewer.
The single most expensive irrelevant term across all 12 accounts cost $169.91 and had one click. Nine of the ten most expensive terms were single clicks.
That changes what the work actually is. Sorting by cost surfaces a handful of one-off clicks on expensive queries, which is worth doing and takes five minutes. Then the report looks handled and you close it.
Meanwhile the real money is spread across thousands of rows that individually cost a few dollars and never rank near the top of anything. No single row justifies the time it takes to evaluate it. Collectively they are the entire problem.
This is why the search terms report gets reviewed and the waste persists anyway. The reviewing method is matched to the wrong shape of problem.
Finding two: there is no universal negative keyword list
The second piece of standard advice is to build a master negative list. Free, jobs, DIY, cheap, salary, resume. Apply it everywhere.
Across our 12 accounts there were 20,022 distinct irrelevant search terms.
99.3% of them appeared in exactly one account. Only 141 appeared in two. Two terms appeared in three.
And the handful that did overlap were not generic junk words. They were competitor brand names, shared between two advertisers who happened to be in the same industry.
A master list of generic negatives is still worth having. It just is not where the money is. The money is in the 99.3%, which by definition nobody can write down in advance, because it only exists in your account, in your vertical, generated by how Google chose to interpret your keywords this month.
That is the uncomfortable part. The work does not generalize. It has to be done per account, repeatedly, on terms nobody has seen before.
What this means if you manage accounts
Three practical conclusions from the data:
Sort by cost second, not first. Handle the expensive outliers, then work the long tail, because that is where 86% of the money is. If the tail is too large to work by hand, that is the real finding, not a reason to skip it.
Frequency beats thoroughness. Waste accumulates in accounts that are reviewed monthly, not accounts that are reviewed badly. A shallow weekly pass catches more than a deep quarterly one.
Assume your clean account is not clean. Two of our 12 were genuinely tidy. The other 10 all had money in the report. The accounts wasting the most were not neglected ones; they were accounts someone was actively managing.
What we are still measuring
A fair caveat: 12 accounts over seven weeks is a small sample. It is real production data rather than a survey, but it is not a study, and the money is concentrated in four of the twelve.
We will publish an updated number as the sample grows. If it moves, we will say so.
Weekly for new campaigns, where Google is still learning how to interpret your keywords. Every two weeks to monthly once a campaign is stable. Review sooner after launching broad match, changing locations, or switching bidding strategies.
No. A term can describe your service perfectly and still fail to convert because the landing page is weak or the offer is wrong. Waste means the search itself was never going to be a customer. Judge intent, not just the conversion column.
In our 12 account sample, the median was 6.6% of search spend, ranging from 0.14% to 19.15%. That counts only queries provably irrelevant. Real totals are higher, because Google hides low volume search terms.
It helps, but it will not solve the problem. In our data, 99.3% of irrelevant search terms appeared in only one account. Most waste is specific to your keywords and your vertical.
Search behavior changes. New competitors, new products, seasonal queries and news events all create new matching opportunities, and broad match keeps generating queries nobody has evaluated yet. Negative keywords are maintenance, not a fix.
PPC Sherpa connects to your Google Ads account and finds these terms for you, including the long tail that is too large to work by hand. Every recommendation shows what the term actually cost, and you approve what gets applied.