// glossary
Search Waste.
Definition + how to reduce
Search waste is the portion of a Google Ads budget spent on queries that are unrelated to the brand's offering or fail to produce conversions. A typical account leaks 8-15% of its spend to this category, and account owners often miss it.
// detail
Common sources of search waste: broad match overuse, insufficient negative keyword list, campaigns left open to irrelevant queries (e.g. "free", "jobs", "complaint"), and disproportionate brand protection spend.
Detection: pull the Search Terms report for the last 30 days; flag queries that received clicks but zero conversions; check which are irrelevant. Queries with 10+ clicks and zero conversions are the clearest candidates.
Example: A broad-match campaign targeting "men's running shoes" might serve on "men's shoe removal". That's search waste. Fix: add the irrelevant query as a negative keyword.