Red Flag #2

Broad match consumes most of your budget and there's no negative keyword strategy

There are two settings on a Google Ads keyword that determine how loosely Google interprets it — broad match (Google decides what counts as related) and exact / phrase match (you decide). Broad match can be useful in disciplined hands. It can also be the single biggest waste of money in your account, and most clients have no way to tell which version they’re getting.

The way you tell is by looking at the search terms report (the list of actual queries people typed before clicking your ad) and at your negative keyword list (the list of queries you’ve told Google not to match against). If the search terms report is full of queries that have nothing to do with what you sell, and the negative list hasn’t had a meaningful update in three months, you’re funding the long tail of Google’s imagination.

Why agencies do it

Three reasons, in roughly this order.

It scales. Broad match plus Google’s automated bidding produces volume on demand. Ask your agency for more clicks or more leads and broad match is the lever they pull, because it’s a setting change rather than the slow work of writing better ads, building tighter campaigns, or improving landing pages. The volume comes fast. The relevance is the cost, and the cost is invisible to you unless you go looking for it.

It hides labor. Maintaining a negative keyword list is unglamorous, ongoing work that has to happen every week or two on a real account. It takes ten to forty minutes per pass depending on volume. Multiply that across an agency’s book of clients and you’re looking at significant unbillable hours. Broad-match-without-pruning is what happens when an account is too small to justify that labor, but the agency doesn’t want to renegotiate the retainer downward.

It looks fine in the report. The numbers Google shows you for broad match campaigns — clicks, conversions, ROAS — are real. They just leave out the half of the spend that bought traffic that will never convert. As long as the agency reports on aggregate performance and not on search-term-by-search-term spend, the bad half is statistically invisible.

What it looks like in your report or account

Pull a 90-day search terms report (the list of actual queries that triggered your ads). Sort by spend. If more than ten of the top fifty queries are obviously off-topic for your business, you have a problem.
Look at the negative keyword list. If it has fewer than 30–50 entries on an active spending account, or hasn’t been updated in 60+ days, you have a different version of the same problem.
Pull spend by match type. If broad match is over 60% of total spend with no carve-outs by intent or audience, ask why.
Watch for query patterns like job titles (“careers,” “jobs,” “salary”), DIY-intent terms (“how to,” “free,” “tutorial”), competitor-adjacent fluff that doesn’t convert, and product categories you don’t actually sell.

What to ask your agency

Two questions, in order. The second one is the test.

First: “Send me the top fifty search terms by spend over the last 90 days, with conversion rate and cost per lead next to each.”

Then, after they send it: “Walk me through the negative keyword cadence. How often is the list reviewed, who does it, and what was added in the last 60 days?”

Good answer

“Negatives are reviewed every two weeks by our SEM lead. Last 60 days we added 47 negatives, mostly job-intent terms and a competitor cluster that was bleeding budget. Here’s the audit log. We pulled broad match share from 71% to 48% over the last quarter; the carve-outs are running on phrase and exact for the highest-intent queries.”

Bad answer

“Broad match is the recommended setting and lets Google’s machine learning find the right traffic. We monitor performance at the campaign level. Negatives are added when we see issues. The system is working as designed.”

What it means if you get the bad answer

It means nobody is doing the work. The phrase “negatives are added when we see issues” is functionally equivalent to “we don’t look unless something breaks badly enough to show up in the aggregate report,” which on a smaller account can be never. “The system is working as designed” is the part where you should pay attention — whose design, exactly?

The fix is rarely as dramatic as switching agencies. It is almost always a 90-minute conversation in which you ask for a 30-day negative-keyword cleanup, a written cadence going forward (“every two weeks, list goes to you in writing”), and a target for broad-match share that comes down by ten or fifteen percentage points over the next quarter. A real agency will say yes and have it done in three weeks. An agency that says yes and then nothing happens is telling you something more important than any report ever will.