How to Fix Underperforming Keywords in Google Ads

Your search terms look promising. The intent seems right. Yet the clicks dribble in, the conversions are worse, and entire ad groups quietly burn through budget with nothing to show. The problem is rarely “Google Ads doesn’t work.” Much more often, the problem is a handful of underperforming keywords quietly dragging everything down.

Making that worse, a large chunk of what you are actually paying for is hard to see. One analysis found that on average, 51% of ad spend is associated with search terms that Google Ads does not surface, rolling them into “other terms”. That means a lot of budget is tied to queries you never get to review line by line.

The good news: underperforming keywords are usually fixable. With the right structure, data, and process, they can shift from “barely treading water” to steady, predictable performers. This guide walks through how to diagnose what is going wrong, fix it systematically, and build a setup where weak keywords get caught and corrected early.

What “Underperforming” Actually Means in Google Ads

Before pausing or rewriting anything, it helps to get clear on what “underperforming” means for your account. A keyword can look bad in one metric and still be a net positive for your business. Another can look fine on the surface but quietly waste a lot of money.

Conversion rate is usually the starting point. Across industries in twenty‑twenty‑three, the average conversion rate for Google Ads was 3.75%, with far higher rates in segments like Animals and Pets at 13.41% and Physicians and Surgeons at 13.12%. That spread alone shows why raw benchmarks are only a sanity check, not a strict target. A keyword at three percent conversion might be outstanding in one niche and unprofitable in another.

So “underperforming” must be defined relative to your actual economics. If a click costs five dollars and a lead is worth two hundred, a keyword converting at one percent could still be excellent. If a sale is worth thirty dollars, that same keyword might be killing your profit. Start with your target cost per conversion or return on ad spend, then work backwards to decide which keywords are clearly below the line, which are promising but need help, and which are strong enough to deserve more budget.

Moreover, it’s essential to consider the broader context of your campaigns. Factors such as seasonality, market trends, and competitive landscape can all influence performance metrics. For instance, a keyword that underperforms in a particular season might actually perform exceptionally well during another time of year. Analyzing historical data can provide insights into these fluctuations, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly. Additionally, keeping an eye on competitor actions can reveal shifts in consumer behavior that might affect your keywords' effectiveness.

Another critical aspect to examine is the quality of your ad copy and landing pages. Even if a keyword has a decent conversion rate, if the associated ads are not compelling or the landing pages do not provide a seamless user experience, you might still be leaving money on the table. A/B testing different ad variations and optimizing landing pages for better user engagement can significantly enhance performance. By ensuring that your ads resonate with your target audience and that your landing pages fulfill their expectations, you can transform underperforming keywords into valuable assets for your advertising strategy.

Diagnose Why a Keyword Is Failing

Once you know which keywords are underperforming, the next step is diagnosis. Keywords rarely fail for a single reason. Intent, relevance, competition, and account structure all interact. The mistake many advertisers make is treating every weak keyword the same way: cut the bid or pause it. That hides the symptom instead of fixing the cause.

Accept That Keywords Behave Very Differently

A useful mindset shift is understanding just how differently individual keywords can behave. An empirical analysis of several hundred keywords from the New York University Stern School of Business found substantial variation in click‑through rates, conversion rates, and ranks across those keywords. In other words, performance is heavily keyword‑specific. Some will naturally attract many clicks but few buyers, while others quietly convert at a high rate with modest volume.

This reinforces why averages across campaigns or even ad groups can be misleading. An ad group that looks healthy overall may be carried by two great keywords while five others are losing money. Treat each underperforming keyword as its own micro‑business: it has its own audience, intent, and competitive landscape. The job is to figure out where that micro‑business is breaking down.

Check Intent and Query Relevance

Start with search intent. Compare the keyword to actual queries from the search terms report. Are people clearly looking for what you sell, or only loosely related topics? Underperforming keywords often sit just one step too broad: they technically match your product, but the searcher is still in a research phase or looking for something slightly different.

If most queries show the wrong intent, no amount of ad copy tweaking will rescue the keyword. You either need to tighten match types and add negatives so only high‑intent variants trigger, or let that keyword go and focus on more specific, commercially focused terms. Fixing intent mismatch is often the single biggest unlock for conversion rate.

Audit the Ad and Landing Page Experience

Next, check what the user sees after searching. Does the ad echo the keyword language and promise a clear, relevant outcome? Does the landing page continue that promise with strong messaging, proof, and a simple path to action? Weak keywords often live in muddled ad groups where a generic ad tries to cover very different queries.

Even a small misalignment-such as sending comparison‑oriented searches to a generic homepage-can wreck performance. When a keyword is underperforming, build at least one ad that speaks directly to that query’s intent, and send it to a page that backs up the promise. Sometimes the keyword is not the real problem; the message is.

Review Bids, Competition, and Match Types

If intent and experience are on target, look at competitive pressure and visibility. Is the keyword rarely showing because bids are too low to be competitive? Or is it showing too often for vaguely related queries because match types are overly broad and negatives are sparse?

Combining tight match types with a focused negative keyword strategy lets you capture the right traffic without paying for loosely related clicks. On the flip side, pushing bids slightly on high‑intent but low‑impression keywords can dramatically improve volume without diluting quality. The goal is not simply “higher position,” but an efficient position where the right users see and act on your ads.

Fix and Reallocate: Make Keywords Earn Their Keep

After diagnosis, underperforming keywords typically fall into three buckets: cut, fix, or feed. Some are clear losers that need to be paused. Some can be turned around with better structure and creative. A few are undervalued winners that deserve more budget once they are cleaned up.

Pause or Down‑Bid Proven Losers

If a keyword has had enough clicks to be meaningful yet sits well below your target economics, do not hesitate to cut it or bid it down heavily. Emotional attachment to “important” phrases is common, especially around broad category terms or aspirational short keywords. The data has the final say. Freeing that budget immediately improves your account, because those dollars can move into areas that actually convert.

When pausing, make a short note about why: wrong intent, poor economics even after improvements, or structural overlap with another stronger keyword. That context helps prevent old mistakes from creeping back in when new campaigns are launched later.

Double Down Where the Economics Work

On the flip side, identify keywords with solid conversion rates and acceptable cost per conversion that are limited by budget or rank. These are the places to reallocate the spend you recovered from losers. One case study shared by Adthena showed that by reallocating ad spend away from underperforming brand terms and towards non‑brand opportunities, and pausing weak keywords, VodafoneZiggo improved its impression share by 70%. The takeaway: thoughtful reallocation can produce outsized gains compared with simply increasing total budget.

For your own campaigns, look for keywords with good performance but low impression share, then test higher bids, better ad copy, and more focused landing pages. Feed what is already working before experimenting wildly with unproven ideas.

Refine Match Types, Negatives, and Query Filters

Many underperforming keywords are not inherently bad; they are just attached to sloppy query matching. If a phrase or broad match keyword drives a mix of good and bad queries, do not throw the whole thing out. Instead, layer in negative keywords to block the low‑intent slices, and consider breaking out successful variants into their own exact or phrase match keywords.

Over time, this turns a messy bucket of traffic into a set of clean, intent‑driven keywords, each with its own tailored ad and landing page. Underperformance often disappears once wasteful query variants are excluded and the remaining ones are treated with more precision.

Restructure and Group Your Keywords More Intelligently

Sometimes the problem is not the individual keyword, but the way everything is grouped. If very different intents sit inside the same ad group, performance data gets muddy, and it becomes hard to know what is actually working. Good structure makes it dramatically easier to spot and fix weak areas.

Use Intent‑Based, Not Just Topic‑Based, Grouping

Many accounts group keywords primarily by topic: all “software” terms in one place, all “consulting” terms in another. A more effective approach is to group by both topic and intent. That means separating informational queries (“what is…”, “how to…”) from commercial ones (“pricing”, “near me”, “book”, “buy”). Those two mindsets respond to very different messages and offers.

Research on account structure supports this. A multi‑level computational framework for keyword optimization in sponsored search advertising found that optimal keyword grouping significantly improved campaign performance. Better grouping allows the bidding system and your creative to respond more precisely to how and why someone is searching, not just what words they used.

Right‑Size Your Ad Groups

Overly large ad groups make it hard to spot which specific keywords are struggling. If twenty or more different queries share the same few ads, underperformers can hide inside blended metrics. Consider trimming ad groups down so each contains a tight cluster of closely related queries that can legitimately be served by the same ad messages.

This does not mean every keyword must have its own group and ad. That level of granularity can become unmanageable. The sweet spot is where you can glance at an ad group and instantly describe the shared intent of its keywords in a single sentence. If you cannot, that group is probably masking underperformers and making optimization harder than it needs to be.

Separate Brand, Competitor, and Generic Terms

Brand, competitor, and generic category keywords each behave very differently. Brand terms usually convert far better, competitor terms can be volatile and expensive, and generics may drive volume but require tighter control. Mixing them inside the same campaigns or ad groups can make performance reporting meaningless.

Pulling these into separate structures lets you judge underperformance fairly. A generic keyword with a modest conversion rate might be excellent compared with others in its group, while that same metric for a brand keyword could signal a serious problem with your landing page or funnel. Structural separation makes it obvious where fixes are needed most urgently.

Make Optimization a Habit (or Get Expert Help)

Underperforming keywords are not a one‑time problem. Even well‑tuned accounts see performance shift as competitors change bids, new products launch, and search behavior evolves. The accounts that stay profitable treat keyword optimization as a regular habit, not an occasional emergency.

Build a Simple, Recurring Review Process

A practical approach is to schedule recurring reviews focused only on underperformance. Start with a view filtered to low‑conversion or high‑cost keywords, then work through them with the diagnostic lens from earlier: intent, ad and landing relevance, match types, structure, and competition. The key is consistency. Catching problems early keeps small issues from turning into large budget leaks.

Industry experts consistently emphasize this discipline. One guide from KeywordSearch notes that regularly reviewing and eliminating underperforming keywords, and implementing tracking parameters to attribute conversions to specific keywords, is essential to maintaining effective Google Ads campaigns. Without that tracking foundation, it becomes almost impossible to know which individual keywords truly deserve more budget or need to be reworked.

Invest in Clean Tracking and Measurement

Fixing underperforming keywords depends on accurate data. That means conversion tracking that reflects meaningful actions, clean attribution to specific keywords and ads, and consistent use of tracking parameters in URLs. If your reporting stops at “campaign level” or lumps large groups of queries together, even the best optimization workflow will stall.

Map each important on‑site action-lead forms, demo requests, purchases, trial signups-to a conversion event, and confirm that those are flowing correctly into Google Ads. Then ensure each click carries parameters that let you trace performance back to the exact keyword and ad variation. Once you trust the numbers, strong and weak performers stand out much more clearly.

When It Makes Sense to Bring in an Agency

There is a point where trying to fix underperforming keywords alone becomes more expensive than getting expert help. Complex accounts with many campaigns, multiple geographies, or large product catalogs can hide issues that take time and specialized tools to uncover. That is where a focused performance agency can be the difference between a plateaued account and one that scales profitably.

At North Country Consulting, we build engagements around this idea. We start by auditing search term visibility, structure, and measurement to reveal where underperforming keywords are hiding. Then we reorganize campaigns, rebuild ad groups around clear intent, and set up tracking in a way that makes future optimization straightforward. Because we live inside Google Ads every day, we are able to spot patterns and opportunities quickly, and we are relentless about cutting waste so more of your spend goes into the keywords that genuinely grow revenue.

Whether you manage your own campaigns or partner with us, the principle is the same: underperforming keywords are not just “bad luck.” They are signals. Interpreted correctly and acted on consistently, they tell you where intent is off, where structure is weak, and where untapped opportunity sits. Turn them into an ongoing feedback loop, and your Google Ads account becomes far easier to scale with confidence.

SEO Description: Learn how to diagnose and fix underperforming keywords in Google Ads, from intent and structure to smarter bidding, tracking, and expert help from North Country Consulting.

Ready to transform your Google Ads performance and scale your revenue with confidence? At North Country Consulting, our expertise is deeply rooted in the success of Google Ads, drawing from our founder's extensive experience at Google and leading revenue teams at major startups like Stripe and Apollo.io. Don't let underperforming keywords hold back your business. Book a free consultation with us today, and let's unlock the full potential of your digital marketing and revops strategies together.