Google Ads optimisation is often about small, steady gains.
But when it’s clear that incremental improvements and tinkering aren’t going to get you to your destination, it’s time for the emergency reset — the move you make to salvage an account that’s in real trouble.
One of my go-to approaches:
1. Open the search terms report for a long date range.
2. Pull every term that’s generated a conversion.
3. Don’t be too selective at this stage — just weed out:
• Search terms that, from their meaning, you know will never lead to a genuine or valuable conversion, even if they’ve recorded one.
• Search terms that have converted but only at a very high CPA / low ROAS.
4. Group the rest into ad groups as exact-match keywords.
5. Launch a new campaign with these, running it alongside the old one if it’s still pulling some value. (Tighter ROAS targets on the old one + keyword prioritisation rules will usually steer the more valuable traffic to your new campaign.)
You’ll want either to retain – or at some point add – some capacity to target traffic beyond this narrow set of past winners. But for now, you’ve created a new, solid foundation. Proven search terms are just that… and they tend to convert.
It doesn’t always work (PPC secret: no “best practice” always works) but when it does, it can work very well.
