-
How are you dealing with hidden search terms in Google Ads?
Posted by on February 16, 2026 at 10:55 amWith Google hiding more search terms over the years, I feel like optimization is getting blind.
Even with scripts and reports, we still don’t get full clarity.
For those managing large budgets:
- Are you just trusting automation?
- Using third-party tools?
- Or building custom reporting dashboards?
Curious how advanced PPC folks are handling this.
-
1 Reply
-
When term visibility is partial, shift from keyword micromanagement to intent-cluster control. Build negative lists at cluster level, feed first-party conversion quality back into bidding, and audit query themes weekly instead of chasing every exact term. Measure by qualified conversion rate and margin per cluster. This is how we stabilized search at August Ads.
-
Badly. I hate it.
-
Exact match shows more search terms than other match types, so I try to shift all traffic here, and it’s working. I use negative query funneling, not just keywords, to build an exact campaign that captures everything relevant the the point i completely turned phrase off.
I don’t know if anyone else does this but, I take every query that my exact campaigns can match to and negate those from phrase campaigns. This is different from just negative KW funneling.
-
Use phrase match negative keywords
-
It is in-fact difficult honestly but you need to strategically put broad and phrase negative in a way the campaigns wont overlap also split brand as well.. compare with backend sales data to see full impact weekly and monthly
Log in to reply.