The $6,700 Mistake Hiding in an “Optimized” Campaign (And the 7-Minute Fix We Used to Catch It)

On paper, the account was performing.

In reality, $6,700 was going to people who never intended to buy.

A little while back, we audited an ad account for a high-end cookware brand.

Everything looked fine on the surface.

Strong branded performance. Solid return on prospecting and remarketing.

The usual suspects pulling their weight.

And then we opened the search term report.

Over $6,700 spent in the last 14 days on clicks from people searching:

“how to clean cast iron”
“ceramic vs stainless steel cookware”
“bakeware reviews reddit”
“what pan should I buy if I’m broke”

You get the idea.

They weren’t paying for customers. They were paying for the curious, the confused, and the DIYers deep in a rabbit hole at 2am.

Now, to be fair, there are times when you do want to invest in upper-funnel traffic. You may want those early researchers to find you, trust you, and eventually buy from you.

But this wasn’t that strategy. There were no educational landing pages. No nurture flow. No long-game content funnel. Just performance campaigns, spending like every click had the intent to purchase.

All of it totally avoidable. And yet it was happening, day after day, click after click.

This is how most brands lose money

With small inefficiencies that compound over time.

The kind that show up as:

Marginally worse ROAS
CAC just a little too high
Campaigns that “sort of work” but never scale

Most of it is preventable, but only if you’re actively auditing, sculpting, and removing irrelevant search traffic. Otherwise, you’re just letting Google experiment with your money.

There are two types of negative keywords every performance account needs:

1. Account-Level Negatives

These are your non-negotiables. Words or phrases that should never trigger your ads, no matter the context, no matter the intent.

For a premium cookware brand?

You probably don’t want to be showing up for things like:

“how to make a pan from scratch”
“cheap cookware sets under $20”
“cookware ingredients list”
“wax melting point”
“free samples”
“best pans for camping”

These aren’t bad searches. They’re just bad for you—if you’re selling $300 Dutch ovens to discerning home chefs.

These go on your account-wide negative list. Every campaign, every ad group. No exceptions.

Because without them, your campaigns aren’t optimized, they’re just exposed.

2. Sculpting Negatives

Now we get into the more strategic layer.

Sculpting negatives are about funneling relevant traffic to the right campaign, so your creative, bids, and landing pages all work together.

Let’s say you’re running two campaigns:

One for gift-givers (Mother’s Day, wedding registries)
One for serious home cooks researching premium cookware

Now imagine someone searches “best luxury cookware to gift.”

That traffic belongs in your gift campaign—not your cookware education funnel.

So you add sculpting negatives to the second campaign (words like “gift,” “present,” “registry”) to keep that traffic where it belongs.

This approach helps you:

Match intent to the right ad and page
Improve conversion rates
Avoid campaign cannibalization
Feed clearer data back into Smart Bidding

It’s a small move with a big ripple effect.

“But wait... doesn’t Smart Bidding figure that out?”

Eventually. But not before it spends your money testing first.

Yes, Smart Bidding uses over 100,000 signals.
Yes, Google learns what works and what doesn’t.
Yes, machine learning can eventually figure out who not to show your ad to.

But remember machine learning is still pattern recognition.
It needs time. It needs money. It needs failure to learn what to avoid.

And that failure?
That’s your media budget.

You can wait for Google to recognize a bad pattern after 500 expensive clicks.
Or you can cut it off at 50.
That’s what negative keywords do.

They don’t replace Smart Bidding.
They accelerate its intelligence by shaping the training data.

Negative keywords aren’t a relic from the past. They’re how professionals curate what the machine learns from.

How we handle it inside the agency

We run search term reports consistently—weekly, sometimes daily on newer campaigns.

We look for:

Words showing up in wasted spend
Themes that indicate misaligned intent
Opportunities to use sculpting to clean up traffic flow

If we see something like “ceramic vs stainless steel” showing up in a high-intent campaign, we might not block it right away. We’ll check CPC trends, impression volume, and conversion performance.

If it’s declining over time? Maybe Google’s already learning. If not? We cut it.

The key is to monitor, not guess. Let data shape the sculpting. Let strategy shape the list.

It’s not flashy work. But it’s the kind that compounds.

Let’s be clear about the real opportunity here

Every time you remove a source of inefficiency—every wasted click, every irrelevant search—you’re doing two things:

Improving immediate performance
Sharpening the data feedback loop for the entire account

The payoff is rarely instant. But over time, it adds up in a way no one talks about:

Cleaner signal → smarter bidding
Smarter bidding → better auctions
Better auctions → higher profitability
Higher profitability → room to scale

The math is brutal and simple... If 10% of your spend is wasted, you need your remaining 90% to work 11% harder just to break even.

Fix the 10%. That’s the work.

So here’s what great marketers actually do

They look at the search terms. Often. Consistently. Not just when performance dips.

They study what they paid for.
They look for the friction, the bloated ad spend, the false positives.
And they make decisions, small, specific ones, that clean up the account one click at a time.

They don’t need a dramatic insight to justify it. They just ask:

“Does this belong in our budget?”

If it doesn’t, they remove it. And they move on.

That kind of consistency, the willingness to notice and fix what others overlook, is what separates accounts that quietly compound profit from the ones that plateau for months and no one knows why.

Not because the product is bad.

Not because the strategy is wrong.

But because no one took the time to clean up the $6.87 leaks hiding in plain sight.

That’s the work. And it adds up.

Your action item:

This week, pull your search term report. Look at where your money actually went.

And remember:

Every irrelevant click you allow is a vote against your own profitability.

Subtraction is strategy.

See you next week,
Isaac

P.S. We cover negative keyword strategy (and way more) in-depth inside the certifications inside the Institute.

If you’ve ever stalled on a reporting call, guessed your way through a CPC trend explanation, or blacked out when someone said “search query mapping,” this is for you.

Worst case, you leave smarter. Best case, you get promoted.