Field notes · Google Ads · 12 August 2026 · 6 min · from our own account

Nobody searches for your clever keyword: the 10-minute demand check

Our precise keyword set pulled ~50 searches a month; the plain words next door pulled 6,860. The Keyword Planner walk that catches it before the first rupee.

Our first keyword set was precise, descriptive, and dead. Terms like “google ads spend leak” and “ppc audit tool” described exactly what we’d built — and pulled roughly 50 searches a month, combined, in India. Several were marked “rarely served” by Google itself: the auction wasn’t rejecting us, it simply wasn’t happening.

The plainer words one row over in Keyword Planner — “google ads agency”, “google ads expert”, the phrases real people type when ads are bleeding money — carried about 6,860 monthly searches. A hundred and thirty times the demand, sitting next to the set we’d lovingly hand-written. We rebuilt the campaign around what people actually search, and it started serving the same week.

The 10-minute walk

  1. Paste your whole keyword list

    Tools → Keyword Planner → Get search volume and forecasts

    Set the location to where you actually sell.

  2. Read one column: average monthly searches

    Not the forecast, not the competition grade — just the volume. Note the total.

  3. Ask Google what people do type

    Discover new keywords → enter your landing page

    Read the suggestions as a report on real vocabulary, not as a shopping list.

  4. Compare the two totals

    If your set totals double digits and the plain-language terms next door total thousands, no bid, budget or ad copy will save the campaign — you’re fishing where the fish aren’t.

0 of 4 checked

Why precise keywords die

You named the product; searchers name the problem. Nobody with a leaking ad account types “ppc audit tool india” — they type “why are my google ads not converting” or “google ads expert”. Write keywords in the searcher’s vocabulary and let the landing page do the translating to your product’s.

Run it before the first rupee, then quarterly

This check costs nothing and needs no live campaign. It would have saved us our first weeks of spend. Demand also moves — a set that cleared the bar in January can be a ghost town by June, so put the ten minutes on a calendar.

Admiral flags keywords Google marks as rarely served and search terms that spend without converting — the two symptoms of fishing in the wrong water. The first audit is free and runs on your own account’s history.

Run the free audit