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The short answer
A keyword is flagged when it has spent past the account's money bar and had enough clicks that zero conversions is unlikely to be chance. Both bars come from your own numbers. When the keyword's longer history agrees, Oppy prepares a pause, one task per keyword.
Why it matters
Twenty clicks and no conversion is not a rule, it is a number somebody typed. The clicks it takes to prove a keyword is bad depend on the account's conversion rate, and the honest measure is money anyway: a €4 click and a €0.40 click cannot be judged by the same count.
Getting this wrong in either direction costs money. Too early, and good keywords are paused on bad luck. Too late, and a keyword that will never convert keeps spending month after month.
How Oppy decides
The check reads every enabled keyword in a live ad group and campaign over recent weeks.
A pause is proposed only when the longer history agrees: the keyword had clicks before this period and never converted then either. When that history is missing or says otherwise, the finding says no pause is proposed.
Checks that weigh money or clicks judge what they find on your own account's numbers, not on one figure applied to every account, so what counts as a problem on a small account is not the same on a large one. Checks on settings read how the account is set up.
When there is too little to go on, the check says so instead of guessing. A finding always comes with the rows behind it, so you can read the evidence before you decide.
| This check | |
|---|---|
| Step of the audit | Spend |
| What it reads | Keywords report |
| Needs trustworthy conversions | Yes. It stays silent when the tracking step fails. |
| What happens next | Oppy prepares pausing the keyword, one task per keyword. Can run alone in Autonomous mode, inside your limits. Otherwise it waits for your approval. |
Check it yourself in Google Ads
- In Google Ads, open Campaigns, then Audiences, keywords and content, then Search keywords, for the last 30 days.
- Filter on Conversions = 0 and sort by Cost.
- Work out how many clicks your account's conversion rate needs before zero means something: the lower the rate, the more clicks.
- Keep the keywords past that many clicks that also spent well past what a conversion should cost you. Leave out your own brand terms.
What to do about it
Pause the keyword rather than delete it, so its history stays and it can come back. Before you do, check its search terms: sometimes the keyword is fine and one loose match is doing the spending, in which case a negative is the better fix.
If the keyword matters to the business, look at the ad and the landing page before giving up on it. The wasted spend threshold calculator runs the same arithmetic on your own numbers.
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Other checks in this area
The checks next to this one in Wasted spend, each with its own page.