Every account carries spend that is not buying anything. Not underperforming spend — **spend with nothing on the other side of it.** It accumulates quietly, and it is the easiest money you will ever find.

This is a single sitting, in order, from the biggest wins to the smallest.

**Time: about two hours. Do it quarterly.**

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-cut-waste-explainer-b2e0c0c0.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Seventy-seven seconds on the order to work in, and the rule setting to get right.*

## **Before you start**

Set your date range to **the last 30 days**, and know your **break-even ACoS** — the point where an extra sale stops making you money. Everything below is judged against that number, not against a number you like.

## **Step 1 — Take the recommendations first**

**Search Query Performance → Recommended Actions.**

![Recommended actions, sorted by money impact](/kb-assets/shot-sqp-recommended-168c63.png)

This is the shortest path to the largest wins, because the work of finding them is already done. Filter to **Cut bids** and sort by **wasted spend**.

Each row names the query, the money at stake, a **Why** and a **Suggestion**. The two shapes worth acting on immediately:

**High ACoS, low conversion** — *"this term does not convert for this catalog"*. Negative-match it, or pause the keywords carrying it.

**High ACoS, decent conversion** — *"the term works but the clicks are overpriced"*. Lower the bid. Do not pause it; you would be throwing away a term that converts.

The distinction is the whole point of the screen. Pausing an overpriced-but-converting term is the most common self-inflicted wound in this exercise.

> Competitor-brand queries are deliberately absent from these recommendations, because a better page cannot win a shopper who wants somebody else's brand. If a rival is missing from your competitor list, its queries will keep appearing here with advice that cannot work. See [**Generic, Branded and Competitor Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/generic-branded-and-competitor-terms).

## **Step 2 — Find the terms that never convert**

**Amazon Ads → Search Terms**, with [**Aggregated Search Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/search-terms-and-aggregated-search-terms) switched on.

![Search terms, aggregated across the account](/kb-assets/shot-adv-terms-view-2cadd4.png)

Aggregation matters here. In the default view the same customer search appears once per keyword per ad group, so a term wasting real money looks small in every row and large in none.

Sort by **spend**, descending. Then look for:

**Clicks above ~25, orders zero.** Twenty-five clicks is roughly where "not enough data" becomes "this does not convert" for most catalogs. Below that you are guessing.

**Spend above your threshold, orders zero.** Use spend rather than clicks when your click costs vary a lot — a $0.20 click and a $5 click are not the same evidence.

**Add these as negative exact matches** in the ad groups they came from. Not campaign-wide unless you are certain: a term that fails in one ad group sometimes works in another with a different product behind it.

## **Step 3 — The overpriced converters**

Same screen, different filter: terms that **do** convert but at an ACoS well above break-even.

These are bid problems, not relevance problems. Lower the bid on the keywords feeding them by 15–25% and let them run. If the term still converts at the lower bid, you have just taken a loss-maker into profit. If it stops converting entirely, it was only ever buying position.

**Do not cut more than about 25% in one move.** You will not learn anything from a change large enough to kill the term outright.

## **Step 4 — The capped campaigns nobody noticed**

Check for **Campaign Daily Budget Capped** in your alerts.

This is the opposite of waste and belongs in the same sitting, because you are already in the numbers. A campaign hitting its budget before the day ends is turning away traffic it could have converted — and if its ACoS is below break-even, that is money you are choosing not to make.

Move the budget you freed in steps 2 and 3 here first, before anywhere else.

## **Step 5 — Stop it coming back**

**Automations → Create Rule.**

![A pause branch: enough clicks to prove it, and no orders](/kb-assets/shot-b26-form-c-504ade.png)

Everything above is manual work you should not have to repeat. Two rules will hold most of it:

**A pause rule for dead weight.** *Clicks greater than 25 **and** orders equal to 0 → pause targeting.* The built-in **Pause dead keywords** recipe is exactly this.

**A bid rule for the overpriced.** *ACoS above your ceiling → lower the bid*, capped at 10–15% per run.

Two things to get right before you enable them:

**Set the look-back to 14 days and ignore the freshest day.** Yesterday's spend is complete but yesterday's sales are not — a pause rule that reads right up to yesterday will pause things that converted and have not been credited yet. See [**Look-back Windows and Adjustment Frequency**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/lookback-windows-and-adjustment-frequency).

**Dry-run it first.** The preview computes every change and applies none, and it shows which branch claimed each target. See **Dry-Run Preview**.

## **What good looks like**

A first pass on an account that has never had one typically finds **5–15% of spend** with nothing behind it. A second pass three months later should find much less — if it finds just as much, your rules are not doing their job.

Write down what you cut and what you expected to happen. The check in a month is not *"did spend fall"* — it is *"did sales hold"*.

## **What not to do**

**Do not pause on thin evidence.** Four clicks and no orders is not failure; it is barely a test.

**Do not negate broadly on the first pass.** Exact negatives in the specific ad group. You can widen later; you cannot easily discover what a broad negative silently killed.

**Do not do this and a bid-strategy change in the same week.** You will not know which one moved the numbers.

**Do not forget the freed budget.** Cutting waste and leaving the money unspent is a smaller account, not a better one.

## **Related**

- [**Recommended Actions: The Queries That Need a Decision**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/sqp-recommended-actions) — step 1.
- [**Search Terms and Aggregated Search Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/search-terms-and-aggregated-search-terms) — step 2.
- [**Building a Rule from Scratch**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/building-a-rule-from-scratch) — step 5.
- [**Guardrails to Set Before You Automate Anything**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/guardrails-before-you-automate) — before you enable anything.
- [**The Bleeder Reports**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/the-bleeder-reports) — the same job across three time windows, including the lifetime pass.
- [**Bid Optimisation: Six Rules**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/bid-optimisation-six-rules) — tapering bids before pausing outright.
- [**Easy-Win Campaigns**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/easy-win-campaigns) — where low-bid auto campaigns fit alongside the cleanup.