TL;DR: Running Google Ads? Someone just shared a 10-step prompt that turns your search term report into a clear decision sheet: what to scale, what to block, and where your budget is leaking right now.
The Problem
Going through a search term report manually is slow. You’re sorting hundreds of queries trying to figure out which ones pull weight, which ones need work, and which ones are quietly draining spend for no return. It’s the kind of task that takes an hour and still leaves you second-guessing the calls.
And even when you finish, the decisions usually come down to gut feel. Is this query “good enough” to keep? Is the CPA just slightly high because of a bad week, or is it a structural problem? You end up making judgment calls on 200 rows without a consistent framework, which means the same mistake shows up in next month’s report too.
The other thing that gets missed in manual audits: patterns. Individual queries might look borderline acceptable on their own, but when you step back, you notice the same low-quality modifiers showing up across dozens of terms. Words like “free,” “jobs,” “DIY,” “tutorial.” Each one spending a few dollars here and there. Together they’re eating a meaningful chunk of your budget on traffic that was never going to convert. Manual sorting rarely catches this because you’re evaluating terms one by one instead of looking across the full set.
This prompt from r/ChatGPTPromptGenius structures the whole audit into 10 steps you can run in one session.
How It Works
You provide your campaign goal and 7 to 14 days of search term data. The prompt walks through a full breakdown for every query in your report:
- Intent classification: high, medium, or low
- Intent type: transactional, commercial, informational, or irrelevant
- Estimated conversion probability based on query intent and actual performance data
- A clear action for each term: scale, optimize, test, or add as negative
The decision framework in Step 4 is the part worth paying attention to. Most manual audits look at intent OR performance in isolation. This one uses both together:
- High intent + strong CPA: scale
- High intent + weak CPA: fix the landing page or ad copy, not the bids
- Low intent + any spend: add as negative, full stop
That middle category is where a lot of budget gets mismanaged. When a high-intent query has a weak CPA, the instinct is to lower bids or pause it. But that’s often the wrong move. If someone searched for “buy project management software for small teams” and didn’t convert, the query did its job. The breakdown is downstream. Cutting bids just means you pay less to keep losing the same people. The prompt flags this distinction explicitly so you don’t confuse a traffic problem with a landing page problem.
Beyond the per-query table, the prompt also surfaces broad match leakage patterns, repeating low-quality modifiers (free, jobs, cheap), your top 20 keywords worth scaling, and budget allocation guidance on where to push spend versus where to pull back.
The broad match leakage section alone is usually worth the time. Broad match has gotten better over the years but it still fires on searches that have almost nothing to do with what you’re actually selling. Without a regular audit, those terms accumulate. A few hundred dollars a month in wasted spend is easy to miss when you’re looking at overall campaign numbers, but it adds up fast over a quarter.
The budget allocation output at the end ties it together. Instead of a list of problems, you get a directional answer: here are the campaigns or ad groups that deserve more budget based on what’s actually working, and here’s where you should pull back. That’s the kind of output you can act on the same day instead of spending another hour turning the data into a recommendation.
Use Cases
- 🔍 Monthly PPC audit: paste 30 days of data and get a prioritized negative keyword list in one pass
- Pre-meeting prep: build the decision story before a client or stakeholder review so you’re not winging it. Walk in with “here are the three things we’re changing and why” instead of a spreadsheet that still needs interpretation
- Post-launch check: understand exactly why a new campaign isn’t converting before you start guessing. The intent classification step usually makes it obvious whether you have a targeting problem, a messaging problem, or a funnel problem
It also works well as a second pass after you’ve already done a manual review. Even experienced media buyers miss things when they’re moving fast. Running the prompt after your own audit is a useful sanity check. If it flags something you didn’t catch, that’s worth knowing. If it agrees with your calls, you go into the client conversation with more confidence.
Prompt of the Day
The framing line that kicks the whole thing off:
“You are a Senior Google Ads Performance Analyst. Think like someone managing real budget, not just analyzing data.”
That context shift changes the output from generic summaries to actual decisions you can act on the same day.
The reason this framing works is that it changes what the model optimizes for. Without it, you tend to get analysis: here are the numbers, here are some observations. With it, you get recommendations: here is what to do next and why. The difference between someone presenting a report and someone who has to defend a budget decision with their name on it. That second mindset is what you want when you’re auditing spend.
Try It
Paste your next search term export into Claude or ChatGPT with this prompt. Export from Google Ads directly, include at least 7 days of data, and make sure conversion tracking is firing correctly before you run it. The output is only as good as the data you feed it, so a week with tracking issues will skew the CPA numbers and the recommendations with them.
Even if you already run manual audits, a structured second pass tends to catch things that slip through the cracks. The patterns section especially. It takes about 10 minutes to run and usually finds at least one thing worth acting on.
What did it surface that surprised you? Drop it in the comments.
Simple prompt to analyze Google Ads search terms (and find wasted spend)
by u/vijaybhabhor in ChatGPTPromptGenius