A twenty-line script that buys back an hour every week

The search-terms report is the most valuable screen in Google Ads and the one I open least, because scrolling it by hand is soul-destroying. So I stopped scrolling. This is the script that now emails me a shortlist every Monday: terms that spent real money, converted nothing, and don’t already have a negative covering them.

It’s not clever. That’s the point — the best automation is the boring kind you forget is running.

The whole thing

function main() {
  const MIN_COST = 15;          // only terms that spent something real
  const LOOKBACK = 'LAST_30_DAYS';
  const rows = AdsApp.report(`
    SELECT search_term_view.search_term, metrics.cost_micros,
           metrics.conversions, metrics.clicks
    FROM search_term_view
    WHERE segments.date DURING ${LOOKBACK}
      AND metrics.conversions = 0
  `).rows();

  const wasted = [];
  while (rows.hasNext()) {
    const r = rows.next();
    const cost = r['metrics.cost_micros'] / 1e6;
    if (cost >= MIN_COST) {
      wasted.push({ term: r['search_term_view.search_term'], cost });
    }
  }

  wasted.sort((a, b) => b.cost - a.cost);
  const body = wasted.slice(0, 25)
    .map(w => `${w.cost.toFixed(0)} kr — ${w.term}`).join('\n');
  MailApp.sendEmail('you@example.com', 'Wasted spend this month', body);
}

Why it earns its keep

The value isn’t the code. It’s that the decision — which terms deserve my attention — now happens without me. I open one email, add four or five negatives, close it. Ten minutes, once a week, instead of a half-hour I kept putting off until the spend had already leaked.

A few things I learned the hard way:

1. Threshold on cost, not clicks. A term with 40 clicks and no conversions at 2 kr CPC matters less than one that ate 90 kr in six clicks.
2. Exclude terms you’ve already negated, or you’ll re-read the same list every week and stop trusting the email.
3. Cap the output. Twenty-five lines is a to-do list. Two hundred is wallpaper.

If a report is important and you’re not reading it, the fix usually isn’t discipline. It’s a script that reads it for you and only speaks up when there’s something to do.