USA & Global
We run a Google Ads campaign for our own marketing agency in Guayaquil. The job is simple. When someone searches for an agency here, the ads should appear. The search we are paying Google to understand is agencia de marketing guayaquil.
A campaign is more than that keyword. You set the ads, the audience, the landing page, the city, and the budget. Then you add keywords. Those keywords are supposed to decide when Google is allowed to show the ad.
This is not a polished client win. It is a campaign we actually run, used here as a working example so the problem is easy to follow.
Google gives you three ways to write a keyword: exact, phrase, and broad.
Exact match is the one that looks responsible. You put the query in brackets — [agencia de marketing guayaquil] — and you tell Google: show the ad when someone searches this, or something so close that the intent is the same. For a local service in one city, that feels like the adult choice.
Then the campaign sits there. Google says there are not enough searches for that exact keyword, and it restricts the account. The setup looks correct. Nothing happens. Exact match is not a strategy if the auction never starts.
So you open the match. Broad match is the other extreme. You point at a phrase like agencia marketing, and Google treats almost anything in that neighborhood as fair game: courses, careers, software, how-to queries, people who are not hiring anyone.
Watch a search-terms report for a week and the illusion goes away. Broad match is not a filter. It is a way to keep the campaign spending.
That leaves the middle option: phrase match. You put the keyword in quotes — "agencia marketing guayaquil". On paper, Google should show the ad on close variants: a different word order, a conjugation, an obvious synonym, the same buying question asked another way. It should not show the ad on a marketing-theory class, an AI ads tool, or a motivational slogan.
Phrase match is the only setting we can keep running. It is not clean. It is the least-bad option Google will let you use. And it still puts the ad on searches that have nothing to do with the keyword.
It is easy to assume this only happens at the start, while the account is empty and the algorithm is "learning." That is not what the report shows.
The capture below is from this same Guayaquil campaign after four months, with about five hundred negative keywords already in place. The keyword we are paying for is still a marketing agency in Guayaquil. Google still found room for 5 p del marketing and ad genius ai.
If phrase match meant what the name suggests, those queries would never have been eligible. They are not conjugations of "agencia de marketing guayaquil." They are not synonyms. They are not close variants. They are Google finding another way to spend the budget.
Months later, after adding negatives week after week, new junk still appears. A later report includes searches like build your freedom — again treated as a reasonable variant of a local agency keyword.
The pattern is always the same. You clean the search terms. Conversions look saner for a while. Then a new family of nonsense shows up. This is not work you do at launch. It is maintenance.
We want the ads to fire when people search for us the way we want to be found: agencia marketing guayaquil. We do not want to pay for clicks on searches like cómo levantar un negocio.
That last query is not made up. From the first day we added cómo se hace as a negative, hoping Google would stop treating how-to searches as a variant of hiring an agency. Four months later, a how-to query still leaked through now and then.
A negative keyword is a line you draw. This search is not purchase intent. Do not show the ad. Do not spend here.
When a useless search appears, we mark that exact query as a negative exact match. Not a theme. Not a broad block that might also kill good traffic. The specific search that just wasted money.
Then we do it again the next week. And the week after that. For as long as the campaign is on. The search-terms report is not a dashboard you glance at. It is a cleanup list.
After months, the conversions look different. Not because Google suddenly understood the keyword. Because we filtered a pile of searches that were never going to become a client.
Phrase match is the setting you can actually run. Exact negatives, added every week, are how you carve a real audience out of the mess Google keeps pouring back in. If you are not doing that, you are not running search. You are paying for random traffic and calling it a keyword strategy.
Strategy, design, content and growth.
