The keyword list says what you asked for. The search terms report says what you got, and on a grant account the gap between the two is where the click-through rate goes. Reading it is the highest-value recurring job on the account and the one most often left for a quieter week.
What one set of changes should contain
- Negatives for the terms that are plainly not the audience, at the level that belongs — campaign-wide for the ones that are never right, ad group for the ones that are right elsewhere.
- Promotions: a term that converted is a phrase or exact keyword you had not thought of, and it belongs in the ad group whose ad already answers it.
- Pauses for the keywords that spent and converted nothing. Pause rather than remove: a pause can be put back and a removal cannot.
- A note of what changed, so next month's reading starts from what last month's decided.
Weekly is better than monthly on an account using broad match, and the first month of a new account is worth reading every few days — that is when the expensive mismatches are introduced and when they are cheapest to remove.
Questions people ask
The report shows fewer terms than we have clicks.
Google withholds terms with very little traffic. What is shown is the part worth acting on; the long tail is read through the keywords it matched.
Should every irrelevant term become a negative?
The ones that recur. A single odd search that cost one impression is not worth a list entry, and a list nobody can read is a list that eventually blocks something it should not.
Does the agent apply any of this?
No. It proposes all of it in one change, Google validates it, and a specialist applies or skips it.