You’re probably pausing keywords way too early, and it’s hurting your lead gen results.
If you want the best leads at the best prices, you need a system. One that tells you when to pause and when to let a keyword ride. Because you can’t optimize a campaign on vibes.
Knowing when to pause a keyword is one of the most important optimizations you can make. Do it wrong and you’ll keep spending on keywords that aren’t worth it, which pulls money away from the ones that actually work. So you’re not just wasting money, you’re also earning less than you could be. That’s a real problem if you don’t get it right.
Over 8 years of running local lead gen campaigns, I’ve built a system that makes keyword optimization the easiest part of my job, even with 30-plus accounts to optimize every week.
Below I’ll show you:
- The stupid-simple decision-making system I use
- How I’ve automated the whole thing with something faster and more reliable than AI
Why you need a system
Pausing keywords is one of the most important optimizations you’ll ever do. When a keyword stops working, you don’t want to keep pouring budget into it. That part’s obvious.
If you’re managing one account, it’s not that time-consuming. But the second you’re running lots of accounts with hundreds or thousands of keywords, you need a system you can lean on. You can’t manually eyeball every keyword in every account every week. It’s too much. You’ll burn out, you’ll miss things, and your optimizations will get sloppy.
So you need something easy to apply and easy to stay consistent with. Consistent optimization is what actually moves the needle over months and years. If you bounce from one decision-making method to the next with no consistency in how you evaluate keywords, your campaigns will suffer.
Step 1: Know your acceptable cost per lead
Every account has a goal, an acceptable cost per lead. It’s the number where the client is happy and the math works for their business.
If you don’t know what that number should be, here’s a quick way to ballpark it:
- Pull up the Keyword Planner.
- Search one of your main keywords in your area.
- Look at the top-of-page and bottom-of-page bids for that keyword.
- Add them together and divide by 2 to get the average CPC.
- Multiply that by 5 to estimate what a lead should cost in your area for that keyword.
I multiply by 5 because converting 1 in 5 clicks into a lead is a 20% conversion rate, which is a good goal for a local lead gen campaign.
Keep in mind that’s for a mature, optimized campaign. New campaigns might only convert at 5 to 10%. So to be realistic, multiply by 10 instead to represent a 10% conversion rate.
CPL is the only number that matters
Let’s say the acceptable cost per lead is $50. That’s our line in the sand. I look at every keyword in the account through that one lens.
Is this keyword bringing in leads at or below $50? Great, leave it alone. Is it bringing in leads way above $50, or spending money and bringing in nothing? Then it’s a problem.
Don’t forget what we’re trying to do here: generate leads. So your cost per lead is all that really matters. When it comes to pausing keywords, I don’t care about CTR, CPC, or anything else. CPL is king. One target number, and I measure every keyword against it.
The mistake: treating your target like a hard line
You can still mess this up if you treat that number like a hard cutoff. Pause keywords the second they go over the line and you’re not doing yourself any favors.
Here’s an example. Your target is $50 and you’ve got a keyword sitting at a $75 cost per lead. Technically it’s over the line, so you pause it and move on. That can be a big mistake.
If you’d left it one more day, it might have picked up another conversion. Say it then sat at $80 spent and two leads. That’s $40 per lead, under your $50 target. The keyword was fine all along. It just needed a little more time to show what it could do. Because you used a hard limit, you killed it right before it turned the corner.
This happens constantly with keywords that don’t have much data yet. A single lead can swing the cost per lead wildly when the numbers are small. One expensive-looking keyword is often a single click away from being a bargain. On the flip side, a keyword that’s working can drift out of range and get too expensive over time.
The fix: use a multiple, not a hard limit
This is why I use a multiple instead of a hard limit.
On new accounts and new keywords, I use a 2 to 3x multiple. So if my target cost per lead is $50, I don’t even think about pausing until a keyword crosses $100. That’s 2x the target. I give it room to run because I want to be sure.
Remember, you did the keyword research and added that keyword for a reason. Time and effort went into finding it. It was a conscious decision. So I want to be sure before I kill it. I’d rather spend a little extra confirming a keyword is a genuine loser than kill a future winner by accident. The upside of a high-performing keyword is worth far more than the downside of spending a bit extra on testing.
With a 2 to 3x multiple, by the time a keyword crosses the line, it’s spent enough money to have had a fair shot. Now I can pause it and not worry, because I know I’m not leaving leads on the table. So for anything new, 2 to 3x is my default. It keeps me from being trigger happy.
Tighten the multiple as you gather data
That multiple isn’t set in stone. It moves as I collect data.
Early on with any keyword, you don’t know what it’ll actually cost to get a lead. The data’s thin, so you give it room. Once a keyword has several conversions under its belt, you know what you’re dealing with, and you can tighten the leash without worrying about making a premature call. At that point I might drop from a 2x multiple down to 1.5x.
So the rule is simple:
- New, unproven keywords: give them room with a 2 to 3x multiple.
- Established, proven keywords: tighten toward 1.5x, because you know what you’re working with.
How to apply this in your routine
Now that you know the rule, here’s how to actually use it. You’ve got two options.
Option 1: Filters
Go into your keywords and click add filter. Select Cost / conv., choose greater than, and enter your limit. If your acceptable CPA is $50 and you’re using a 2x multiplier, enter $100. Then go down the list and pause anything over $100.
This works, but it’s hands-on. When you’ve got a ton of accounts, those extra hours add up.
Option 2: Automation scripts
This is why I lean on scripts. If you’re not familiar, Google scripts are just pieces of JavaScript that do things inside your ad account, like pulling data or making changes based on rules you set.
Think of scripts as a more primitive, and more reliable, form of AI. I say reliable because AI can hallucinate and flat out lie to you. Scripts, as long as they’re written properly, do exactly what you tell them to. Personally, I’d never trust AI inside an ad account, even just for reporting. Maybe in the future, but you never want to mess with inaccurate numbers.
My scripts run automatically every 24 hours and email me an alert if they find something that needs attention. That’s what makes them easy to use. Set them up and wait for the alert. If you want a copy, they’re in my Google Ads Script Pack. The two I’d use here are the High CPA Keyword Alert and the Junk Keyword Alert. You set a threshold, and if a keyword crosses it, the script emails you.
In practice, as long as the scripts are running, I almost never manually review keyword performance. I just wait for the email.
These scripts, along with the others in the pack, save me around 30 hours a month. Do the math. You’ll spend at least 15 minutes in each account every week, minimum. 15 minutes across 30 accounts is 7.5 hours a week. Multiply by four weeks and you’re at 30 hours a month. That’s almost a full work week, every month, spent on something a few scripts can do for you while you sleep.
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