There's a question most PPC managers can't answer precisely: of all the clicks your campaigns generated last month, what percentage came from people who were actually ready to buy?
Not browsing. Not researching. Not comparing options for the third time. Actually ready to hand over a credit card.
For most accounts, the honest answer is somewhere between 20–40% of paid clicks represent genuine purchase intent. The rest is interest, research, or misdirected curiosity — and you're paying Google the same CPC for all of it.
This gap between query intent and conversion intent is one of the most expensive inefficiencies in paid search, and it's getting wider as Smart Bidding and broad match expand the reach of campaigns beyond what the keywords you typed actually mean.
Understanding the Intent Spectrum
Search queries exist on a spectrum from informational to transactional. Understanding where different query types sit on that spectrum is the foundation of a profitable PPC strategy.
Informational intent — the user wants to learn something:
- "how to improve ROAS"
- "what is performance max"
- "best practices for google shopping"
These users are researching. They're not buying today. Clicks from informational queries are almost never profitable in a direct-response campaign — but they show up constantly in broad match search term reports.
Commercial investigation intent — the user is evaluating options:
- "best CRM for ecommerce"
- "shopify vs woocommerce"
- "performance max vs standard shopping"
These users are closer to a decision but still in comparison mode. Conversion rates are low, but they're building toward a purchase. Content marketing and retargeting capture these users more efficiently than paid search.
Transactional intent — the user is ready to act:
- "buy nike air max size 10"
- "shopify expert agency london"
- "google ads management service pricing"
These are your money keywords. High CPCs, yes — but conversion rates are 5–10x informational queries. Every budget dollar here is working harder.
Why Smart Bidding Blurs the Line
Here's where it gets complicated for modern PPC management.
Smart Bidding — Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions — uses machine learning to find users most likely to convert based on signals beyond the keyword itself: device, location, time of day, browsing history, in-market audience signals, and dozens of other factors.
The theory is that Smart Bidding can profitably bid on broad and informational queries because the contextual signals tell the algorithm this particular user has high purchase intent despite the generic keyword.
Sometimes this works. A user searching "running shoes" who has visited Nike.com three times this week and has location signals suggesting they're near a running event is a different buyer than someone who just Googled the same term casually.
But Smart Bidding's signals are imperfect, especially post-iOS 14 where third-party data is degraded. The algorithm fills in the gaps with probabilistic modelling — and it makes mistakes. Those mistakes show up as clicks that never convert.
The Query Intent Audit: What to Look For
Pull your search term report for the last 30 days. You're looking for three categories of waste:
Category 1 — Pure informational queries Any search starting with: how, what, why, guide, tutorial, tips, learn, explained. These are almost never converting. Add them as negatives at the campaign level.
Category 2 — Wrong-audience queries Queries that are commercially relevant in your category but attract a different buyer than your product serves. A premium skincare brand showing for "cheap moisturiser" queries is burning budget on price-sensitive buyers who won't convert at premium price points.
Category 3 — Competitor research queries "[Competitor] review," "[Competitor] vs [your brand]," "[Competitor] pricing." These users are evaluating competitors, not looking for you. Conversion rates are typically low and CPCs are high because you're bidding against the competitor themselves.
Building negative keyword lists from these three categories typically reduces wasted spend by 15–25% in accounts that haven't done this work recently.
The Bid Structure That Matches Intent
Once you've cleaned your traffic, the next step is building a campaign structure that bids differently for different intent levels:
High-intent campaigns (exact match on transactional queries): Bid aggressively. These are your profit-driving keywords. Accept higher CPCs because conversion rates justify it. Use Target ROAS with a high target.
Mid-intent campaigns (phrase match on commercial investigation queries): Bid moderately. These users might convert with the right landing page and offer. Use tighter audience targeting — in-market segments, remarketing — to raise the quality of who sees these ads.
Broad match discovery (with Smart Bidding): Keep budgets controlled. Let the algorithm find queries you haven't thought of. Review search terms weekly and add new negatives aggressively. This is where you discover new transactional queries to graduate to exact match campaigns.
The Landing Page Variable
Here's the part most PPC guides skip: intent matching doesn't end at the keyword. It continues to the landing page.
A transactional query should land on a product page or a page with an immediate conversion path — price visible, add to cart accessible, no friction. Landing a transactional query on a blog post or a "learn more" page loses the conversion even when the click was perfectly matched.
A commercial investigation query might convert better on a comparison page or a case study than a direct product page — because the user is still deciding, and a product page feels like pressure rather than information.
Mapping landing pages to intent levels is the often-missing second half of intent strategy.
How to Prioritise This Work
If you've never done a structured intent audit on your Google Ads account, start here:
- Pull the search term report (last 60 days, all campaigns)
- Sort by cost, descending
- Flag the top 50 spending queries as informational, commercial, or transactional
- Add all informational queries as negatives immediately
- Identify which commercial queries have landing pages mismatched to investigation intent
This process takes about 2 hours and typically finds 15–30% of spend being allocated to intent levels that don't match your campaign goals.
If you want a faster starting point, the Gromerce free audit flags intent mismatch signals — including match type structure, negative keyword gaps, and query quality issues — in under 3 minutes.
The Bottom Line
Query intent and conversion intent are not the same thing. Your Google Ads account is almost certainly spending money on clicks from users who were never going to buy from you today — not because they're bad prospects, but because the query they typed doesn't match the point in their journey where paid ads are effective.
Fixing this doesn't require a complete rebuild. It requires a disciplined search term review, a tighter negative keyword structure, and landing pages that match where each user actually is in their decision process.
The ROAS improvement from doing this work properly is typically immediate and measurable.
Related articles: Performance Max vs Search: Which Should Get Your Budget in 2026? · Google Expands Smart Bidding Exploration to Shopping and PMax — And Changes How Your Budget Spends Itself · Stop Running PMax Alone — The Hybrid Strategy That's Actually Lifting E-Commerce ROAS in 2026
Sources: Search Engine Land, Google Ads Search Term documentation, industry intent taxonomy research, 2026
