Discovery to conversion, fully automated.
Search terms move through a four-stage funnel. Converters get promoted, waste gets negated, and match types tighten as confidence grows.
- Funnel stages
- 4
- Conversion window
- 30d
- Automated movement
- 24/7
Funnel stages
Conversion window
Automated movement
Every keyword gets a path to prove itself.
Discovery stays open so the account keeps learning. Everything downstream of it is earned, which is why the spend concentrates without you writing a rule for each term.
- Discovery Auto + Broad
- Surface every search term that could convert, on a fixed learning budget.
- Research Phrase
- Isolate the converters and decide which terms have earned a graduation.
- Performance Exact
- Tighten targeting around proven converters and price them by margin.
- Ranking Exact, top of search
- Push the strongest performers with placement modifiers.
Four moves, running continuously.
Promotion, negation, match-type changes, and budget allocation all run from conversion data. No weekly report housekeeping.
Converters graduate
A term that clears its order and confidence threshold moves to the next stage with a tighter match type.
Waste is negated
Spend without orders past the threshold is negated upstream, so the same query cannot be bought twice.
Match types tighten
Broad becomes phrase, phrase becomes exact, and exact earns placement modifiers as evidence accrues.
Budget follows proof
Discovery keeps a fixed learning budget while the rest concentrates on terms that have already converted.
Terms graduate on proof, not opinion.
Each move carries the numbers that justified it. When a term is promoted you can see the orders behind it, and when one is blocked you can see exactly what it cost before it was cut.
- Explicit thresholds for orders, clicks, and confidence at every stage
- Negatives applied upstream so campaigns never bid against each other
- Every graduation and block written to the same decision ledger
What the funnel replaces.
Most accounts run some version of this by hand, in a search-term report, once a week, when someone has time.
| Manual search-term review | Keyword funnels | |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | Weekly, when someone gets to it | Continuous, on every data refresh |
| Promotion rule | Analyst judgement, rarely written down | Explicit order and confidence thresholds |
| Negation | Added locally, often duplicated | Applied upstream across the structure |
| Match-type changes | Batch edits in bulk uploads | Tightened per term as evidence accrues |
| Audit trail | Spreadsheet history, if any | Every move logged with its reason |
- 4
- Funnel stages
- 30d
- Conversion window
- 70%
- Spend on proven converters
- 24/7
- Automated movement