Live connector data or pasted CSV exports for search term reviews?

Say you're doing a monthly search term cleanup. You can export the report from Google Ads as a CSV and drop it into the chat, or let the AI pull the same data live through a connector. The CSV has fans because you can see exactly what the model is looking at, and it works in any chat app. Still, for anything you'll act on, I think the live pull wins, mostly because an export is a snapshot. Paste it on Monday, change bids on Tuesday, and the AI is reasoning about numbers that no longer match the account. Where the CSV still earns its place is one-off questions about a past period, since you get a fixed file you can re-check. Curious how others split it, especially on accounts with a lot of daily changes.

Agreed on the snapshot problem. Conversions also trickle in late, so a search term pulled a few days after the period closes will usually look worse than it does a week later. Run cleanups on a window that ended at least a week ago, or you'll end up cutting terms that were just slow to report.

Agreed on the late conversions. It really comes down to how much data a term gets per week. On a high-volume account, a week of search terms is plenty to judge a term fairly, so the snapshot age matters less. On a small account, a term with three clicks can look dead just because the conversion hasn't landed yet.

On a small account I'd stop judging single terms in the first pass. Group them by theme first, like all the "cheap" variants or all the "near me" ones, and look at the group. Three clicks on one term tells you almost nothing, but twenty clicks across six similar terms with no conversions means the theme isn't working. After that, pull up the conversion lag report to see how long your conversions usually take to show up, so you know how old the data window has to be before you cut any individual term.

The lag report is useful, but on a small account I'd read it loosely. It shows the distribution across the whole account, so if you only get a handful of conversions a month, the "90% land within 14 days" figure rests on very few data points and can swing from month to month. Say a plumbing firm gets eight conversions a month. One call logged two weeks after the click can move that number a lot. I'd use the report to pick a rough window and then add some margin on top. And once you're grouping terms by theme, the group is what you judge, so the lag matters less than whether each theme has enough clicks behind it to tell you anything.

For small accounts, a cost-based check beats click counts. Before you cut a theme, let it spend roughly two to three times your target CPA with zero conversions. At that spend a converting term would very likely have shown up by now, so the silence actually means something. Click counts don't scale that way, because a cheap keyword and an expensive one can both hit 20 clicks while one has burned far more money. For a plumbing firm with an $80 target lead cost, that works out to about $160 to $240 in spend per theme before you call it dead.

Agreed on the spend check, but tie it to the conversion window. With a 30-day click-through window on your primary action, a theme that spent $200 in the last ten days hasn't finished converting yet, so a zero tells you very little. Only judge spend from clicks that are at least a full window old. It's easy to slip on this when you pull the report on a Monday and a theme looks dead when it's really just recent.