Click the Ads tab to view all ads in your account.

Near the top right, click the Filter and views dropdown button and then select Filter ads.

1. From the dropdown menu, change the > ("greater than") sign to < ("less than"). Then enter the CTR percentage for the ads you want to see. All these ads will be below the CTR you set. In the example above, I’ve set the threshold CTR at 0.1%. That means only ads with 0.09% CTR or lower will survive this filter.

2. Click the + Add filter rule link to bring up another row for a rule. Change CTR to Impressions. The comparison should automatically change to >= ("greater than or equal to"). Select the threshold amount of impressions. In the example above, I’ve chosen 1000. So only ads that have received 1000 or more impressions will survive the filter.

3. Select the Save filter checkbox to bring up a text box for naming the filter. In the example above, I call it Low CTR, High Impr. I will now call upon this filter whenever I want to find the lowest CTR ads that are getting a lot of impressions.

Click Apply to save and activate the filter.

 

The ads that remain in the dashboard will be your worst performing ads with a significant number of impressions.

Click the ad group name to go to that ad group.

Click the Keywords tab to show all the keywords in the ad group of the low CTR ad.

Study the keywords, then either peel some keywords into a different ad group, pause or delete some keywords, or rewrite the ad to be more relevant to the keywords in the ad group.

Return to the Ads tab.

Mouse over the text of an ad to bring up a pencil icon to the right of the ad. Click the icon to begin editing the ad. If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll see the warning message shown above. Select Don’t show this message again by checking the box, then click Yes, I understand to reassure Google that you’re OK with your ad statistics being reset.

Change any of the five lines of your ad, then click the Save button.

By constantly targeting the lowest performing of your ads, you can systematically improve your quality scores across your account.

*Note: if you’re split testing ads in an ad group, then make sure you pay attention to the split tests before making changes to a single ad. Respect the test, and wait for a winner or a statistical dead heat before making changes.

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Let’s end with a joke: