1. The keywords you want may be worthless 2. Google/Bing/Yahoo stopped sending the keyword data about a year ago (so you have almost no insight into what keywords did what
What is important is driving meaningful traffic. This usually means increasing visits that increase revenue.
Here is the hard part, besides ecommerce sites, most businesses do NOT track at the level needed to know.
Even if you educate people, there is a tiny set that actually care to track and an even smaller set that actually put in the effort to do so.
A lot of people still care about the vanity side. "I am #1 for <keyword>"
Pay for Perforamce marketing only works if you close the loop. And even then it's a hard to do and may not be best for everyone
To me, it does sound like your friend was a victim of fraud.