If you’re only bidding on exact match keywords, skip this post. But if you’re bidding on any phrase match or broad match keywords, you need to be running search query reports or using the “see search terms” option at the adgroup level on a regular basis. If you’re bidding on broad match keywords in particular, you must be running these reports because it may well blow your mind to find out what search queries Google is matching your ads up to.
Why do you want to do this? Because 20 minutes spent on this could more than double your clickthrough rate or find you a few negative keywords to add that could cut your costs by 30% will no drop in sales or leads, or whatever it is you’re after.
Search query reports are run through the reports tab in your account. Like all other reports, you can set them up to run automatically as often as you like. Once a month is a good start, but if you have a high-volume account or a keyword that needs emergency attention, running them once a week is not too often. Once a day won’t help a lot – you need a bit of traffic and results to really get actionable data out of these reports. If you’ve never run a search query report before, set the time frame to the last 3-6 months. Choosing “all time” might bring in data from when your business focus was different, or from when you had your account or campaign organized differently.
You can run a search query report at the ad group or the campaign level. This matches the negative keyword options, too – you can add negative keywords at the ad group or campaign level. If you have the time, work your search query reports at the ad group level. If you don’t, work them at the campaign level. Or, if you like the 80/20 rule, pick your top 3-5 adgroups and run search query reports at the ad group level for them, then run one search query report for the whole campaign. Pay attention to the differences between the campaign and ad group level. I have seen accounts where we definitely wanted to add a negative keyword to an adgroup, but if we had added it at the campaign level we would have spoiled the results in a different adgroup in the same campaign.
You can also include conversion data in your search query reports. Unless you’re working for a non-profit that has no interest in where its money goes or how its spent, I’d include the conversion data. All too frequently, keywords that perform poorly with clickthrough rate end up doing terrific in terms of conversions. Murphy lives.
Google’s new interface lets you “see search terms” – this is basically the search query report, but with a slightly different take, and none of the hassle of going over to the reporting tab and messing with settings.
This is where the pull-down menu is in the adgroup interface:
And this is what the results look like:
You can easily add the words the report gives you back as negative keywords or regular keywords.
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