Insights On Google Ads Search Term Report And Its Use

Insights On Google Ads Search Term Report And Its Use

For reaching the right people, with the right message, you need to know exactly how your ads are doing and what words potential customers are using to search.

A search term report feature on Google Ads lists specific search queries or terms that users type into Google, triggering the display of your ad. It gives you a peek into actual search queries your potential customers are looking up that led them to see your ad. With the data from the Google Ads search terms report, advertisers can target relevant profitable keywords, discover keywords, and understand user intent to optimize their Google Ads campaigns.

A search term report in Google Ads helps advertisers understand how their ads are performing based on the actual searches that triggered their ads within the Search Network. The report shows specific terms and phrases that triggered your ad to show, which helps determine if you’re bidding on the right keywords or using the right match types. If you find search terms that aren’t relevant for your business, you can easily add them to your negative keyword list repository. This helps you spend your budget more effectively by ensuring your ads are only triggered for relevant, useful searches by potential customers.

Benefits of Using Google Ads Search Terms Report:

Refining your keyword targeting strategy based on the data and insight from the Google Ads search term report, enables reaching a highly relevant audience. By discovering high-intent terms and filtering out irrelevant queries, advertisers can improve audience quality and ad efficiency. This ultimately improves your Quality Score, which also means lower CPC and improved ad rank.

The Google Ads search terms report helps in identifying negative keywords that reduce wasted ad spend. Focusing the Google Ads budget on high-converting terms decreases CPC and overall ad costs. This targeted approach leads to higher ROI and more effective marketing within the same budget.  

Search Terms Report for Performance Max Campaigns

Google rolled out a significant update for PMax campaigns that allowed advertisers more transparency and control over their ad placements. PMax search terms became available in the standard search term report. Now advertisers can view the search terms of their PMax campaigns.

To create Search Term Report in your Google Ads is simpler and, better yet, can be automated. You need to log into your Google Ads account and then navigate to Campaigns>>Insights & reports>>Search terms.

Ways To Use Search Term Report Data

1. Refine existing keyword lists

Refining existing keyword lists is the first area where the search term report can help. Some of the areas of opportunities you will find: what searches are leading to conversions, what searches are irrelevant to the product or service, what searches have high impressions but low clicks, and how searches are being mapped to existing keywords and ad groups.

It probably makes sense to add those keywords to an already-existing ad group or start a new one for searches that result in conversions. It is recommended to include certain queries as negative keywords if you believe they have nothing to do with your product. This prevents your ad from showing up for that search moving forward.

Take action in the bid strategy if some searches have a high volume of impressions, but very few clicks, and it is a keyword worth bidding on, which may indicate that the bid strategy isn’t competitive enough.

Reviewing and updating existing keyword match types as necessary and adding negative keywords where appropriate at the ad group or campaign level to avoid cross-pollution. When a search phrase is triggered by several keywords and ad groups, this is known as cross-pollination of keywords, since it is effectively having numerous keywords bid on that search term, which might increase the cost; this could result in a worse ROI.

2. Understand How Your Audience is Actually Searching For Your Product

Bidding on keywords you think describe your product or service, but not getting any traction, then you could be misaligning expectations. Oftentimes, searches that lead to conversions are from terms you wouldn’t have thought to bid on without looking at the search term report.

Finding lesser-known ways customers are searching for and finding your product is one of the report’s most underutilized use cases, and finding these types of keywords may result in the creation of a new campaign, especially if the search terms don’t fit existing ad group structures.  

Building out campaigns by different search themes enables appropriate bidding strategies for each because not all keyword values are created equal. Understanding how a customer is describing their need for a product or service not only helps your keyword strategy but can lead to better-aligned product positioning. This leads to a third way the search term report can help your campaigns.

3. Optimize Ad Copy and Landing Pages

Customers’ language and phrases provide valuable insights into their needs and preferences. Marketers can use the search terms report to better tailor ad copy, making it more relevant and appealing to prospective customers.

Once a user clicks on an ad, they expect to see an alignment of what they searched for and what is presented on a website. Make sure that landing page content is updated regularly to better match the searcher’s intent, which can result in a better user experience and an improvement in conversion rates. 

Using the Search Terms Report Can Help Campaign ROI

Part of refining existing keywords is negating any irrelevant search terms that trigger an ad. Having a solid negative keyword strategy gets rid of “unwanted” spending on keywords that don’t make sense. Previously “wasted” spend is getting redirected to campaigns that regularly drive higher ROI. In addition, adding top-performing search terms gives you better control from a bid strategy perspective. Being able to pull the appropriate levers and set proper bid strategies by search theme ultimately leads to better ROI.

Understanding the exact language and search terms, marketers can update ad copy and landing pages to better match those searches. This can increase ad relevance and Ad Rank within Google Ads. These items help with keyword Quality Score, which can help reduce CPCs as your Quality Score increases. More relevant ads likely lead to higher click-through rates, which leads to a higher likelihood of converting those users.

Better understanding the audience’s search intent, updating ad copy and landing pages reflecting their search, and indicating better ad relevance. Once the user clicks on that relevant ad, they find the content on the landing page better than what they’re looking for. This can significantly increase the likelihood of conversion, ultimately boosting ROI