The search terms report is a Google Ads feature that lets you see exactly which search terms increase the visibility of your ads and their relationship to the keywords you’re targeting. This report can be used to generate ideas for the content your customers are looking for and to improve your ads performance.
Search terms and keywords are different concepts
Keyword: These are the words you can add to your account so that your ads reach the target audience.
Search term: The word or group of words a person uses while searching on Google.
Manage Your Keywords With Search Terms Report
Use your search terms data to make strategic changes to your keywords that can improve your advertising performance. Here are some ideas:
- Add high-performing search terms into your ad group as keywords, and potentially adjust your bids as well. Keep in mind that search terms appearing in the report are already generating traffic. Thus, adding these search terms as keywords may not necessarily have a significant impact unless paired with changes to bids, ad text, or both.
- Review and update the match type (e.g. broad, phrase, or exact match) for your existing keywords. It can help you understand how the correct keyword match type is affecting your ads performance. In the search terms report, the “Match type” column can be a useful resource in this regard.
If a search term is NOT relevant to your products or services, consider adding it as a negative keyword . This will prevent your ad from being shown to users searching for something that you don’t sell. For instance, if you sell sunglasses and you see that the search term “reading glasses” is causing your ads to trigger, you may want to add “reading” as a negative keyword.
How to View Your Search Terms?
You will see the report and find search terms data that have been used by a number of customers and triggered clicks
While investigating your data, you can use the following features as well:
- Segment button : To separate table into conversions, time, device that the ad was shown in or networks
- Download button : To download the data in desired format
- Columns button : To modify columns, add/remove or reorder
- Expand button : To enlarge the table
Interpret Your Search Terms Data
Match type column : It tells you how relevant the search terms that triggered your ads are to the actual keywords. You can see which match types work better.
Keyword column : It shows which of your keywords matched the search term and got clicked. You can check your keywords in action and improve your keyword list.
You will not find it at first glance because the Keyword column is not displayed by default. To see this column, follow these steps:
- Click the Column button mentioned above
- Click “Attributes”
- Check “Keyword” box
- Click “Apply”
If you have a close variation of search term match type, it will be shown in the “Match type column”. Close variants can form due to misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, stem words (such as clean and cleaning), abbreviations, accents and synonyms.
Modify Your Report
You can view search terms for specific campaigns and modify your report in your Google Ads account. However, remember that you can’t add keywords or negative keywords directly to your report.
Follow these steps to edit your report:
- Click reporting icon on the top right menu
- Select “Predefined reports” from the drop-down menu
- Choose category
Search terms report and search terms insights may have different data from each other. Search terms insight analyzes the search terms in which your ads appear over a period of time.
