In my opinion, the Google Ads Search Term Report is the most important reporting section of Google Ads, barring all others.
It is the report that allows you to see exactly what people have typed in to Google that has triggered your advertisement to appear and for a visitor to click through to your website.
Whilst your keywords are the words that you think you are targeting with Google Ads to bring people to your website, the Search Term Report shows you the real words that they used to find your website.
Why are they different?
Well, it all comes down to your keyword matching options.
If you are using Broad Match (not advised) or even these days Phrase Match (since Google made this reach much further) you will generate clicks through related keywords to the ones that you have chosen to target.
The Search Term Report allows you to see which keywords and you can then decide if you would like to add these new keywords, or perhaps even more powerfully, add them to the ‘negative keywords’ list if you don’t want to be spending money for that type of visitor.
Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Broad Match
If you are looking to generate conveyancing quotations from your website you might have a Broad Match search like this one:
conveyancing solicitor
In this case, your advertisements will be shown not just for the term targeted, but also searches related to it, for example housing solicitor (which may be vastly different in search intent) and anything else related to property and the legal sector.
Broad match, these days, is casting the net far and wide, and should only be used alongside checking your search term report every day to add all of the negative keywords that you can so that your ad only triggers for ‘buyer intent’ keywords.
Phrase Match
A Phrase Match for the same term will look like this:
“conveyancing solicitor”.
This will mean that your advertisement will now be triggered whenever the word conveyancing and solicitor are “googled” in the same search.
Therefore, if someone types in “How do I sue a conveyancing solicitor” or “conveyancing solicitor jobs”, your advertisement will be triggered.
If they click on your advertisement you will be charged even though the visitor is not your target lead as they are not looking to buy a house.
Phrase Match used to be much more closely targeted than this, but Google broadened its reach and it has become much less useful.
Exact Match
Exact match looks like this:
[conveyancing solicitor].
In this case, your ad will only trigger when these words appear together. So, you might still appear for search terms including these words and ‘jobs’ and ‘sue’, but you would quickly add those two words to your negative keywords list so that your advertisements are not triggered whenever anyone includes the word ‘sue’ or ‘jobs’ in their search for a conveyancing solicitor.
You can see why the Ads Search Term Report becomes such an important thing to check.
So, the next question, how often should you check it?
How often should you check your Search Term report?
If you are setting up a new campaign, my advice is to check it every single day. In the early days of an Ads Campaign you will be keen to start generating visitors to your website, so you are likely to be using a lot of modified broad match search terms to discover what keywords are out there. Checking your Search Term Report every day will allow you to quickly add new keywords that are good as phrase match search terms (“in quotes”) and also to grow your list of negative keywords so that you don’t waste your budget on irrelevant keywords.
Once you have been running your Ads campaign for a number of weeks or months and the visitor numbers are much more stable, then I recommend at least a weekly review of the Search Term Report.
I hope you can see why I consider the Search Term Report to be the most important part of a Google Ads campaign.
When did you last check yours?
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