Google’s Search Query Report unveils the best search terms, and some really bad ones too

The Search Query Report in Google is simply a PPC advertiser’s dream come true. No more fiddling with website statistics and server logs! The Search Query Report gives you all the search terms that matched the keywords in your account one way or the other. Run the report, download it as a spreadsheet and sort on the click-through ratio (CTR). Now behold:

1. a list of very good exact match keywords to be added to your account
2. a list of bad search terms or words that should be added to your “negative” list.

Why are exact match keywords so important? To understand this, you first need to read our description of how search engines rank advertisements.

An exact match keyword is normally more relevant, and normally has a better CTR, than a broad match keyword. Just insert the word “sex” after any of your search terms and you have found at least one occasion where your advertisement may not be relevant. If you run a sex site, try “free”, “christian” or any city or country name instead.

Broad match keywords typically match a lot of searches that are irrelevant to the advertisement, which is why most advertisers try to find as many exact match keywords as possible for their ad groups.

A good practice is still to include broad match keywords alongside the same exact match keywords in order to get clicks also for slightly less relevant search terms. As an example, if you use “internet marketing training” with broad match, you may also get clicks from someone searching for “internet marketing training europe”.

Using the server log to optimize a keyword list

In the past, advertisers scanned their server logs for referrer strings (the URL of the page that the click came from), since the referrer string from a search engine normally includes the search term that was used to trigger the advertisement. Most log analysis programs even have a separate “Search terms” section that conveniently lists the most popular search terms that brought visitors to your site.

Using the list of the actual search terms that brought visitors to the website, the advertiser does two things:

• By scanning the list, additional good search terms can be identified and added to the account as exact match keywords. This way they will get a higher CTR the next time they are used. A higher CTR is a major advantage for the advertiser, since it often leads to a higher ranking.
• The list also contains words for which the advertiser doesn’t want to show the advertisement (e.g. “sex” or “free"). These unwanted impressions reduce the CTR for the ads. To avoid this, the advertiser adds these “bad” keywords as negative match keywords to the campaign or ad group.

But log analysis can be time-consuming. Another drawback is that your server log only includes the search terms that actually brought someone to your site. You still don’t know anything about the many searches that included irrelevant keywords, and caused the ad to appear even though it was very unlikely that the user would click on it.

Using the Search Query Report to optimize your keywords

With Google’s new Search Query Report, you can get the same information in a much more manageable way just by running a report. The Search Query Report lists all the search terms that caused an impression for one of your advertisements. You can download this list as a spreadsheet, and use it to optimize your advertising.

Here is an example of what you can do:

1. Run the report, including both the Campaign and Ad Group columns.
2. Download the report and open it in your spreadsheet program.
3. Sort the list on “Impressions”.
4. Delete all lines with less than 10 impressions as they probably don’t matter much anyway.
5. Create a copy of the list you now have, e.g. in a new worksheet. Name the original one “exact”, and the other “negative”.
6. Sort the “negative” list on CTR.
7. Create a list of negative keywords by examining the searches with the lowest CTR. Delete all the lines in the spreadsheet that don’t contain a good negative keyword.
8. Sort the “negative” list on Campaign and Ad Group, and add these negative search terms to the corresponding campaigns and ad groups.
9. Open the “exact” list. Create a list of suitable exact match keywords – with Google it doesn’t matter whether you already have them in your account or not – by deleting all lines that would be inappropriate for exact match.
10. Sort the “exact” list on Campaign and Ad Group, and add these search terms as exact match keywords to the corresponding campaigns and ad groups.

This little update can have an enormous impact on your advertising results. Your new exact match keywords will typically have a much higher CTR than the corresponding broad match keyword had, which will give your advertisements a higher average position in the search results.

The new negative keywords will avoid showing your ads for irrelevant searches, which will improve the CTR for the corresponding advertisement – again giving your advertisements a higher average position than they would have had without this simple tuning effort.