What is a Search Term Report and How to Get One?
- Gamze Sucu
One of the most important things about Search
Engine Marketing (SEM) is relevance. Relevance
has an algorithm designed to fully understand
the user’s search intent and match it with
your ads.
The Search Terms Report plays
an important role in helping you achieve this
and in optimizing your Ads search campaign.
What Exactly is the Search Terms Report?
The Search Terms Report is the process of
gathering and presenting the keywords that users
searched for before clicking on your ads,
providing this information in a report format.
If you are an advertiser, you already know that
when a user clicks on your ad, it costs you
money, and if the click is in the form you
envisioned, you already know how it will be
billed. By addressing all these, you have to
ensure that your ads are shown to the target
audience or the right users and prevent
unnecessary clicks, i.e. costs. At this point,
the Search Terms Report will be very useful to
you.
If you know which keywords your ads are
targeting and which keywords should be in your
ad group, you can also determine exactly which
ones should appear in the search terms report.
Optimize Your Ads with the Search Terms Report!
When running search campaigns, there are certain
aspects you need to carefully review and
monitor. To do this thoroughly, you can follow
these steps sequentially:
- Select the keywords for which you want to display search terms. Here, you can check every keyword, as there are fewer overall clicks and you want to deal with as much data as you can within the area of interest.
- Then click on the Search Terms field here.
- On the screen that appears, you will see the search terms report given at the bottom. You can also download the report to your device.
To optimize your ads, the procedure you need to
follow is quite straightforward:
1. Understand the Purpose of Your Campaign: Knowing the campaign’s objective is crucial for crafting the right keywords and messages. You should be clear about this and state the purpose of your campaign directly, in one sentence if possible.
(For example: The campaign goal is to reach
users searching for digital marketing training
in Istanbul.)
2- Find search terms that are not relevant to
your objective:
Within the keywords you will obtain for your
campaign, there will be words that are related
to keywords but are not actually in your
campaign goal, that is, words that are in the
same context as words but semantically and
fictionally irrelevant to your campaign goal.
These keywords should be added as negative
keywords.
3- Add off-target keywords as negative
keywords:
These out-of-context words that we mentioned in
the previous point and that you have identified
are your negative keywords. These keywords
should be added as negative keywords. you can
perform this task by selecting the Keywords tab
and clicking on “Add as Negative
Keyword.”
If there is a keyword that is common in the set
of unwanted search terms, you need to add that
keyword as a negative and the entire set will be
blocked. For example, search terms like
“digital marketing jobs” and
“online marketing jobs” have
overlapping areas, so you need to carefully
identify these as negative keywords. This will
ensure that these keywords are automatically
excluded, and ads will stop being shown when
users’ searches match them.
Conclusion
If you find that a specific keyword in your ad
group is generating the most unwanted traffic,
it would be beneficial to either completely
remove that keyword from your ad group or use a
broad match modifier [+], phrase match, or exact
match to more accurately align with the
user’s intent.
This report will provide information on which
keywords converted under each match type and
which matching strategy you can implement in the
next phase to improve your performance.
Gamze Sucu
Hello, my name is Gamze Sucu. I graduated from the
Internet and Network Technologies department. I started
my career in news editing. With my interest in digital
content production and optimization, I shifted my focus
to SEO. For the past two years, I have been working as
an SEO Specialist at Mobitek Performance Agency. My goal
is to provide accurate and clear information in the
content I produce and to enhance digital visibility
through a strategic approach.
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