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.
