AdWords, Running a Search Query Report & How it can Benefit Your Campaign

Google’s PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising platform “AdWords” is well known for having a variety of reporting functions that give you extensive in-depth knowledge into your audience. One of the most beneficial AdWords reports when it comes to improving your conversion rates is the “Search Query” report. The search query report allows you to see exactly what users are typing into Google to trigger your ad, whereas regular keyword reports only allow you to see the keyword that Google associated with the user’s search.

Below are 3 ways in which you can use this report to improve the performance of your AdWords campaign.

1)      Expand negative keyword lists. This is the biggest area of potential for Search Query reporting. Regularly monitoring your search query reports will expose you to a lot of different kinds of search terms that people are typing into Google, and not all of these will be relevant to your product or service. For example, if you have the keyword “buy flowers” within your AdWords account, there is a chance that users searching for “how to grow flowers” will see your advert. If you do see this occurring within your search query reports, you can tick a box next to your “how to grow flowers” query, and simply hit the “add as negative” button to exclude anyone using this phrase to search in Google from seeing your advert in the future. This can greatly improve CTRs (Click-Through-Rates) and conversion rates for your campaign.

2)      Expand regular keyword lists. When you first build out your keyword list within AdWords, there is a very high chance that you’ve missed keywords that you could be using to improve your performance. Monitoring the search query report will allow you to see which keywords related to your product/service are getting high search volume. Google make it very easy for you to add keywords from the search query report too! All you have to do is tick the box next to the search term you’d like to add, and click the “Add as Keyword” button.

3)      Advert optimisation ideas. The search query reports can give you a lot of insight into the type of language the majority of people use when searching for your product or service. With this information, you can edit your adverts to better match the language used by your audience, which should result in increased relevancy (and therefore better CTRs (Click-Through-Rates).

Due to the huge amount of value that can be obtained from search query reports within AdWords, it’s highly recommended that you monitor the information within the report on a very regular basis – even daily if your traffic is in the moderate to high range. This can result in consistent improvements in your campaign & a better business outcome.