Reading the search terms report like a detective

The search terms report is the closest thing in marketing to hearing your customers talk to themselves. Most advertisers open it once a month, scan for obviously wrong words, add a few negatives, and close it. That is the least valuable thing you can do with it.

One caveat before you start

The report is no longer a perfect transcript. Google has said that terms shown for AI driven surfaces may reflect its interpretation of what the user meant rather than the exact string they typed. Practically, that means you should treat the report as high quality evidence of intent, not as a legal record of words. It changes how you read a strange looking term. Before, an odd phrase meant a matching mistake. Now it may mean the query was messy and the interpretation is a summary. Read for patterns across many rows rather than reacting to a single one.

Sort by something other than cost

Everyone sorts by cost descending and looks at the top twenty. Those terms are usually your obvious keywords and they teach you nothing. The information is in the long tail.

Three sorts that are worth your time:

• Terms with clicks and zero conversions, sorted by clicks. This is the money you burned. Group them by theme before you judge them.
• Terms with impressions and a very low click-through rate. Your ad appeared and was rejected. Either the intent is wrong, or your ad is not saying the thing that query wanted.
• Terms that converted but are not in your keyword list. This is the report’s best gift and almost nobody harvests it.

Read for the shape of the intent

Stop looking at terms as strings and start sorting them into buying stages. Almost every account’s search terms fall into five buckets, and the correct action is different for each:

1. Problem language. Water coming through ceiling. My site is slow. These people do not know what to buy yet. They convert, but later and at a lower rate. Worth having, worth a different page, not worth your highest bid.
2. Solution language. Roof leak repair. Site speed optimization. This is the core. Everything here should have a matching ad group and a page that repeats the phrase.
3. Comparison language. Best, vs, alternative, reviews, top 10. Expensive, informational, and often better served by content than by an ad. I cut these first when a budget is tight.
4. Price language. Cost, price, cheap, free, salary, jobs. Split this carefully. Cost and price are strong commercial intent. Cheap and free usually are not. Salary and jobs never are.
5. Wrong entity. A different industry, a competitor’s product line, a homonym. Negatives, immediately.

Do this once properly and the negative keyword list writes itself, but more importantly you learn what your market thinks it is buying, which is frequently not what you think you are selling.

The detective questions

When something looks odd, ask these in order:

• What did this person want that made my ad look like the answer?
• Which keyword triggered it, and is that keyword too loose or is my ad too vague?
• Did they click? If yes, my ad promised something. Did the page deliver it?
• Does this term appear once, or is there a family of twenty like it?

The last question decides the action. A single strange term is noise. Twenty variations of the same wrong idea is a structural problem, and the fix is usually a keyword or an ad, not a negative.

How to run the review in 30 minutes

1. Set the date range to the last 60 or 90 days so you have enough rows to see patterns. A week of data will fool you.
2. Export to a spreadsheet. The interface is fine for scanning and terrible for grouping.
3. Add a column called bucket and tag every row with one of the five categories above. It is boring for ten minutes and then it goes fast.
4. Pivot by bucket: spend, conversions, cost per conversion. Now you can see which stage of intent your money is actually buying.
5. Three actions come out of it. Negatives for the wrong entity rows. New ad groups or ads for any converting theme that has no home. A decision on comparison and problem language: fund it deliberately or cut it, but do not fund it by accident.

Two habits that save real money

First, when you find a converting search term with no matching keyword, resist the urge to just add the keyword. Ask whether it deserves its own ad and page. Adding the keyword changes nothing if the ad and the page stay generic.

Second, keep a running document of the phrases your customers use. Not for the account, for the whole business. The exact words in that report belong in your headlines, your page titles, your sales emails, and your service descriptions. In the accounts I have run, the search terms report has been a better source of copy than any brainstorming session, because it is what people typed when they were alone and wanted something.

What to do next

Block a 30 minute slot this week, pull the last 90 days of search terms, and tag them into the five buckets. If more than a quarter of your spend is sitting in comparison and problem language and you did not intend that, you have found your first real decision. If you want a second opinion on what the report is telling you about your market, book a free consultation.