One thing that really bothers us advertisers is that many google ads search terms are not showing anymore, especially when we spend a lot for the bidding keywords but few conversions. This adjustment by Google began in 2020 for privacy policy updates. Now they are hidden and categorized as "other search term".
In this article, I will introduce you how to discover more other search terms in Google ads effectively. Hopefully, it can be useful for beginners to better manage their google ads campaigns.
Difference Between "Keywords" and "Search Terms"
Keywords, usually with 10-15 keywords as an ads group, are used to bid by Advertisers. It can be set up in 3 match types to determine user search terms showing range.
And the search terms are that users have actually entered the search bar or other google search network partners, and that triggers your ads and shown on the google search result page under some condition. You can find them on the search terms list.
Why Do Google Ads Hide Some Search Terms?
Google states that certain search terms are excluded from the search term report when their search volume is too low, in accordance with privacy policy. However, we don’t know exactly how many search terms are missing. It’s not a data loss issue; rather, it’s a result of Google’s policy updates.
Depending on your keyword matching options, the search terms listed can be different. If you use many broad match type, your keyword targeting conditions are likely to match a large number of different queries through "broad matches", then those keywords with less search volume will be hidden.
Three Ways to See More Google Ads Other Search Terms
Except the search query report, we also can find out the other search terms in 3 ways, that is insight, GA4-explore and look studio.
Google Ads Insight Report
Understand the search term categories your ads appeared against and your performance in each category.
Top search categories can provide inspiration for your ads and business by revealing what your customers are searching for, the words they use to search, and what categories are growing and declining.
You can also click view detail report to learn more, including search volume and conversion status, ctr.
Use GA4 Explore
Step1-GA4-[Explore]-[Blank] Create a new exploration.
Step2-click [Dimension]-Select [Google ads search query], Metrics-Select active users, bounce rate, events or any other metrics and customize events raw and columns and which one to show.
Actually, i suggest combine other dimensions together trying to get more google ads search terms including search term under segment-[paid search], or google ads query.
About Google Ads query and session Google Ads search terms
In GA4, the Google Ads queries with sessions and the Google Ads keywords with sessions text dimensions are similar to the search terms and keywords in Google Ads. Both refer to search queries and keywords entered by users in the search engine, which triggered your Google Ads ads and led to sessions on your website.
However, we do not recommend that you compare the data in GA4 and Google Ads directly, because each platform measures and reports data differently, which will directly lead to differences in content and we cannot drill down to see more content.
And due to the threshold limits, only some search query content will be displayed in the GA4 exploration report. The threshold is controlled and allocated by the system. In the free account, the max.Raw is 500.
Using Looker Studio data insight report
Looker Studio is a flexible tool that turns your data into fully free customize informative reports and dashboards that are easy to read and share. We can use it for quick visual reports or many tables even if we are not fully skilled at using it.
3 Steps are below, finding out more google ads Other search terms and downloads
Open google marketing platform.
Set up blank report, and select Google Analytics for data source.
Create a new report, Dimension-Select Google ads search query, Metrics-Select active users, bounce rate, events or any other metrics and customize events raw and columns and which one to show.
After linking GA4 and website data, we can see there is a new basic report--all items, even canvas size, color need to be set . For example, the following figure shows more than 1,400 search terms people used in 7 days. Of course, due to threshold control, not all of them are displayed here, so I think it's better to download the reports frequently.
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