The search terms report is one of the most interesting reports you can find on Google Ads. You probably check (or a script) this report quite often when you have to improve the performance of your account.
Below I will show you two advanced techniques that I often use to get the most useful information for the optimisation of campaigns.
Analyze the performance of single words
With the first technique, we will analyse the performance of the individual words that make up the various search queries. It is very useful to find single words repeated in different queries and campaigns and that have bad performances.
First, download the report and open it with Excel:
Then you have to select the column Search Terms and use the function Text to Columns. Use “space” as the delimiter because you want to have each single word in a different cell.
Move the single words in the first column and copy all the KPIs you want to analyze. E.g. For the query “airmax 45 online” you will have 3 rows with the same KPIs, one for each word.
You create a pivot table, and in the first column, you have the column with the single words. In my example, I calculated the ROAS of the words, and as you can see the word “airmax” appeared in 3 different search queries, but the performances are not that good.
Detect patterns and analyze the performance of long tail queries
The second technique is helpful if you have to analyse the performances of long tail queries or if you want to detect patterns in the converting keywords. First step – I use an Excel formula that counts how many words are in the search query:
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=IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ",""))+1) |
In another column, I use a formula that checks if the query contains a number (you can do the same with brands name, products name, colours,…)
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<span class="sy1">=</span><span class="kw4">COUNT</span><span class="sy0">(</span><span class="kw4">FIND</span><span class="sy0">(</span><span class="sy2">{</span><span class="nu0">0</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">1</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">2</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">3</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">4</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">5</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">6</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">7</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">8</span><span class="sy0">,</span><span class="nu0">9</span><span class="sy2">}</span><span class="sy0">,</span>A1<span class="sy0">))</span><span class="sy1">></span><span class="nu0">0</span> |
Once again I use the pivot tables to reorder the dataset, and I build charts that help me to visualize the data.
I think that those two techniques are helping me a lot because I can dig deeper into the data and get out valuable information:
- negative keywords
- positive keywords
- improve the spending/budget management