If you are knowledgeable on PPC, you are familiar with the Google AdWords Search Terms Report.

If you are new to Adwords or have someone else managing your SEM, you need to become familiar with this report that reveals crucial keyword data.

What is the Google Ads search terms report?

A search term is the exact word or set of words a customer enters when searching on Google.com or one of our Search Network sites.

A keyword is the word or set of words that AdWords advertisers create for a given ad group to target your ads to customers.

How do I pull an AdWords search terms report?

To run a search terms report in AdWords, complete the following steps:

• Sign-in to your AdWords account and choose a desired date range
• Click on the campaign you are interested in viewing search terms for
• Click the “Keywords” tab
• Notice the three sub-tabs displayed directly below the main tabs that say “Keywords,” “Negative keywords,” and “Search terms”
• Click “Search terms”
• Download the report by clicking the downward arrow icon

Block unwanted SERPs with negative keywords

As you scroll down your search terms report, you’re going to see a bunch of search terms whose SERPs you obviously do not wish to appear on.

A classic example is people looking for “jobs” or “careers” in your industry.

Match types work just the same for negative keywords as they do for positive keywords, so for example if you see that you have a bunch of search terms like:

• jobs selling ladies shoes
• careers in ladies retail
• ladies shoes sales jobs

You could choose to add 2 phrase match negative keywords:

• “jobs”
• “careers”

It’s also worth noting that you’ll sometimes want to use exact match negative keywords. A great example of this is the single word search term for whatever you sell.

Why are you finding unrelated search queries in your report

When you use this report you may find that there is a lot of search queries that are popping up that are completely unrelated to your product or service.

This will be because of the keywords you have in your adgroups and their related match types.

Short conclusion

The way people search and how people search is always changing for example the increased use of mobile phones and Siri or Google Voice Search means that which keywords trigger ads will be more a reflection of speech than of written English.

Therefore, the search term report should form part of your armory and be checked on a monthly basis to identify themes and patterns to your customers search behaviour.