Search term

Keywords are what you bid on; search terms are what you pay for. One broad keyword can match hundreds of searches, and only some are what anyone meant to buy.

Reading search terms is how you find waste to block and winners to add as keywords. It is the single most useful report in a Search account.

1. Open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms.
2. Add Cost, Conversions and Added/Excluded columns.
3. Sort by cost, then filter on zero conversions and on converting searches.
4. Add searches as keywords or negatives from the report.

A wine shop reads its search terms weekly. It blocks wine making kit and free wine tasting, and adds organic red wine delivery as an exact keyword after it converted three times.

• Never opening the report.
• Blocking a search after one click.
• Reading only the top rows by clicks, not by cost.

The audit checks Oppy runs on this, each with its own page.

• Searches taking money with nothing back
• Searches that already make money and have no keyword of their own
• How much of the budget Google chose

• Keyword: A word or phrase you bid on, with a match type that decides how closely a search must match it.
• Negative keyword: A word or phrase that stops ads from showing on searches containing it.
• Close variants: Searches Google treats as the same as a keyword: plurals, misspellings, abbreviations and same-meaning phrasings.
• Dynamic Search Ads: Search ads whose headline and landing page Google builds from your website's content, to cover searches your keywords miss.
• Wasted spend: Money spent on clicks that bring no result past the point where zero is likely to be chance.