Earlier this month it became apparent to many Google Ads professionals that the ‘Search Terms’ report had been somewhat obliterated. Okay, maybe not ‘obliterated’, but it had been severely cut-down. And if you’re optimising a campaign using a negative keyword strategy, then this is beyond bad news.
“We are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users. As a result you may see fewer terms in your report going forward.”
Well that just sucks. How am I meant to discover individual search terms that yield conversions? This is how…
HOW TO BE SET-UP TO DISCOVER MISSING SEARCH TERMS
While we have noticed a significant reduction in the Search Terms Report for our clients, we have discovered that they can be uncovered using Google Analytics.
Any Google Ads professional worth their salt will have linked their clients’ Google Ads and Google Analytics account as a matter of course. If you haven’t already done this, then do this now as it’s necessary in order to find these missing search terms.
HOW TO FIND MISSING SEARCH TERMS FROM GOOGLE ADS SEARCH TERMS REPORT
All that you need to do is:
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Navigate to ‘Acquisition’ in Google Analytics.
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Select ‘Google Ads’.
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Click ‘Search Queries’.
Voila! You should see a larger list of search queries for a given time period than you do in the Search Terms report on the Google Ads platform.
What we have noticed is that the search queries that we’re NOT seeing in Google Ads but ARE seeing in Google Analytics are reporting zero clicks. However, we know they have been clicked on or else they wouldn’t be in this report (plus we can see attributed users and sessions).
Most importantly, we can see attributed conversions to these missing search terms.
You’re welcome…
