Google AdWords and Search Query Reports for Beginners

Search Query Reports within your Google Adwords account provide a insightful, and often overlooked, way to measure detailed elements of your campaign performance. Search Query Reports show how visitors clicked on your Adwords advert and the exact term that triggered the advert. This offers us powerful insight into how your potential customers search the web and gives you valuable information that you may want to consider for your SEO and overall Online Marketing Strategy. Here are five ways you can use your Google AdWords search query data to improve your marketing campaigns:
Optimise and Adjust Keywords
Using data from your Google AdWords Search Query Report, you can improve the optimisation of your keywords. Focus on whether your keywords are relevant to search engine users as well as if their search terms match your chosen keywords. To view how your keywords are performing, sign into your AdWords account -> Campaigns tab -> Keywords tab -> and click on ‘Keywords details.’ Look at the keyword column to see your keywords that matched a search engine user’s search term, triggering your ad. If some keywords do not match or not perform well for your campaign, you could replace them with other keywords or exclude.
Add Negative Keywords for Increased Relevancy
You can experiment with adding different types of keywords such as negative keywords in order to increase relevant matches to your ecommerce site. The purpose of having negative keywords is to prevent keywords that are not relevant to your own products or services from triggering your ads. While some keywords can be spelled the same, they do not mean the same in different context. An example of this is camera lenses/lenses. Some users who might search for “lenses” could see your ad for camera lenses even if they actually wanted to search “contact lenses.” To prevent this, you can classify the keyword “contact” as a negative keyword.
Use Long-Tail for More Matches
If your keywords are experiencing poor conversions, consider being more specific to match how users search. Search engine users tend to narrow down and research for products and services using long-tail keywords for search queries. Some users want to tack on specific information to let the search engine do the research for them when typing in a long-tail keyword of three or more words, including dates or seasons (summer 2013).
Customise Your Search Terms Report
When using your AdWords data, create a customised report to aid in your analysis. Using the segments, columns, and filter view you can customise reporting specific to the metrics you require. Split your report into segments to organise data relevant to your business needs. Quality score ( a number between 1 to 10, determining how relevant your ads, keywords and landing page are to users) is an important metric to add to see if adverts can be significantly improved at a glance.
Look at Match Type
When choosing the settings for keywords in Google AdWords, choose a matching option that determines how your ad is triggered. These options include broad match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match. In the spectrum of how these keywords are matched by relevancy, depending on how specific you want searches to be, exact match and phrase match will show the most relevant. Broad match can include synonyms and can generate impressions and clicks faster but will also generate unwanted and irrelevant clicks.
To optimise and enhance your ecommerce sites, for both SEO and PPC, utilise and analyse your Google AdWords data to its full potential and uncover information that you didn’t previously know.