Google Reduces Visibility in Search Terms Report: What You Need to Know

Google announced that the search terms report changed on September 1. The reports within Google Ads show only terms that reach a minimum traffic volume. Many advertisers and agencies used the previous report system to optimize their campaigns, and this change has created many questions that will try to answer below. 

What Is The Search Terms Report?

It is a feature of Google Ads that show all the search terms that your ad use to appear and how related your targetted keywords are to these search terms. So, you get a list with metrics of your ad in specific keywords.

Many advertisers use this data to optimize their Google Ads campaigns. They can find negative keywords, new search terms that they can target, and the best match types for each keyword. If they can’t find these keywords, they can’t remove the keywords that don’t work and find new match types to increase their profits. So, the optimization process on Google will be different in the future.

How did Google change the search terms report?

The announcement of Google mentioned that the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for. Also, it makes it clear that these terms may have a click in your ads. It means that we can’t see these keywords even if we spend money on them. However, it is not clear how they decided which number is significant or not.

The Impact Of The Search Terms Report Change

When your ads appear in keywords with very low conversion rates and get clicks from them, you waste money. For this reason, it is important to remove them from your campaigns and focus on the ones that work. 

Some people think that they don’t matter because the traffic is low. However, they add up and make a big difference in the long-term. If you run multiple campaigns for your business or clients, you can see a reduction in your advertising budget at the end of the month. The results will be lower bidding and lower conversion rates because of the ad spend wasted.

How To Respond To The Search Term Report Changes

Google will keep making changes in the advertising program. Their focus is to improve their program. In some cases, we disagree with these changes as advertisers, but the only thing we can do is to adjust to the new updates.

We need to understand that there will be a loss to advertisers. They will lose a percentage of the advertising data. The results of the less information will be the inability to optimize some specific parts of their campaigns, as mentioned above. 

You Must Continue Optimizing

Of course, you can always continue optimizing your campaigns and add profitable keywords in your pay per click campaign. Google Ads will give you enough data to make decisions, even if they decided to make this change. If you do the research and find enough positive keywords, you will remove the impact of the negative keywords.

It means that Google Ads allows us to work on ads and find new keywords. The loss of data should not prevent us from taking action. Lastly, Google does not want to lose advertisers. They may think that there are more important optimizations that we can do.

Review Your Bing Search Query Report

If you use Bing Ads, you can use the Microsoft advertising tools to get important information for similar keywords. When you check your Bing search queries regularly, you will find new keywords to target on Google Ads and get data for negative keywords.

Those who search on Bing and other search engines use the same terms. You may find some minor differences in each search engine, but most keywords will be the same. Of course, Google has more traffic on every keyword, and this is why it is worth using Google Ads.

Launch Dynamic Search Ads 

This method will help you to find new keywords but does not remove the ineffective ones. Dynamic search ads will target keywords based on your landing pages’ content and generate hundreds of keywords. A number of these keywords will be new to your campaigns. If you find keywords only with the standard keywords tools, you miss some profitable keywords. It’s unlikely to try every possible search and combination.

Use Smart Bidding Options

Google Ads can help you target the right keywords with the available bidding options. If you use any smart or automated bidding options, it will adjust your bids and target relevant keywords to reach your goal.

For example, when you use the target CPA option, it will set bids that will generate as many conversions as possible at the targetted CPA (cost-per-action). 

Google Ads improves the experience of the advertiser with smart bidding options. However, many marketers want to control most parts of the process. You can consider letting Google optimizing some of your campaigns and compare the results in the end.

Diversify Your Skillset

If you focus only on search engine ads until today, it can be an opportunity to use new digital marketing strategies for your business. For a similar strategy, you can learn about social media ads. Many online platforms allow you to reach your target audience like Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, TikTok Ads, etc.

You can consider getting organic traffic from search engines because it works well with search engine ads. SEO is a great long-term investment, but it takes more time and effort to get ranked on Google’s first page than creating ads for your target audience.

Conclusion

This change in the search terms report will affect most advertisers. We can’t answer every question until having more information. The word significant is too general, so we don’t know the exact percentage of keywords that will be removed from the search terms report. However, we know that we must adjust to the new reports of Google Ads.

In every case, you can follow the suggestions above. You can improve your ads’ performance if you keep optimizing them and make good use of Google’s bidding options.