When you’re running a paid search campaign for your business, there’s a lot of angles to take and factors to consider. Improving your campaign’s efficiency to reduce overall ad spend while improving results should always be in the back of your mind; one step to achieve that is through mining new keywords, either to add or negate.

For this reason, we recommend that every marketer should be completing a search query report (SQR for short) at least twice a month!

Today, we’ll talk you through why and how.

First off: A rundown on search terms

Search terms are the backbone of search ads and you know what they are even if you don’t consciously think of them as “search terms.” These are just the things people type into a search engine before hitting enter, that then end up matching with one of your keywords and its associated ad. As you know, they can be a single word or a string of text terms. For example, someone looking to buy shoes might search for:

• Shoe store
• Shoe store near me
• Sneakers
• Department store near me

Or, something more specific like:

• Adidas shoes
• High heels red
• Kids shoes

But sometimes a search query will trigger one of your ads despite the fact that, in context, it’s not related to what you offer.

In these cases, you’ll want to negate these terms out. For example, if you’re selling tennis shoes, “comfortable shoes” might be a term you’re bidding on, but someone searching for “comfortable shoes to wear with cocktail dress” likely isn’t interested in said tennis shoes given the additional context of their search.

In a scenario like this, you can preemptively negate the phrase “cocktail dress” to make sure you’re not wasting ads on people unlikely to be interested.

Finding and utilizing search terms

The actual mechanism for doing this is in the Google Ads UI. Here, your search terms will be located under the keywords tab.

Image source: Karooya

Here you can put down settings to filter out irrelevant search terms, even when they might be otherwise paired with very relevant search terms, like the previous tennis shoe example. You can also find new keyword variants that will help your campaign.

All together, this helps reduce how much you spend on search ads while also giving you more options to find new, likely-to-convert keywords.

What else should you keep atop your mind when approaching search terms?

For starters, go where the data is. That is, pay attention to what it shows you on which terms convert, and adjust accordingly.

When you find search terms that reliably convert — especially ones with a pattern of conversion — add them as keywords into your campaign.

Similarly, utilizing “negative” keywords can make your search ad campaigns operate much more efficiently.

Just like the earlier tennis shoes example, there will almost always be some irrelevant potential search terms triggering your ads that, when attached to a keyword you’re advertising for, would indicate the user is actually looking for something different instead of what you’re offering.

Intuitively enough, you set these negative keywords under the negative keyword list. But determining which search terms you should list as a negative keyword is its own task. Luckily, it’s not too complicated.

Using the search terms report, you can see what people are searching for that have triggered your ad.

In all likelihood, most of the terms you’ll see here will be relatively fine. But you may see some that stand out negatively — or ones that don’t necessarily stand out, but are only partially relevant to exactly what you’re selling. The words or phrases here are what you’ll want to add as a negative keyword.

Also, we recommend that when you do go through the search terms report that you don’t look back further than the last 30 days. Any longer back than that and you’ll likely see some outliers that aren’t worth heeding since they naturally aren’t coming up currently anyway.

Otherwise, it’s up to you to decide exactly what constitutes an irrelevant search term that you want to negate. It’ll differ by business and campaign purpose, but many irrelevant search terms are more or less obvious. In other cases, you’ll start to recognize over time the more subtle search terms that don’t advance your campaign, which you might want to negate. Just like so much with digital marketing, being proactive and keeping your eye on things will put you in a good position to succeed.