Introduction
We know how important keeping on top of your search terms can be - and the impact they can have on your performance - but often they are overlooked just due to the amount of time needed when using the Google Ads Interface.
The Adpulse Search Terms tool has been built to speed up the review and analysis of the search terms within your accounts, ensuring these actually get reviewed and the performance opportunities are realized.
Overview
We have done the first pass of analysis for you and placed the search terms within different ‘Tabs’ for you to easily review and action (See the full list of tabs below). Within each Tab are the metrics we believe you need to make a decision and then the ability to ‘Action’ a search term - this could be adding as an exact negative, adding an edited version of the search term as a phrase keyword, or snoozing it so you can let more data accumulate before you make a decision (See the full list of actions available below).
You can even apply multiple actions to a single search term, so could add the search term as an exact negative, and also part of the search term as a phase negative.
You can also apply actions individually - to one search term - or in bulk, eg. select multiple search terms and add all as phrase negatives to a shared list.
The process of actioning a search term
There are two steps to actioning search terms;
Adding search term Actions to a queue, then
Submitting that queue of Actions in a single submission.
This has been done to speed up the process for reviewing and actioning the search terms as the delay created by sending data back and forth via the API for each Action would render the tool too slow to use effectively.
Important to note: You can add search terms to the queue across all the tabs for a single given Ad Account, but you will need to submit these Actions for each Ad Account before navigating to another Ad Account. If you do not submit your queued Actions for each Ad Account as you go, then you will lose those queued Actions.
So the full process to action a search term is:
Apply an Action (such as ‘Add As Negative’ or 'Snooze 7 days') to a search term to add it to a queue.
The kebab menu at the end of the search term row will update to a queued icon, to show which terms you have already processed
Repeat the above across multiple search terms and tabs within the Ad Account - adding more to the queue
Submit the queued Actions in a single submission once completed, by pressing the 'Submit' button
The queued icons will update out to a green tick, to show they have been submitted
Search Term Tabs
The tabs available are listed below with a description of each and their current status:
The below categories were updated Oct 23, so you might find some references to different column names in the support docs.
The Categories
Category | Description |
Status Issues | These Search Terms have a good conversion history but have no impressions account wide in the last 30 days. |
Good Performance | Your best performing search terms - add these as new keywords to improve performance and keyword targeting. |
Average Performance | Search terms that perform in line with your campaign averages show up here. |
Poor Performance | These search terms seem to be performing much worse than the campaign average. Could be time to add them as negative keywords? |
Low Data | These search terms have only a few conversions and not a lot of spend, so we can't categorize them yet. |
High Spend | High spenders that are not converting. Great candidates for adding as negative keywords. |
Average Spend | Moderately spending search terms that haven't spent too much since their last conversion but also haven't converted yet, so they are just sitting here and waiting to get enough data to be categorized as either good or bad. |
Low Spend | Small spending search terms that have not yet converted (last 30 days) - not much to do on these yet. |
No Clicks | Search terms with impressions but no clicks in the last 30 days |
Hidden | List of search terms that have been snoozed or hidden |
Actions
The actions available vary by Tab - some actions are not applicable in some cases - but here is the complete list of them:
Action | Description | Status |
Choose match type (exact, phrase or broad) and location (campaign, shared lists, adgroup) | Live | |
Choose match type (exact, phrase or broad) and location (campaign, shared lists, adgroup) | Live | |
Remove Negative | Removes the negative from its current location | Coming Soon |
Will hide the search term from your tabs for the selected time frame: 1 day, 7 days opr 30 days. | Live | |
Hides the search term from all tabs indefinitely. Can be unhidden from the ‘hidden’ tab | Live |
Metrics
The metrics available for each tab vary by tab - same as the actions - as some data is not relevant to some tabs.
For example, in the Expensive Terms (1 conversion) tab, we only show cost data over a range of time periods as there haven't been any conversions. Whereas in the Expensive conversions tab we show CPA/ROAS results alongside the number of conversions for each time period.
For all tabs, we use the campaign performance data (the number of conversions, and KPI) as the benchmark, so you can analyze the historical Search Term performance against the campaign to inform your decision and therefore action.
Now you can get stuck in using the Search Terms tool and here are some articles to help: