An N-gram is defined as a continuous sequence of N words from a specified sample of text or speech.

In PPC, we apply this principle when analyzing search term performance to gain insight into the aggregated performance of certain phrases across your search terms.

For example, let's look at two search terms with overlapping words and convert them into N-grams. Our search terms are:

If we were to convert these phrases into 1-grams, we would have the following N-grams along with their total impressions:

1-grams:

If we converted the phrases to 2-grams, we would have:

2-grams:

If we took a lot of search term data for a single ad campaign, we would likely discover that certain words and phrases are present in many of the search terms that generated impressions for the campaign. N-gram analysis allows advertisers to see which of these words or phrases that reoccur within a campaign are best correlated with positive or negative ad performance.

In N-gram analysis and PPC, advertisers look at all the search terms that generated impressions or clicks for a given ad campaign – these search terms are taken together as the text sample for the N-gram analysis. The next step is to group the underlying words into N-grams of the desired length – typically either one, two, three or four-word phrases.

N-gram analysis is basically interested in three things:

Using this technique, advertisers can identify the specific words and phrases that are most strongly correlated (either positively or negatively) with ad performance for a given campaign.

In Adpulse, navigate to the Performance > N-Gram dashboard:

Click into any of the performance categories you want to look at (in this case, we want to investigate the one client that has a lot of 'High Spend, No Conversion" N-Grams as we want to clean up the search term report by adding negatives for any n-grams that are not converting but are spending a lot of money):

We can see in the first campaign that the 1-gram "early" exists in search terms that collectively have spent $7,136.78 but none of those search terms resulted in a conversion! That's a real waste of money when we consider the $55.25 CPA benchmark for this campaign. First order of business - add a negative to the appropriate level by clicking the triple dot (or multi-selecting N-Grams and add negatives in bulk using the green 'Actions" button).

And just like that, you're removed a bunch of search terms that are wasting money with a single negative keyword! Imagine how efficient your search term report will be when you're using n-grams on a regular basis :)

Our favorite performance categories are:

Happy hunting.

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