There are many reports available to the AdWords advertiser – some helpful, some just a lot of data on a page with no real value. One of the helpful ones is called the Search Query report. This report spits back, essentially, a list of keywords users have used and have seen your ads. The reason this is helpful is if you are using different match types (which I hope you are!) there are a lot of variations of keywords that you may or may not have included making this list incredibly helpful. You can also see which words your ads showed up for that you may not want to show for and you can then add these words as negative keywords.

A big one I have been seeing a lot is a local company selling their product only in that particular city, with the geo target set to that city. So for example, if I have a jewelry store in Calgary and I am only interested in local customers, I can set the target to Calgary only. But if someone in Calgary searches for ‘jewelry store in vancouver’ my ad will show up if one of my keywords is phrase match ‘jewelry store’. This will show up in the report and I can add vancouver as a negative keyword.

On the flip side of that, maybe someone typed in ‘calgary jewelry store’ and my ad would have shown. If I have broad match terms, I could add calgary jewelry store as a phrase match term and slowly eliminate the need for broad match terms which often have high impressions and show the ads for some pretty interesting combinations of words! They are also very good at using up your budget quickly.

When you run the search query report, you can specify which campaign or adgroups you want to run the report on.

With this new feature, you can log in to your account and while you are looking at each adgroups keywords, click the “See Search Terms” link and it will show you all of the keywords used for that particular adgroup. This is so much easier than running the report every time and then having to sort by adgroup etc.

The real time saver though, is the fact that you can add keywords right there. With a click of the mouse! You can also add negative keywords just as easily.



You can either select specific keywords and see what variations users have used or you can simply click on See search terms… and then select All. This will give you a complete list.

Fantastic tool that has already saved me a ton of time! Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Next week, the same thing happens – the same keyword is entered just to be sure the ad is still showing and to determine which position the ad is in.

Here are the problems:

1. Each time a user searches for something in Google, this term and the ads that come up are tracked. If the ads are never clicked (because why would you click on your own ad when you are searching for it?) Google thinks the ads they are showing are not relevant and will stop showing those ads. So now all of a sudden it looks like we are not doing our jobs and have let the ads slip off the radar. This is in fact not the case. Google has just optimized the paid search results in order to serve each user better.

2. Each time an ad appears and is not clicked, this is tracked as an impression. The more impressions an ad has, the more clicks it should have, in theory. But if a user is always checking to see if their ad is there and never clicking on it, the number of impressions increases. This brings the CTR (click-through-rate) down, which brings the Quality Score down, which drives the CPC up!

Of course, there is a solution.

Google has developed a brilliant tool call the Adwords Ad Preview Tool. What this does is it brings up a site which mimics Google search results but does NOT affect the PPC campaigns. A user can now search any or all of the keywords and see EXACTLY what they would see if they were typing the words directly into Google.

The nice thing about this tool is that the PPC campaigns are not affected and also, specific regions can be selected. If I have a client in the US and the PPC ads are targeted at California only, if I go to Google.com and type in one of their search terms, I will never see the ads because I am in Calgary. With the Ads Preview tool, I can select a target region and see the ads that appear for that area. Very neat!

Keep in mind that the solution is NOT to click on the ad to avoid impressions increasing without clicks increasing. This would then only drive up your costs. You know what your website looks like so you don’t need to click on a paid ad to get there.

So next time you want to see if your ads are showing, make sure you use the Adwords Ad Preview Tool. In the long run, it will help your PPC campaign!

As always, if you would like to set up a PPC campaign and need help or would like us to do it for you, please contact us at Anduro Marketing!