Search terms insights help you understand how your customers are searching and engaging with your business on Google. They analyze the search terms where your ads have appeared in the past 56 days, grouping them into search categories and subcategories to provide you with key performance metrics for each.
This article explains how search terms insights work, where to find them, and how to use them effectively.
- Search campaigns
- Shopping campaigns
- Performance Max campaigns
Benefits
- Understand what your target customers are searching for using intent based search categories without having to sift through individual search terms in the search terms report.
- Take action on recommendations that help tailor your creatives, landing pages, and Merchant Center feed descriptions to incorporate top search categories surfaced or trending, helping to boost performance.
- Identify which campaigns and ad groups are capturing the most demand, based on the search categories and apply relevant recommendations on how to capture more.
Where to find search terms insights
Search terms insights can be accessed at either the account level or the individual campaign level.
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click Insights on the page menu on the left.
- Scroll down to the ”Search terms insights” section.
How it works
1. Check which search categories are driving performance
Search categories are auto-generated groupings of the search terms driving traffic to your campaigns. These groupings take all search terms into account, including those not exposed in the search terms report due to privacy reasons. They’re automatically categorized based on customer intent and product and service attributes.
- Note: Search terms that have lower spend or don’t have an identifiable search category will be grouped together as ”other search terms”.
For each of the search categories identified, you can note which campaigns and ad groups received traffic, along with the following aggregated metrics:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Conversions
- Conversion rate
- Conversion value
- Search volume (across all targeted countries)
2. Dive deeper into search subcategories
- You can learn more about a particular search category by expanding a given search category to view its subcategories and more.
- Note: Search terms that don’t have an identifiable search category are grouped together as ”Uncategorized search terms”.
- Go over the search term details to view the full list of subcategories, associated performance metrics, and search terms. You can also get campaigns where the theme has appeared.
- Note: Search terms with lower conversions or clicks, or weren’t searched by a significant number of people are grouped together as ”other search terms”.
3. Update your campaign and creative strategy based on learnings
After you’ve identified which key search categories are driving the most demand towards your account or campaign, you can leverage these insights to help shape your creative and optimization strategy.
- Use any recommendations you may identify alongside search terms insights to easily capture more untapped demand.
- Consider shifting your creative or targeting strategy to align more closely with the top search categories.
- Consider increasing your budget alongside your targeting changes to give your campaign enough headroom to capture this new set of users.