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PPC: Search Queries Vs Keywords
Thursday, January 21, 2010
One report I love for making improvements to any Adwords campaign is the 'Search Query Performance' report. This is very different to the 'Keyword Performance Report'.

The Search Query Performance report show you exactly what terms people searched for when they came to your site, whereas the Keyword Performance report shows you what keyword in your adwords account  the click was attributed to. In Google Analytics, you will see keyword performance results, not search query performance.

For example, in your Adwords account, you might have the keyword "leather shoes", which is a phrase match keyword.

If someone typed in 'white leather shoes' and then clicked on your ad, the search query performance report would record one visit against ' white leather shoes', whereas the keyword report (and Google Analytics) would record one visit against "leather shoes".

So what can you do with the search query performance report? Here are just a few things you can do after analysing the kind of search queries people are using to arrive on your site;

1. If people are arriving using search queries irrelevant to your site  - for example if you sell shoes and people are arriving on terms like 'shoe polish', then add the negative term 'polish'. The search query report can help you find negative keywords you might never have considered.

2. If lots of people are using similar terms, you might want a dedicated ad group and dedicated copy for those. E.g. if a lot of people are arriving from terms related to 'tennis shoes', (and assuming you sell tennis shoes), then you might want dedicated ad copy and an ad group for tennis shoes.

3. Similarly, make sure that what people are looking for is related to the landing page you are sending them to. If not, make a new ad group for those terms and have a dedicated landing page.

4. If there are a lot of uses of 'synonyms', then you might want to add them as their own keyword in your account, which will make them more relevant and might reduce your cost per click. 
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