The importance of PPC Search Query Reports

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April 30th, 2008 by Mike

Optimisation of a pay per click campaign comes in many different guises from bid changes to keyword matching options. One important way of improving quality of traffic is to add more and more negatives to an account as you see the data coming back.

The way to do this is to run search query reports on your pay per click campaigns and find out which phrases have been searched for by users to view your ads. In many cases you can find your ad being served on expanded match for phrases that bear no relation to the target of your campaign, these need to be added in as negatives.

As ever, no system is fool proof. In many instances the reports will contain data match up to keywords with the response ’12 other unique search queries’. Having spoken to Google employee’s on a number of occasions they tell me this is usually the case when the search volume is so low that the system merely collates this data together to work more efficiently and in most cases the data that isn’t being shown would be of no benefit to optimising the pay per click campaign.

However over the last few weeks I have run reports on client’s pay per click accounts to find out why a particular ad group was achieving a low CTR. I took the time period from the beginning of the month, spanning a ten day period, the low CTR keywords were ‘10 other unique queries’. Is this down to low volume? I think not, 2049 impressions over the ten day period were accrued, hardly low volume traffic. This leads me to believe that a term within these ‘10 other unique queries’ is triggering the ads with no relevancy. Hardly of any benefit to the campaign!

All in all, I value the findings of search query reports. They do provide you with good data to improve your pay per click campaign negatives. Just a shame it’s not a perfect system!

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