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Google announced on 1st September 2020 that the search terms report is changing for good, advertisers will now have a limited oversight of what triggers their ads on Google Search.
“We are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users. As a result you may see fewer terms in your report going forward.” - the notice in all of our accounts said.
This update was not something agencies and advertisers welcomed, as managing search terms and optimizing search appearance has ever since been a key part of success in PPC campaign management.
A month has passed since the announcement, we can already see the exact impact of how much data is lost for manual optimization. We’ll be sharing our experience in this article through our regional and global accounts managed at EAZY Digital agency, and also ‘How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love this Bomb’. But first, let’s have a recap of what search terms report is and why it is important for us all.
Search terms report is used to track how ads are performing when they are triggered by actual searches on the Google Search Network. Besides performance, the report helps us understand how closely those terms relate to the keyword we are targeting within our ad groups. Search terms can be found in Google Ads accounts under the campaign / ad group’s ‘Keywords’ report.
Let’s have a look at an example. You are a financial advisor company, helping individuals saving money on the long term. You’re boldly adding the keyword “money” with “phrase match” (read more on match types here) within your campaign. Your ads will start triggering for some search terms that are relevant to your goals like: money saving expert | money advisor, but also for a several queries that are not, or may even be counterproductive: money heist | money laundering | illegal money fast.
Obviously you don’t want to waste your money and spoil your hard earned reputation by appearing for irrelevant search terms like the ones mentioned above, so what the heck can you do? Solution 1) Target more specific keywords, or use different keyword match types 2) Start your campaign with a wider keyword research and exclude irrelevant terms from start 3) Continuously monitor your search terms report and filter out the ones that do not attract your ideal audience.
Let’s wrap it up before jumping back on the news. How can Search Terms report be used to your advantage?
We’ve seen a different number of lost search terms data in our accounts, Google has kept away only a minority of these in the previous years, ranging from as low as 0.2% up to 8% of all clicks / clicks reported in the search terms report, adding up to 2,2% on average.
From September 2020 this number has grown to 10 times higher, with an average of 24% of all clicks and search terms reported on the Google Ads interface. This makes the impact of the change 22% additional lost data in our reports.
In some cases the actual rate is a lot higher than the average, with results up to 50%, where on the other hand there are accounts with ‘only’ 10-15% of data loss.
Now that we know the numbers it is clear Google made a significant change to their reporting, making it harder for PPC managers to keep track of their search campaigns. The question is what can we do next and how can we adapt to these changes?
Google is making constant changes to their advertising tools, this is something that we know we cannot avoid. Some of these changes affect us positively, some of them don’t, or at least we only see the possible downsides of it, rather than looking at it as an opportunity. Online advertising is already shifting to an automated, machine learning campaigns management, so does managings keywords with dynamic search ads combined with smart bidding strategies.
Even though a major portion of data will not be available for us to manually manage our campaigns, most of the valuable information is still out there and under the hood Google’s algorithms can still access and optimize ad delivery based on them. Smart bidding strategies such as target ROAS, Maximize conversions, Target CPA utilize a wide range of contextual signals that can capture the right user at the right time for our business. If you didn’t put enough trust in Google to optimize your campaigns yet, it will be even more difficult to do so with changes like these, however it has never been more important to make the switch now than ever. Arguably, as PPC experts we are not happy with this change, but on the bigger picture, this can help advertisers use more sophisticated methods to manage their campaigns, and potentially achieve higher results.
To summarize our thought on how to move forward, we recommend you the following:
Feel free to contact us with your questions regarding Online / Digital Marketing and Social Media. Sign up on our site: the EAZY Digital team is always up for good teamwork!
