Keywords & Targeting
Search Terms Report
The search terms report lists the actual queries that triggered your ads, with performance metrics for each, as opposed to the keywords you bid on.
In practice
Keywords are what you buy; search terms are what you get. The report shows the queries that matched, how often, what they cost, and whether they converted. It is the single most important report in a Search account and the source of nearly every negative keyword and most new keywords.
Google hides queries below a privacy threshold, so the report never covers 100 percent of spend, but it covers most of it. For Performance Max, the campaign-level search term report exposes the queries PMax entered, which is why nobody should describe PMax as a black box any more.
A daily review catches an irrelevant query after a few dollars instead of a few hundred. We read it every business day on every account, negating what does not fit, promoting what converts, and running n-gram analysis on the aggregate when volume makes row-by-row review impractical.
Why it matters
It is the ground truth of what your budget is buying.
See it in a real accountTrusted Locksmith: daily search-term mining in an account that grew from 5 to 248 leads a month
RELATED TERMS
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are terms added to a campaign, ad group, or shared list that prevent ads from showing on searches containing them.
N-gram Analysis
N-gram analysis breaks search terms into their component one-, two-, or three-word sequences and aggregates performance by sequence, revealing which words drive waste or conversions across thousands of individual queries.
Performance Max (PMax)
Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign using automated bidding and asset-based creative.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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