Google’s new Search Query Report is, quite possibly, one of the most helpful improvements Google has made to the program in recent memory, IMHO. Now I can see what keywords my ads are actually showing up for, and it’s been quite the revelation for me.

For starters, I didn’t realize how broad the broad keyword match option actually was. They’re not kidding when they say that your ads can show up for a broad number of keywords. I was finding all sorts of random phrases that had very little to do with the original ad group. Remarkably, I still had a decent CTR, but the conversion rate was horrible, which is more a tribute to the ambiguity and persuasiveness of my ad-writing skills, rather than any virtue of my keyword targeting. Guess I should look at rewriting my ads with more specific ad copy. So I can already see optimization tips coming from this data.

Ideally, once you have everything cooking, this report is going to be an invaluable source of new keywords and negative keywords for your accounts. I’m thinking you could create a tester campaign where you throw in a bunch of generic or less-targeted keywords and let it run. Then, once you have a decent amount of data, pull this report for the campaign and dig in. You should be able to find some phrases that perform well and need to be added to your regular accounts and bidded up for better performance, and you’ll probably find some abysmally-performing irrelevant keyword phrases that you didn’t think about when you first built the account that you’ll now be able to ad as negative keywords, thus boosting your CTR.

Technorati Tags: adwords, search qyery report, optimization, seo