About the search terms report in DoubleClick Search

The search terms report displays the search terms that match your keywords and product groups, and trigger ads to appear. Once you understand the search terms that trigger your ads, you can update keywords and product descriptions to better match customer intent.

Search terms report for keywords

If a keyword campaign (manual campaign or inventory keyword campaign) contains broad match or phrase match keywords, some of the search terms entered by customers may differ slightly or significantly from the actual keyword that's in your campaign. You can use the search terms report to see how much the search terms differ from your keywords, and then add new keywords or set negative keywords to better match your campaign to your customers' intent.

The report varies by engine account

Because different search engines provide different amounts of data about search terms, the data you see in the report varies by search engine:

• AdWords: When you view the search terms report for an AdWords keyword campaign or ad group, you'll see:
  • The search terms that users entered
  • If you click the View keywords button or segment the report by keyword, you see the keywords that matched the query, including the keyword text and match type.
    For example, you might see that a customer searched for "volleyball shoes," and this matched your broad-match "shoes" keyword.
  • Engine metrics and conversions reported by AdWords conversion tracking.

    Floodlight conversion data (for example, Actions and Revenue) is not available for the search terms report in AdWords accounts. 

  Bing Ads, Yahoo! JAPAN, and Yahoo! Gemini: When you view the search terms report for a Bing Ads, Yahoo! JAPAN, or Yahoo! Gemini campaign or ad group, you'll see:
  • The search terms that users entered, unless the search was encrypted. If a search engine encrypts customer searches, the actual search terms that the customer entered are not available to DoubleClick Search (DS). For encrypted searches, you'll see Other queries instead of the search terms.
  • The keywords that matched the query, including the keyword text and match type.
  • The number of visits recorded by DS for each query, and the Floodlight conversion data associated with each query such as total revenue, number of actions, and so on.
    
    Engine metrics are not available for the search terms report in Bing Ads, Yahoo! JAPAN, and Yahoo! Gemini accounts.

Search terms report for product groups

For AdWords Shopping campaigns and ad groups, the search terms report shows the queries that match your product groups. You can use the data in the report to do the following:

• Create negative keywords. Negative keywords can help you reach the most interested customers, reduce your costs, and increase your return on investment. When you add terms as negative keywords, your ad won't show to people searching for those terms.

• Improve the product descriptions in your inventory feed. AdWords uses product descriptions to decide how and where to show your ads. You can use the information in the search terms report to make sure that your product descriptions match customer intent, which then helps the engines show your products for relevant searches.

Search terms report at the AdWords engine account level

If you navigate to an AdWords engine account and view the search terms report, you'll see the queries that matched both product groups and keywords (assuming the account contains both Shopping campaigns and keyword campaigns).

If you segment the report by campaign or ad group,  you can see which campaign or ad group each product group and keyword belongs to.

If you segment the report by keyword, you'll only see search terms that matched keywords.

How fresh is the data?

AdWords provides updates to the search terms once a day, and DS updates its report as soon as AdWords does.

For other engines, the report is based on DS visits and is as fresh as other DS and Floodlight aggregated metrics.