A search terms report is an overview of the actual queries for which your ad was shown, as opposed to the keywords you have set up in the account. The difference between the two is at the core of managing search campaigns. The report performs two tasks at once. The first is finding waste – queries that are unrelated to your offer or are at the wrong stage of the decision process, which you then add as negative keywords. The second is discovering opportunities, since well-performing queries show how customers actually think about the problem, which is useful not only for campaigns but also for content on the website. Check it regularly, especially after deploying automated bidding strategies and after broadening match types.
See also: Keyword match types, Prompt research, Internal site search as a topic source.
