In the last PPC Back to Basics blog post we tried to give you an easy overview on how to use reporting in Bing Ads. In this post we’d like to highlight the search term report as it is a little gem of a report that will do you some favours:
- It helps you find new, valuable keywords.
- It helps you to fine-tune your negative keywords and control the search traffic that engages with your campaign.
- It can give you some insight into user intent
What is a search term report?
The search term report is a performance report that shows you which search queries are causing your ads to display on the Yahoo! Bing Network. The search query report includes information on impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and average position for those search queries that have triggered your ads and this information you then help you to refine both your keyword and negative keyword lists.
How to set up a search term report in five simple steps:
Go to the reports tab in Bing Ads
- Tick ‘search term’ to select the Search Term Report.
- Set the time unit you want to run the report for, date range, time zone and format.
- Fine tune the report to your requirements in the ‘choose your columns’ section (for this report we would recommend adding ‘keyword’ as an extra column so that you can see what search queries are matching to your specific keywords. You are also able to add the column ‘Delivered match type’ so you can see which match type is causing your ad to show, allowing you to decide if you should amend any of your broad terms to phrase or phrase terms to exact.)
- Save or schedule your report as you like.
- Run the report.
How to set up a search term report
How to apply the knowledge from the report to your account’s benefit
As explained in the blog post ‘Match Type Essentials for the Beginner’ a keyword that is bidded on in broad match such as for example ‘golf clubs’ may also return results when people search for ‘golf clubs sales’, ‘junior golf clubs’ and ‘golf clubs fakes’. The search term report will tell you which keywords are triggering your ads to display and in what match type so you may find out that the keyword ‘golf clubs’ in your account which you set up in broad match is serving your ad to someone that was looking for ‘junior golf clubs’.
If you actually sell junior golf clubs that is a good result – you may want to add the keyword ‘junior golf clubs’ to your account and bid on it in exact match which will likely be cheaper for you than the results achieved via broad match. You can also give it a dedicated ad and landing page, increasing your chances of achieving a high ROI.
Obviously you are not selling fake golf clubs and you wouldn’t want your business to show up for such a query. In that case the search term report has given you the insight that you need to add ‘fake’ as a negative keyword. Another way to prevent your ad from showing up for this keyword when you are bidding in broad match is to look into using broad match modifiers.
Add the new search terms and negative keywords straight into your account:
* We made it really easy to add search terms to your account as keywords and to add any terms you don’t want to show up as negative keywords. Find out here how to do this in a few steps.
Refine the insights on user intend by including stop words into your search term report
* In November 2013 the enhanced search query report was launched. The amount of searches from mobile phones and tablets has increased and many use search on these devices as dictionaries or cook books, hence the relevance of so called ‘stop words’ (‘what’, ‘how’,‘where’) increases. You can now set up your search term report so that you see this data to enable you to understand user intent better. This insight will also help you to optimise your account. Read here how.
We hope we kept it simple and that if you don’t run a search term report today this will start to help you now:
- Have a look at what search terms triggered your ads to serve today.
- Add any good new keywords and negative keywords to your account in a few easy steps.
- Get further insight into user intend with the enhanced search query report.