For niche accounts, is the Search Terms Report on Google Ads only to weed out irrelevant keywords?

[SantaClausDid911]

Google has been black boxing data more and more for years, you’re not crazy but it’s old news.

It’s why broad match is hot garbage, phrase match is what broad used to be, and exact match is like the old modifiers.

Google is slowly implementing an AI and behavioral roadmap across all its properties and on the advertiser side of things it amounts to less control and visibility (also due to privacy standards).

This is not entirely bad, as traditional search behaviors have changed and we sorta need some of this. But Google also knows it makes more money when you push the trust me button.

>I’m starting to think that the search terms report is only for the purposes “Excluding” irrelevant ones as opposed to refining your account.

I mean in many niches that can be the most valuable use of it. And that IS part of refining your account.

But with only a few thousand impressions I’m not surprised you have more gaps than usual. I still see a wide range of variance, anywhere from 30-70% of my SQRs are visible even across different campaigns in the same account.

But I almost always get more data on the higher impression campaigns.

>Would it be unusual if just exclude all known search terms and leave Google to target the queries which it won’t disclose to me due to low volume….?

Yes, in a roundabout way what you’re looking for is what I call query mining; finding the high performers and then targeting only those.

This isn’t how you do it though. If you exclude the same keywords you’re targeting it typically just won’t serve.

You have a few options. 2 that stand out to me:

1. Phrase match with max conversions or another auto bid strat.
If your tracking is good enough and you have appropriate volume the whole point is to kinda let Google do its thing and just mitigate the waste.

2. Do a ton of keyword research using various tools, AI prompts, manual serp analysis, etc.
Put a bunch of exact match terms in and let them play king of the hill.

All of that said, a lot of what you’re saying doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense, or at least doesn’t seem intuitive to me. I mean no insult, but there’s likely something with your methodology or your build that’s making life harder for yourself and I don’t have the context to tell you what that is.

Another thing is to some extent just stay value focused because you can overtinker in a lot of niches.

If you know your ROI and quality are good, or especially if you know you’re crushing your KPIs, don’t go messing with over managing your keywords. Get incremental wins from landing page and creative testing.

Edit: fwiw nothing you said here suggests to me you should be on max clicks

[ernosem]

Well, you still can use the better performing terms for SEO purposes. Grab what converts from PPC and target it with SEO.

[fathom53]

You can use the search term report for both including and excluding keywords but you need to spend a decent amount each month to see what people are searching for. Niche accounts and small spending accounts are going to struggle.

[TTFV]

Search terms reports are useful for identifying irrelevant queries and blocking them as well as identifying relevant (high performing) queries and adding them back to your campaigns as keywords.

You can do deeper analysis using N-Grams as well to find root words that are high or low performers.

If most of your queries are low relevance your keyword strategy probably needs an overhaul.

I can tell you, also, that your niche is extremely challenging because of low cost offshore competition and various free translation tools making your services unnecessary except in certain professional like legal and medical where very high accuracy is critical.

[Single-Sea-7804]

Yeah this is Google entering its black box phase. I’ve had moments where I could only see 30% of search terms. Just the way it is sadly

[Available_Cup5454]

Switch to max conversions with target CPA so Google prioritizes converting queries instead of click volume then only use the report to block irrelevant intent not to expand keywords