Flight log / Transmission 019

Read your search term report like a mission log

Your keyword list is the flight plan. The search term report is the mission log: what people actually typed before you paid for the click. Since September 2020, Google only shows you the part of that log that clears its privacy thresholds.

Keywords tell you what you meant to buy. Search terms tell you what you actually bought. With broad match, Performance Max and AI Max all widening what a keyword can match, the distance between those two lists has never been bigger, and the search term report is the only place you can measure it.

Read it the way a crew reads a mission log: on a schedule, looking for drift, and writing down what changes as a result. The rest of this post is how.

What is the search term report?

The search term report lists the actual searches that triggered your ads, with impressions, clicks, cost and conversions for each. It also shows which keyword matched each search and the match type, which tells you how far the search drifted from what you bid on.

A keyword is your bid. A search term is the person's words. One phrase match keyword like "expense management software" can match dozens of distinct searches, and some of them will be searches you'd never have chosen.

How do you find the search terms report in Google Ads?

1. Select Campaigns in the left navigation.
2. Open Insights and reports, then select Search terms.
3. Add the Keyword column. It isn't shown by default: open the columns menu, select Attributes, check Keyword, then Apply.
4. Set a date range long enough to matter. For most B2B accounts, 30 days for weekly triage and 90 days for pattern work.
5. Sort by cost, not clicks. Waste hides in cost.

Two more views live in the same report. The Performance Max view shows search terms and landing pages for PMax campaigns, with data from March 2023 onward. And for AI Max, the "Search terms and ad combinations" view shows the headlines and landing pages that went with each search.

What do the match type labels mean?

Beyond match type, four columns earn a permanent place in your saved view: cost, conversions, cost per conversion and conversion rate. Add campaign and ad group too, so you can see which part of the account each search belongs to. Click-through rate is useful later, when you look for page gaps, but it's a poor first filter: a term can be clicked often and still never be worth paying for.

Google notes that the match type shown can differ from the match type you set, because broader keywords can also produce narrower matches. For AI Max, a Source column separates matches drawn from your landing pages from AI Max expanded matches.

What does the search term report hide?

A lot, by design. Since September 2020, Google only reports search terms that have enough search volume across all of Google to meet its privacy standards. Terms below the threshold are left out of the individual rows, so your report totals will usually come in under your campaign totals. In February 2021 Google expanded the report to show more queries that meet those standards.

Two things recover part of the picture:

• Misspellings are now grouped. Since a 2024 update, misspelled searches are reported with the correctly spelled query. Google says that, on average, 9% of search terms previously sitting under "Other" because of misspellings became visible.
• Search terms insights. Under Insights and reports, the Insights page groups searches into categories and subcategories by intent, and includes terms that the standard report omits for privacy. You don't get the exact query, but you do get the theme and its volume.

Size the gap before you trust the report. Compare total clicks and cost in the search terms report with the campaign totals for the same period. The difference is the share of your spend you can't audit query by query. The pattern in most long-tail B2B accounts, where niche searches rarely clear volume thresholds, is that this share is big enough to matter.

How do you mine the search term report for negative keywords?

Start with the top 100 terms by cost over 30 days. For each one, ask a single question: would I pay for this click again? Then:

• Find the root, not the query. "crm jobs remote entry level" becomes the negative jobs. One word blocks a whole family.
• Tag the reason. Job seeker, student, free, DIY, existing customer, wrong product. The reasons become your shared lists.
• Watch for conflicts. A negative that blocks one of your own active keywords is a quiet outage.

One quirk: you can add keywords and negatives straight from the standard report, but not from the Report editor view. The full build process, match types for negatives and a B2B starter list are in how to build negative keyword lists.

How do you find new keywords in search terms?

The flip side of waste is discovery. Filter for search terms with conversions, then check each one against your keyword list. Each converting term is a candidate for one of three moves:

1. Add it as an exact or phrase keyword so you control its bid, ad and landing page directly.
2. Give it its own ad group if it represents an intent you don't already have a home for.
3. Leave it alone if it's a one-off with a single conversion. One data point is a rumor, not a pattern.

How do you spot intent and landing page gaps?

This is the part most search term reviews skip, and where some of the most expensive problems sit. Not every relevant search that fails to convert is a bad search. Sometimes it's a good search sent to the wrong page.

Group your relevant search terms by intent, not by keyword. A hypothetical example for an expense software company:

Then check where each cluster lands. If all four clusters hit the same generic product page, the searcher asking about receipts and the searcher asking about pricing both have to dig for their answer. Clusters with good click-through rates and weak conversion rates are the strongest sign of a page gap rather than a keyword problem. The manual fix: send each ad group to the most relevant page you have, and build dedicated pages for the clusters with the most spend. That alignment between search, ad and page is what message match is about.

How often should you review search terms?

Like the log in The Martian, the value is in the boring entries. Recording every week is what makes the one week something goes wrong obvious. Skip a month and you'll be reading a backlog instead of a log.

Where the search term report breaks

• Privacy thresholds. Hidden terms can't be excluded or promoted individually. Use search terms insights to see the theme.
• Small numbers. In low-volume B2B accounts, most terms have a handful of clicks. Judge relevance by reading, not by conversion rate.
• Automation moves fast. AI Max and broad match can surface new kinds of searches week to week. A monthly-only review lets them run for weeks before anyone looks.

For how search term reviews fit with the rest of running a B2B search program, see the B2B PPC playbook.

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