Finding Buried Treasure: Using Your Keyword Report for Optimization

I realized the other day that I have been giving incomplete advice. I have been recommending to our clients that they optimize their campaigns by using their keyword reports to see the terms that have received searches and use this to “mine” for negative keywords. The mistake I was making was that I wasn’t showing our users how to go about doing that.

Today, I’ll show you where to access this information in your account, and how to comb through your data to find opportunities for keywords and for negative keywords.

To find the report, go to the reports tab in your account:

Next, look for Keyword Report on the page. Click on the keyword to enter.

This is a campaign for a site that sells events tickets. As you can see, there is some activity as well as conversions.

However, there is a large spend occurring, which indicates that there is opportunity to improve the campaign. Also, you can see there are underlined keywords that may be too untargeted to be helpful. Let’s now use this report to make those improvements.

The keywords that have received clicks in your campaign will contain a detailed keyword report. Find this by clicking on each keyword.

Let’s click on “concert ticket.” As you can see, there is now a column for the searched term. This shows the actual term that was connected to your keyword.

This is significant because you can determine how targeted your keyword is, as well as the types of phrases that your visitors are using to perform a search. You may find some new alternative keywords to add to your campaign. You know that it’s being used by searchers, so why not use it for your own needs?

I’ve pointed out two examples: “buying concert ticket” and “buy concert ticket.” I saw this as a repeating pattern in this report, so I surmised that these might be useful. I then took these and implanted them into our Keyword Suggestion tool to assess if they supply any traffic. It turns out that these together received an estimated 100,000 searches in the last month. I then suggested that the advertiser add these to their campaign as a way to capture more traffic.

Another good use of the report is to find options for negative keywords. Comb through your clicks by keyword to see how relevant your searches are. Here’s an example. This person bid upon the keyword “carrie underwood.” Here are some of the searches received.

As you can see, these aren’t relevant to their content. If they still wish to bid on this keyword, they should consider adding terms like ‘bikini” and “married” to their negative keyword list. They could also change their keyword match to exact or phrase match, or delete the keyword altogether.

The advantage of doing this is to refine your keywords and control your spending. Negative keywords should be added at the same time as your regular keywords. This will head off any extraneous spending you might incur through your keyword strategy.

These are some of the ways that the keyword report can help you develop and target your ads. Start using these techniques today.