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Why is Adwords Search Term Report Delayed and Incomplete?

by consultant1027
6 replies
  • PPC/SEM
    • |
I'm curious why the data in the Search Term Report (Details button on Keyword screen) isn't as up to date as the rest of the performance data in an Adwords account. You can have 100 impressions or more sometimes and have no terms in the report and when terms do show up there's always a category 'other' that can have a significant number of impressions.

The Search Term Report is crucial for identifying negative keywords when using phrase and broad match types. The more quickly negative keywords can be identified, the less ad spend that is wasted towards keywords searchs with poor relevancy for that campaign.

The reason I am so shocked is that I'm a developer. Google is a very big company that has allocated huge resources to developing their Adwords platform as it generates a huge amount of income for the company. Obviously their databases store every Adwords search query in realtime. I can see the data being a little delayed like the rest of the performance data displayed in the Adwords account but frankly, I cannot think of any huge technical barrier to showing a complete search term report within the same time frame as other Adwords performance data and displaying EVERY keyword match and not lumping a bunch into 'Other'

It seems this delay and lack of complete data on the Search Term Report would have the effect, especially with new advertisers, of increasing the cost per conversion due to wasted ad spend on keyword searches that had a phrase or broad match that are not relevant and the faster all or part of the search is added to the negative keywords list, the quicker the advertiser can stop/prevent wasted CPC costs.

However, conversely, the longer it takes to get this data and the more incomplete it is, the more revenue Google makes on this wasted ad spend. I'm not accusing Google of doing this on purpose. Ad relevancy may in some, but not all cases dissuade a click-thru on an irrelevant term, but then this still ends up lowering the advertisers CTR and indirectly potentially lowering Quality Score.

Has Google ever given a detailed explanation of why the Keyword Term Report is delayed and does not show ALL keywords? I can't imagine for a company like Google the reason could be a technical one. I've used Adwords for many years and I'm surprised while other things have improved this issue with the Search Term report has not been addressed apparently?
#adwords #delayed #incomplete #report #search #term
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi consultant1027,

    Seems odd you would bring up this topic now, after AdWords recently (mid March) dramatically increased processing and freshness of this very data. (celebrations for increased data speed still fresh in my mind).

    Prior to that recent update they only processed the Search Terms data once a day and posted it around 3PM (EST) the following day. Now it is processed continuously and is available after a delay of no more than 6 hours.

    Originally Posted by consultant1027 View Post

    Has Google ever given a detailed explanation of why the Keyword Term Report is delayed and does not show ALL keywords? I can't imagine for a company like Google the reason could be a technical one. I've used Adwords for many years and I'm surprised while other things have improved this issue with the Search Term report has not been addressed apparently?
    AdWords has explained that some of the data they provide takes a bit longer to process, so it tends to lag your other data by about 3 hours.

    Here's a page that explains AdWords data freshness: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2544985

    By the way, it's called "Search Terms" report, not "keyword term" report. Keywords are not the same thing as search terms. While I suspect that you are aware of that fact, many reading this post may not understand this, so I am using this opportunity to point that out.

    In the AdWords system "search terms" are what users type into search engines, and "keywords" are what advertisers use to trigger ad impressions. Because those 2 are often not the same for a given ad impression, the search terms report helps advertisers learn which search terms are actually triggering ad impressions for a specific keyword.

    How keywords work
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  • Profile picture of the author LucidWebMarketing
    The search term report is available the next day. So today being the 5th, I can see yesterday's data. Actually, I can see today's too, something I'm sure you couldn't do before, but there's no value in that as the day is still going.

    As for lumping search queries into the Other category it's likely a performance/cost/value issue.

    If I have 1000 clicks, what value is it to know of all the 800 unique queries? Many of them are likely very similar too so the value of knowing all of them is low. Do you really want to go through hundreds of unique queries? How many are likely to improve your campaign significantly?

    Google, although they can surely technically do it, is a for-profit company and therefore will do all it can to save money. If it gave you all the queries, that is a cost to them in many ways: storage and bandwidth are two I can think of. So instead of giving you everything, they give you what you need.
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Originally Posted by LucidWebMarketing View Post

      The search term report is available the next day. So today being the 5th, I can see yesterday's data. Actually, I can see today's too, something I'm sure you couldn't do before, but there's no value in that as the day is still going.
      Hi Lucid,

      I tend to agree with you that seeing search terms for the same day is not likely to be that useful for an established campaign that has already gone through a round or two of optimizations. However, for a new campaign, or even just new ad groups, it can be very useful to spot unanticipated search terms that are irrelevant and triggering ads, using up a substantial portion of the day's ad spend budget.

      Originally Posted by LucidWebMarketing View Post

      If I have 1000 clicks, what value is it to know of all the 800 unique queries? Many of them are likely very similar too so the value of knowing all of them is low. Do you really want to go through hundreds of unique queries? How many are likely to improve your campaign significantly?
      I get what you are saying, I know I personally don't "want" to spend my precious time going through search term reports, but I do it anyway. There are many other things I'd rather spend time doing, but I consider this task much too important to neglect.

      Why?

      Because it helps to significantly improve campaign performance. So much so, that it is a top priority task for all accounts at our agency. We decided to make it the very first task we perform on each account every Monday morning. All my account managers know that it is going to be the first thing I look for in our daily Agile meetings.

      You do have a valid point, questioning the value of trying to learn "all" search terms that triggered ad impressions. However, the solution is to work smart, rather than hard.

      We train our account managers to prioritize by ad spend when analyzing these reports. We focus first, and foremost on the search terms that have the highest ad spend, then on the search terms with the highest impressions without clicks. That will allow you to get to nearly everything that is important to know in in an account in just about 5 minutes or less.

      What value do we get from analyzing these reports?
      • Identify irrelevant search terms with significant cost.
      • Identify high value search terms that have not yet been added to the campaign
      • Identify account structure issues that can fixed to improve performance
      We consider all of those to be of great value to help optimize campaign performance.

      Originally Posted by LucidWebMarketing View Post

      Google, although they can surely technically do it, is a for-profit company and therefore will do all it can to save money. If it gave you all the queries, that is a cost to them in many ways: storage and bandwidth are two I can think of. So instead of giving you everything, they give you what you need.
      Google has provided specific information on why some data is not displayed, it is for privacy reasons. This is the message you see when you hover over the "other search terms" tool tip:

      The "Other search terms" row displays data for terms that triggered your ads but that aren't listed individually in your "Search terms" table.

      Criteria: Data appears in this row if both of the following are true:
      You didn't receive any clicks on this term within the last 30 days (from visitors who weren't blocking their referrer URLs).
      The term wasn't entered by a significant number of people.
      Keep in mind, data for searches in the last 24 hours will always be in this row.
      And here is what the say about those other terms on their website:
      Keep in mind that you'll only see search terms that were used by people at least 24 hours ago and have either received clicks in the past 30 days or were searched for by a significant number of people. Any search terms that did not meet this criteria will be summed up in the 'Other search terms' row.
      Source: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472708
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      • Profile picture of the author consultant1027
        So if you have a keyword phrase being used multiple times that is determined private, you can't see it, so you can't add it to negative keywords, but Google still charges you for these 'phantom keywords' Gee, that seems really fair. Why don't they just exclude broad search matching when they determine the search has private data that they won't display to their advertisers or just not charge for those clicks?

        I would bet money that if advertisers saw the actual list of 'other' keywords, they wouldn't be happy about a lot of the so called 'private' data searches they are paying for. I'm seeing 10% of the clicks and as many as 80%+ of the impressions on some accounts being in the 'Other' category. So 8 out of temp impressions were triggered by searches with "private data" in them? I think not.

        I guess Google can always say, then don't use broad match.
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        • Profile picture of the author dburk
          Originally Posted by consultant1027 View Post

          I guess Google can always say, then don't use broad match.
          Hi consultant1027,

          Yep.

          I also say do not use broad match, except for special situations where you are fishing for long tails.You can bet that many of those "other" keywords are irrelevant search terms, or otherwise of low commercial intent.

          A better option is to use modified broad match, with plenty of negative match keywords, or just stick with exact match and phrase match. Leave the dregs of broad match keywords as gleaning for the lazy marketers to fight over.
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  • Profile picture of the author consultant1027
    I never use broad match. I always use modified broad match with plenty of negative terms. The problem is, without access to the search terms in the 'Other Terms' category, you can't easily build a complete negative terms list as the best way to do that is to examine ALL the search terms even if they are 7 word long tail searches.

    Getting negative terms and match types are really not the topic of this thread I started. The subject is WHY does Google not show you all the 'Other Terms' Wel... I you click on the ? next to Other Terms in the report you get:

    -----

    The "Other search terms" row displays data for terms that triggered your ads but that aren't listed individually in your "Search terms" table.

    Criteria: Data appears in this row if both of the following are true:
    You didn't receive any clicks on this term within the last 30 days (from visitors who weren't blocking their referrer URLs).
    The term wasn't entered by a significant number of people.
    Keep in mind, data for searches in the last 24 hours will always be in this row.

    I just ran a report on one campaign for a day two days ago and 121 of 131 search terms were Other Terms and there were 3 clicks. So I'm assuming the latter is true (not entered by a significant number of people.)

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    HERE'S MY POINT: IF ONE PERSON CLICKS ON MY AD DISPLAYED VIA BROAD MATCH AND I'M CHARGED FOR IT, THAT ISN'T AN INSIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF PEOPLE TO ME! IF GOOGLE HAS THE DATA TO CHARGE ME FOR THE CLICK, THEN SHOW ME THE SEARCH TERM!

    I CAN'T THINK OF A LEGITIMATE REASON/EXCUSE TO NOT SHOW ME ALL THE DATA? PRIVACY? YA RIGHT, NOT 95% OF THE IMPRESSIONS! TOO MUCH DATA? NOT, THERE'S PLENTY OF OTHER REPORTS THAT CAN GENERATE THOUSANDS OF LINES.
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