🔍 Google Ads to start limiting search query data

Sep 03, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, I'm feeling a bit ranty, apologies.

Try this for kicks, go to your Search Terms report in Google Ads and add up your spend on search terms that had 1 to, say, 5 clicks in the past 30 or 60 days or so.

Now, take a closer look at those queries, their performance, their common themes and imagine if you had no insight into any of this data at all.

No ability to run an n-gram analysis on them.

No ability to determine if they should individually or as a group be added as negative keywords to stop wasting money on them.

No ability to identify new opportunities based on this data.

Data that you paid for.

That could be advertisers' new reality.

Google says it is updating search terms reports in Google Ads to "only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users."

What does "significant" mean? No idea, yet. But in a world of same-meaning close variants, search term reports have become critical tools for paid search marketers to optimize their campaigns and maximize efficiency.

Google told us it's doing this for privacy reasons. Nobody wants PII in their query reports, but take another look at that report you ran. Anything sensitive? The real problem is that we won't know what we won't see and how much we may be missing.

In other news, Microsoft Advertising's new UI has rolled out, with many new features. Duane Brown took an early look at what to expect from the updates now available in the new interface.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

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Google Ads content policy. Google updated its ad content policies around sensitive events where it will disallow ads that profit off such events or blame others for such events.

HTTPS video. Here is a new video from Google, this one is by John Mueller, on the topic of Google Search and HTTPS.

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