It’s 2008, AdWords has been thundering along since 2001 in the UK making (and more lately - raping) billions of pounds from advertisers and along the way it has introduced a plethora of new tools aimed at making it easier to spend your cash with them and as a result they can now help you find which keywords to use via the Keyword Tool, Advise you how well they think those keywords will fit in with the your landing page by giving it a Quality Score, Google will even tell you which keywords converted through Conversion Tracking too.

However I do have one major irritation with conversion tracking, it’s great for exact matched keywords however when it comes to phrase and broad match this is where Google drops the ball, OK not so much drops but maybe it’s more like playing with a slightly deflated ball as you get some of the fun but it doesn’t give you the full experience.

Using the search query report option in the reporting area you can run a report that will show you which keywords generated clicks and the whole search term used even if you are broad or phrase matching, so rather than just guess what the user searched for in Google and clicked through from, they will actually tell you! .. amazing huh.. well it would be if they told you everything, but annoyingly they don’t so you end up with reports like below :

I pulled off a report for an adgroup I was about to make a start on optimising and as you can see from the search query report above in addition to the keywords (which are hidden - spoilsport I know) there are 537 other “unique” phrase match queries that Google doesn’t want to share with us.

 The max viable CPA for this client’s product $35 and you can see it’s come in well under that at $11.71 CPA (check out that CTR - 77.81%! - good adcopy helps) and I don’t for a second think that ALL 537 unique terms are converting well so I’d guess that the best of them is converting at maybe $5 CPA but from the Search Query Report I’d never know which ones and more importantly which of them are so irrelevant that I need to add them as negatives.

Due to the lack of transparency there we will break it down from the client’s own on site reporting in this instance but I find it so frustrating that AdWords doesn’t show you the full picture when it can do but chooses not to as it deems that the “other unique phrases” are of such low volume or one off search terms that have a very low chance of ever being used again.

I can see Google’s logic, chances of the search term being used again is low so why let us fill our accounts up with them but I still feel it’s important that we get access to every keyword used as it would give us a better idea of searcher behavour, terminology and their thought processes which may help us target landing pages, adcopy, keywords and negatives in the future, but for now it’s all a bit like working blindfolded for part of the time.

Hopefully in time Google will update this feature but for now it’s just a tease, I’d rather it wasn’t even there at all as it’s just winds me up when I can see it and how many keywords there are and wonder what themes are there even though the keywords are unique.