Posts Tagged ‘search query performance report’

Using the Search Query Performance Report to Improve Keyword List and CTR

January 17th, 2009

The Search Query Performance Report is one of my favorite reports. It is helpful for extracting new keywords, determining new keyword matching options and finding -negative keywords to reduce unwanted impressions and clicks. Overall it is going to provide valuable data to assist you in increasing CTR to give your account a better quality score and an edge over your competition.

The data below is from an account that was brought to my attention because it was failing to provide a return on investment. To protect this clients identity and keywords I am blacking out part of the keyword. He sells coffee products so for the purpose of further explinations let’s replace the blacked out keyword with ‘folgers’.

Broad Match Keywords = low CTR

As you can see the broad match keyword generated a lot of impressions but few clicks resulting in a low CTR. Because broad match will allow keywords to be inserted before the keyword, after the keyword or related synonyms be used for the keyword the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ can match a broad range of queries.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on the account was run a Search Query Performance Report. The broad match keyword ‘folgers’ generated the below queries circled in red as well as many other queries that I have not shown here. As you can see people were performing search queries on ‘folgers coffee packets’ and the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ was allowing the query to show the ads. There were a good number of impressions for ‘folgers coffee packets’ so I have added the new keyword to the account.

Search Query Performance Report – personal info withheld

The data from the SQPR allowed me to extract many new keywords to add to the account. It also told me to add some negative keywords such as ‘-makers’ because this ad group is specific to coffee (I have another group for makers). Not shown in this report is the many misspelled variations of the keyword I found. I added keywords for all of these misspellings also.

The Below report is a sampling of new keywords I extracted from the SQPR. This is the next day’s data and already look at that CTR! I will keep the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ for now. I expect to see the impressions for the keyword start to drop while I absorb some of those impressions with these more specific variations. The drop in impressions will cause the ‘folgers’ keyword CTR to improve and I can continue to run the report to find more keywords that have good traffic to add to the account. Eventually I may pause the keyword. Note that all the keywords in the report.2 are new are added in exact or phrase match to further increase CTR by restricting the search queries they can appear on.

As you can see the CTR increased dramatically from the broad match keyword ‘folgers’. These scores overtime will help this account to achieve a fantastic historical CTR and the keywords that are scored as OK will eventually become GREAT scores with a really good historical CTR.