4 Tools for Analyzing Data from Google Ads Search Term Report

Back in 2020, Google Ads announced that they were going to start hiding some search query data without a “significant” amount of data. We’ve all had to adapt to the change, but it’s still important to regularly analyze your search query data in Google Ads. In this post, I’ll provide five ways you can analyze your search query data at scale.

At first, it might seem daunting to gather and analyze large volumes of Google Ads search term data, especially if you're not a programmer or don't have access to the API. The tools listed below will give you the same access as the API users have but with much less effort.

In short, analyzing detailed search term reports is not voodoo. No programming skills are required. You can see the same data shared by the experts with just a few clicks.

What are Search Terms in Google Ads?

Search terms (also called search queries) are the actual words or phrases that users type into Google that trigger an ad to appear.

Google Ads Keywords vs Search Terms

While search terms are the actual words used by searchers, keywords are the words or phrases that advertisers bid on.

For example, a user may search for the term “green widgets for sale near me” and trigger our ad for the keyword “green widgets”.

So what? If we are marketing an ecommerce site without a physical presence, we may choose to prevent our ads from showing when the search term includes the phrase “near me”. This will prevent our ads from showing when people need something locally and saves us money that can be reinvested into better-performing keyword variations. We constantly monitor these lists to remove search terms that are not relevant to our campaigns or add new keywords based on actual search patterns.

There are a few common ways to access Google Ads search term data to improve your ability to find new keywords to bid on and exclude irrelevant phrases from triggering your ads. The most obvious is by going through the Google Ads interface, but there are some limitations when going this route.

How to Find Search Terms in Google Ads

Most Google Ads users view search terms data in the Google Ads user interface (“UI”). In light of search term reports being truncated, many people are looking for other ways to access the same data and hope the results might be more thorough or complete.

Finding the search terms report in Google Ads is simple. In your left nav, expand the “Insights and Reports” menu item and click “Search terms”. From there, you can see performance for each search term, the keyword it matched to, and easy options to “Add as keyword” or “Add as negative keyword”.

Viewing the search terms report in the Google Ads UI is somewhat limiting in that you can’t easily view or analyze thousands of terms at the same time. However, it does have the distinct advantage of being able to add or exclude keywords with just a couple of clicks directly from the interface.

Top Tools for Accessing and Analyzing Google Ads Search Terms

1. Google Ads Add-On For Google Sheets

Did you know Google Sheets has a native integration that allows you to create reports with Google Ads data directly in Google Sheets? No programming skills or API tokens are needed! It’s extremely powerful and surprisingly underutilized in the PPC world.

There is a built-in Search Terms report type that allows you to pull in search terms and performance data at the individual account, campaign, ad group, or Manager Account (previously known as My Client Center/MCC) level. Once in your Google Sheet, you can analyze, pivot, or chart the data to your heart’s content. I find it to be much faster than trying to analyze the same data in the Google Ads UI.

One downside is that there is no ability to push changes back into Google Ads. If you want to add a keyword or an exclusion, you’ll have to do it manually in the UI.

Set up is easy. Simply install the Google Ads Add-On from the marketplace and then you can access the report builder in the “Add Ons” menu item in the Google Sheets main menu. Note, it runs slowly especially when pulling thousands of rows or larger date ranges.

If you want to take it to the next level and incorporate data from other sources such as Microsoft Advertising or Paid Social platforms, you might find Supermetrics or Funnel will scratch that itch (for a price).

2. Google Ads API Search Query Performance Report

By far the most customizable and powerful way to get search term data programmatically, the Google Ads API often requires developer assistance or integration through other platforms. Check out the developer documentation for the Search Query Performance Report to get an idea of the data you can extract with a little know-how and a few lines of code.

The options for using the API to extract data are endless but the most common are:

• Pulling Google Ads search term data into a reporting interface.

• Storing Google Ads search term data in a database or data warehouse for further analysis.

• Merging Google Ads search term data with CRM records or other data platforms.

If you want to get really fancy and automate your search term analysis and keyword additions/exclusions, you can also push changes back into Google Ads through the API based on any combination of rules or filters.

3. Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service

Need a cloud-based database solution without programming or messing with the API? Non-programmers can connect Google Ads to BigQuery to store performance data with just a few clicks using the BigQuery Data Transfer Service for Google Ads. It's a mouthful and sounds a bit intimidating but it's really not. The only consideration is cost since BigQuery is part of Google Cloud and you'll pay for storage and data transfer. It's relatively cheap compared to building your own storage solution.

Once you connect Google Ads to BigQuery, you can schedule daily data transfers of almost any Google Ads data. Then it is easy to connect BigQuery to Google Sheets, PowerBI, Google Data Studio, or other popular analysis and data visualization tools.

4. Google Analytics and Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) Search Queries Reports

Finally, our beloved Google Analytics 4 and Looker Studio (formerly called Google Data Studio) show Google Ads search queries once connected to a Google Ads account. These can be especially helpful for marrying search terms with on-site engagement and conversion metrics. These might be the easiest and most familiar methods for marketers who use Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads regularly.

Although you can see search terms' impact on your website's performance, there are no ways to push changes (keyword additions or exclusions) back into Google Ads from Google Analytics 4 or Looker Studio.

So You Can Pull and Analyze Search Term Data. Now What?

Now you can monitor your search terms more easily and add or exclude keywords from your campaign to improve performance. Spend less money on search terms that don't convert and build out better campaigns and ad groups for search terms that drive bottom-line results.

There's so much value to this data and it's a shame Google has removed the ability to see all the data. But you don't need to be a programmer to unlock the full power of this data and put it to work in your account.

This blog post was originally published on September 3, 2020, and was updated and republished on July 16, 2024.