Pay-Per-Click for Seriously Valuable Keyword Search Data: Here’s How

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google Ads and Bing Ads are great ways to increase traffic, conversions, and get your company on to the first page of search results quickly and easily. Another great feature from PPC advertising is keyword search data. This organic keyword search data is useful in optimizing your website around keywords that your audience is searching for that align with your business.

If the search terms driving traffic to your website fit well within your company or website, then you knew your website was generally well optimized for those terms. If there were terms driving traffic to your site that you thought were not targeted toward your site, then you knew you had some work to do in terms of optimizing  the keywords that really tailored to you. This keyword report also let you know what terms your organic visitors were using most often to arrive to your website and was key in determining which terms to use in optimizing your site for powerful SEO benefits.

Organic Keyword Data No More

With Google and Bing Ads both no longer providing this organic keyword data for “privacy” reasons, it now makes the keyword search data offered in PPC that much more valuable. This can be vital information in better understanding your visitors’ search behavior. To make the most out of the money spent on PPC, it is critical to review the visitor search behavior data. Though the paid data is a small sample pool of all traffic sources, it can give you a strong sense of what terms your customers are using across multiple channels. For more information on keyword data, you can use Google Search Console to determine which keywords are seeing the most impressions and clicks.

How to Obtain PPC Keyword Detail Report

1. Once logged into your Google Ads account, set the date range to the timeframe that you would like to look at. If this is your first time looking at this data you will most likely want to set your date range to “All time”.
2. Next, decide if you want to look at all keyword data (all campaigns), campaign specific data or adgroup level data. This will determine how broad or specific you want the keyword search data to be. For this example we will look at all keyword data.
3.  Click on the Keywords tab.
4. Under the Details tab click Search Terms> All. See image below for visual.

Understanding Your Keyword Search Data

Upon landing on the search details report you are now subject to an abundance of keyword data and a number of metrics for each term including clicks, impressions, click through rate, conversions, conversion rate, cost, ect. The columns that appear can also be customized to your liking to help tell the story you are looking for. Since the keyword volumes and metrics are affected by your keyword bids and ad text, the data does need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there is still a lot that you can learn from here.

Here are a few things to look for when looking at this report:

• Which keywords are driving the most traffic to my site? This can help show you which keywords users are using most often and can be used to make impactful SEO changes.
• Which keywords are not converting? Look at the keywords that have a strong CTR and overall clicks but a low conversion rate. Unless the ad text is doing a bad job at describing the page, this more than likely means that there is room for improvement for the landing page. Make sure the landing page is using the keywords you are bidding on and you are giving the users the opportunity to convert.
• Find Additional Keywords. If using broad or phrase match keywords, you may be able to identify specific keyword rich search terms that you never thought of or maybe you thought users were referring to it differently. Again this can help you make sure the terminology your visitors are searching for is being used on your website and your ad text.
• Negative Keyword Opportunities. This search term report is very helpful in identifying possible negative keyword candidates to add to your Google Ads account. In terms of SEO though, you may find out that the terminology you are using on your website relates to other things or has other meanings. This can make ranking for a term like this very difficult and you may want to consider ranking for a more specific and less competitive term that really describes your offering.
• Content Ideas. If you see many search terms asking broad or specific questions about a keyword you are bidding on, you may want to answer their question and draft an educational content piece around this.

To learn more PPC and SEO tips, check out our Save Budget with PPC TLC and How to Boost your Rank on Google: 15 Essential Questions blog posts.

Keyword Data Gold Mine

PPC keyword data can help you uncover things about your target audience, PPC configuration, website optimization and more, that you probably can’t find anywhere else. Share what other ways you make use of the keyword search terms report for PPC optimization, SEO changes or any other part of your business.

For more B2B search engine marketing strategy guidelines, take a look at our ebook. If you have any questions, or need help getting started, contact us. We are more than happy to help!