Classify Search Term

Why build keyword lists from search term reports, and how Opteo makes it easy.

Shaquira Jeyasingh avatar
Written by Shaquira Jeyasingh
Updated over a week ago

Why do I need to classify search terms?

The search terms report will tell you exactly what search terms triggered your ads. It's useful data: you can see what your customers were looking for before they converted, or see what irrelevant searches have shown your ads when you didn't intend them to appear.

It's generally good practice to keep your keyword and negative lists well-matched to your search terms report. It keeps your account healthy and spending budget on the right searchers but it can be hard and time-consuming work! That's where Opteo comes in...

How does this improvement work?

At every refresh cycle, we'll generate an Classify Search Term improvement for the five most costly search terms in your search terms report.

When you click Classify Keyword, we'll prompt you to decide whether to add a new Keyword or Negative Keyword.

We'll offer this improvement when a search term is triggering your ads but hasn't been added as a keyword or negative keyword.

To help you decide, we'll tell you the amount spent on this search term, the number of clicks & conversions it generated, and its CPA.

We'll let you know the location of the keyword which was triggered by the search term.

We'll also display a typical Google search results page the search query would generate.

Classifying search terms with Opteo.

  • When classifying a search term in Opteo, start by determining if it should be a new keyword or a negative keyword.

  • Then, use the 'Modify' button below the search term to adjust the words you want to include and the match type.

  • In case you're adding a new keyword, the Max CPC bid will match that of the source keyword.

  • Finally, decide on a destination for the keyword:

    • New keywords can be assigned to any of your active campaigns and ad groups.

    • Negative keywords can either be added to a negative keyword list, applied at the account level, or incorporated into your active campaigns and ad groups.

Note: It's possible that your account shares an MCC connection and therefore has access to negative keyword lists that are 'Owned by a manager account'. Unfortunately, Opteo cannot add negatives to these shared lists.

Technical notes:

  • We'll prioritise the queries that are costing you the most. In case we don't spot any queries with at least 2 clicks, we'll prioritise the queries with the highest impression count instead.

  • If the CPA is exceptionally bad (more than 3x target CPA), Opteo will offer an Add Negative Keyword improvement task instead. 

  • We'll only look at queries generated in the last 90 days (to keep things fresh), but for those queries, we'll gather all-time metrics. This helps beef up stats for search queries, which tend to have very low metrics.

  • We'll check your campaign-level negatives, your ad group-level negatives, your shared negative lists, and your existing keywords to make sure that a query isn't already covered. If we find an existing keyword, but it isn't [exact], we'll still prompt you for action if it's a significant query, it deserves its own [exact] keyword.

  • For Google Grants accounts, we'll limit the new keyword to a $2.00 bid, even if the source keyword bid is higher.

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