When managing your Google Ads account, one of the key reporting sections we use is the ‘Search Terms’ report – this shows us what people were actually searching for when they clicked one of our customer’s ads. This is important because it informs us of both wasted spend, and opportunities for growth in your account.
Announced at the start of September, Google have made a change to this report with the effect of reducing the volume of data made available to us in this report.
They announced here: “Starting September 2020, the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click. You may now see fewer terms in your report.
We have already seen a significant drop in the data available to us from this report – Seer Interactive analysis has shown a 28% reduction in available data.
Read the report here.
What Marketers Can Do
For now, we’re monitoring the situation and using our automated tools to mitigate this change – we hope that the negative reaction this change has received from across the industry will force Google to change its position.
However, in the medium to long term this is likely to change how we approach keyword targeting for many of our client’s who have limited budgets – this may include restricting the ‘match type’ of keywords more often to ensure we are only showing ads for those keywords and close semantic variants.