I want to be really clear, this isn’t new news. In fact, it’s actually quite old news. But, recently I was sat at my desk wishing I could examine my search query reports in a little more detail. I was thinking to myself, “surely there’s a better way to uncover trends in this data?”.
So, I started to play around in Excel to look for ways to separate each search query into individual terms to examine how that data looked. My Excel didn’t handle this request across thousands of keywords very well, so I quickly moved to Bing to search for an easier solution.
That’s when I stumbled across a script from 2015(!!) and realised I had missed out on a whole load of juicy data goodness over the last few years.
This script did exactly what I was looking for. I just had to copy and paste it into my account, tweak a few options, and then it automatically pulled my search query data into a specified Google Doc. The exciting bit here is that it allows you to separate out and report on performance stats for each individual term in a query, rather than each full search query, as you would find in your standard search query reports.
Three reasons why I’m so excited about this:
Well, this report allows you to understand how individual words impact behaviour vs. full search queries. I very quickly found some words I should have as phrase match negatives across my account. Whilst I would have usually spent a long period of time removing numerous search queries to block the impact of this word, this report helped me understand the most damaging word and block it from the source.
In huge accounts, negative keyword lists can actually get full up. This is a bigger problem over on Bing, where the limit of 20 keyword lists can become an issue after an extended period of time adding a large number of longer queries as negatives. Getting to the source of the problem quicker means you can add the individual words that cause problems, which should decrease the number of negatives you need to add.
On the flip side, there may well be select words that really increase the chances of a search query being a positive one. Of course, your brand term will be up there but there will also be words that are less obviously important to your account. In one account, for example, I found there were a lot of function words (why, what, how) driving low traffic but high conversion rates. I know that these type of words would have flown under the radar if it wasn’t for this script, which instead allowed me to build out campaigns that were specifically for answering these function-based queries.
So, if you’re interested in looking at your search queries from another angle – head to this article to access the script for yourself.
Have fun!
