Since When Are Dinosaurs Relevant?

How long has it been since you have had a look at your search query reports in Google? A week?  A month?  Several months? However long it’s been, I don’t believe there is such a thing as too often. Within the last week, one of our clients has had a sudden frenzy of weird searches that have resulted in clicks. Many of them included random phrases like “dinosaurs,” “floor cushions” and “world map children oversize.” Not only are these phrases mostly unrelated, they actually cost money that could be spent elsewhere. The Search Query Report in question had brought to light about a hundred phrases that had spent money, but not resulted in a single conversion. This is not surprising considering dinosaurs and world maps are in no way, shape or form relevant to what was is being sold. In addition to the monetary cost of irrelevant phrases, there is an opportunity cost. Because you set daily spending limits for your campaigns, it is very possible that you have already reached this limit by the time somebody does a relevant search; therefore you could be missing out on conversions. So I would urge anybody using Google Adwords to run this report regularly and generate lists of negative phrases from it.

Now, when reviewing the Search Query Report, you will notice that there is also a catch-all group named “other unique queries.” You can actually find out what these queries are through the use of Google Analytics, but that is outside the scope of this post, so look for this one in  a couple of weeks.

So as you can see, the Search Query Report can be an amusing yet vital part of any PPC campaign in Google. This is a service that we provide to our clients and if you are managing your own PPC campaigns it is something you should take a look at.

Go ahead, have a look and tell us about the strangest search terms that you have found.

Tagged as: conversion, Google, Google Adwords, keywords, marketing, paid search, PPC, ppc campaign, search query report