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?
Opteo generates a Classify Search Term improvement for search terms that are triggering your ads but haven't been added as a keyword or negative keyword yet.
When you open an improvement, everything you need to classify the term lives on a single page.
Create new
This is where you decide how to add the search term.
Keyword / negative toggle — switch between adding the term as a keyword or a negative keyword. The pill turns green for keyword and red for negative keyword, so you can see your choice at a glance.
Keyword string — a free-form field with the search term pre-filled. Click in to edit, shorten, or rewrite the keyword however you'd like.
Match type — choose between exact, phrase, or broad. Phrase is the default.
Bid — Opteo pre-fills this with the source keyword's bid as a starting point, and you can change it if you'd like. If the campaign uses Smart Bidding, this field is greyed out and shows N/A, since Google sets bids automatically.
Custom URL — optional. Use this if you want to send searches matching this keyword to a specific landing page.
Destination
Choose where the new keyword (or negative) will live. You can select a single ad group, multiple ad groups, or all of them. Each ad group shows its spend and parent campaign, and there's a search box to quickly filter the list.
Search results preview
Below the destination, you'll see a preview of the Google search results page for this term, rendered for the country set in your Google Ads and Opteo settings. Handy for sizing up the competitive landscape before you decide.
Search term statistics
At the bottom of the improvement, you'll see the data Opteo used to evaluate the term:
Search term spend
Search term impressions
Search term conversion value
Search term ROAS / CPA
You'll also see when the data was last refreshed and the date range it covers.
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 generate Classify Search Term improvements from search terms over the last 90 days that aren't yet covered by a keyword or negative.
We check your campaign-level negatives, ad group-level negatives, shared negative lists, and existing keywords — if a query is already covered, we won't surface it.
If an existing keyword matches the term but isn't on [exact] match, we'll still prompt you — a significant query deserves its own [exact] keyword.
Displayed stats use a 365-day window to keep data meaningful for lower-traffic terms.