Enhanced Search Query Performance reports

In order to provide you with more visibility into the performance of your ads and to help you make more informed marketing decisions, we are expanding the Search Query Performance report to provide more granular insight into the queries that trigger your ads.

The Search Query Performance report is a useful tool that can help you optimize your campaigns and manage your phrase and broad match keywords by tracking the performance of keyword variations that trigger your ads.

If you've used the Search Query Performance report before, you may have noticed that some of your traffic was grouped under a line item called "other unique queries." This line encompassed queries with very low volume, often occurring triggering your ad only one or two times. However, some advertisers found that a significant portion of their spend was grouped under this heading, which made it difficult to manage keyword variations.

Starting today, the Search Query Performance report will show all queries that resulted in a click, where the user has not specifically blocked their referrer URL. In other words, this includes all queries that you would see in your server logs or if you use a tool like Google Analytics. In requiring that the referrer URL be present, we are upholding our commitment to user privacy.

As a result of this update, you will likely see longer lists of queries in your Search Query Performance reports, many of which will have very low traffic. We encourage you to focus your decisions about the performance of your keyword variations on those variations that occur most frequently and have a significant amount of performance data.

We are excited to be able to make this update and believe that it will help make the Search Query Performance report even more useful. To learn more about running Search Query Performance reports, you can visit our AdWords help center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew