Search terms and n-grams

Spend less time analyzing and more time optimizing

Managing search terms is one of the most time-consuming tasks in Google Ads. It's key to avoiding wasted spend and spotting new opportunities.

With thousands or even millions of search terms in many accounts, manual reviews aren’t realistic. Adalysis helps you to review and act on them at scale — no spreadsheets, no guesswork, and no manual sifting.

This tutorial will help you get started. Watch the video, skip to the most relevant section for you, or work through these four key steps. The choice is yours.

• Review the prebuilt search term audit alerts

• Add negatives and keywords under Manage > Search terms

• Analyze your n-grams

• Review your search term overlap for Performance Max campaigns (if relevant)

Prebuilt search term alerts

Adalysis carries out automated audit checks across your accounts from day one. Review your recommendations under Audit > Alerts > Search terms and fix issues straight from the dashboard.

Here are the prebuilt search term alerts. You can also create your own custom alerts as needed.

• New keyword suggestion (from search term)
• New negative keyword suggestion from search term (for Search & Shopping campaigns)
• New negative keyword suggestion from n-gram search term (for Search & Shopping campaigns)
• Duplicate search terms (for Search & Shopping campaigns)

There’s no setup needed, but we recommend reviewing the default settings under Audit > Settings > Search terms. Depending on your account, you may want to customize them.

You can also filter accounts with search term alerts from your Accounts overview.

Search term analysis at speed

Many PPC managers review their search terms every week or two. When you’re ready for a deeper look at a specific account, start on the Manage > Search terms screen.

Here, you’ll find your search terms filtered against your negative keywords and broken down into campaign and account-level n-grams.

Adalysis saves you time by bringing together all the data on one screen. That means no more clicking from one Google Ads screen to another. Filtering and sorting help you to find relevant insights even faster. Simply click on the column headers to sort your data.

The Google Ads report will show you search terms even when they’ve been blocked by a negative keyword. The Adalysis report is different: we only show you actionable search terms. This is why your search term numbers will be different in Google Ads versus Adalysis. However, you can click Blocked search terms to see your negatives at any time.

How to add negatives

Adalysis offers two prebuilt filters (matching the audit alerts) that suggest potential keywords and negatives.

You can load the Potential new negative filter from Manage > Search terms and customize the criteria.

Common ways to customize this filter

If your account has a low volume of conversions, you may want to raise the click threshold. This is often the case with big-ticket purchases like cars.

Select the search terms you want to block and click Add as negative keyword. Adalysis will alert you to any potential conflicts with existing keywords. Then review and adjust the prefilled match type and level for your new negative. (Levels include ad groups, campaigns, accounts, and lists.)

Click Save to reuse your custom filter criteria in the future.

How to add keywords

The Potential new keywords filter identifies search terms that are converting well. By default, it also excludes search terms that already exist as exact-match keywords.

You can customize the filter to exclude search terms in any match type and change the number of conversions.

Common ways to customize this filter

If your account has a high volume of conversions and a low order value, you may want to raise the conversion threshold. This is often useful for smaller purchases like flowers. You can also add a cost per conversion threshold to match your target CPA.

To add new keywords to your campaign, select them in your search terms list and click Add as keyword. You can then choose from existing ad groups or create a new one.

Automate your keyword mining

Create automatic actions to add keywords or negatives in different match types to an ad group or campaign. Navigate to Audit > Settings > Search terms and update your prebuilt alerts for keywords and negatives. This is essentially your search terms autopilot, which will optimize your account around the clock.

View blocked search terms

Adalysis will automatically filter out search terms blocked by negative keywords. As a result, your list may look different from the Google Ads report.

Filtering the list means you can focus on actionable search terms. However, you can always see the terms blocked by your existing negatives from the Search terms screen.

Click Blocked search terms to double-check when your negatives might be too aggressive.

N-gram analysis

An n-gram is a one, two, or three-word pattern found in your search term data. Adalysis aggregates n-gram performance at the campaign and account level. This helps you identify more opportunities for adding keywords or negatives.

Click Campaign n-gram search terms or Account n-gram search terms for details.

By far, the biggest use of n-grams is finding wasted spend and potential negative keywords. This is why you’ll find a prebuilt Potential negative keyword filter under Campaign n-gram search terms. It identifies n-grams with high impressions/clicks but poor conversions.

For more common ways to use n-grams to save time on search term analysis, read our guide here.

You can set automated actions from prebuilt or custom search term alerts. For example,

Monitor different campaign types

Adalysis provides search term insights for Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns:

1. For Search campaigns, you can use the full toolset described in this tutorial.

2. Since Shopping campaigns aren’t keyword-based, we only offer negatives for this type.

3. For PMax campaigns, we offer innovative features to manage search term overlap, as well as negatives. Find out more.