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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Adalysis offers tools to speed up search term monitoring for Search and Shopping campaigns. They help you to quickly identify high-value search terms or detect expensive, underperforming ones — without manual reviews or spreadsheets.

You can find the tools under Manage > Search terms.

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 blocked terms from the Search terms screen.

Matched keywords

Click any icon in the Matched keywords column to see the combination of keywords and ads that triggered the search term. By comparing quality scores and ad copy, you can check the relevance of the search term to the keywords and ads in this ad group.

Monitoring search term performance

Manage your search terms without manual reviews: Choose from two prebuilt filters (with matching audit alerts) that suggest potential keywords and negatives.

Potential new keywords

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

Once loaded, you can customize the filter, excluding search terms in any match type and changing the number of conversions.

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.

The matching audit alert has the same default criteria as the filter. You can customize the alert settings in Audit > Settings > Search terms. There is also an optional automatic action to add keywords that meet your criteria as exact matches.

Potential new negatives

This is the equivalent filter for potential new negatives, which you can customize once loaded:

Select the search terms you want to block and click Add as negative keyword.

There are alerts for Search and Shopping campaigns, which you can customize under Audit > Settings > Search terms. There is also an optional automatic action to add negatives in different match types to an ad group or campaign.

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.

For example, you may notice that many of your site's search queries contain “ai”. You can see performance data, like conversions, for this group of queries. This helps you to make an informed decision whether to add "ai" as a negative or optimize for this word.

A campaign-level filter flags potential new negatives from your n-gram data:

There are also matching prebuilt alerts for Search and Shopping, which you can customize in Audit > Settings > Search terms:

Adalysis offers innovative features for managing your Performance Max search terms and making sure your PMax and Search campaigns complement each other effectively.

Go to Manage > Search terms > PMax to see your PMax search terms at the account level. This isn’t possible in Google Ads and will save you time on downloading and comparing search terms in a spreadsheet.

Managing your PMax negatives

Load the prebuilt filter to identify potential new negatives based on performance data. Once loaded, you can also customize the criteria.

Based on your analysis, you can select PMax search terms to add as account-level negatives.

Search term overlap

When you run PMax and Search campaigns at the same time, managing search term overlap is crucial. As Search campaigns are built on closely related ads, keywords, and landing pages, they usually outperform PMax for the same search terms.

In Adalysis, you can easily identify PMax search terms that exist as keywords in a Search campaign, or as search terms in Search or Shopping campaigns. This means you can control which campaign type should serve the ad by adding PMax search terms as exact match keywords in your Search ad groups.

Click on the checkmarks in the table or the Search term overlap button for a detailed breakdown.

Adding PMax search terms as Search keywords

As well as monitoring your audit alerts, you can also identify PMax search terms to add as keywords in your Search campaigns by loading a prebuilt filter. Once loaded, the criteria are customizable.

Select the search terms you want to add and click Add as keyword to a search ad group. The campaign and ad group fields are pre-populated, based on the overlap data. However, you'll still be able to modify all keyword settings.