Cream of Life

When you start optimizing an AdWords campaign, usually you would have an objective in mind, e.g. lowering CPA, increasing CTR and so on, before you run any reports to collect data for your optimization. Among so many types of AdWords report you can run, I’d say the Search Query Report is very likely to be able to help regardless of your optimization objectives. Usually, I run a Search Query Report to dig out keywords that users searched on and clicked on my ads. I need to know these keywords so that I can do the following 2 things.
1. Develop some negative keywords to exclude irrelevant searches
2. Add keywords with high CTR but are not yet included in my existing keyword list

In practice, you need to filter the following info before you can get a smaller list of search queries to find the potential keywords to include or exclude more efficiently.

1. “other unique queries” in the column “Search Query”
2. “Exact” in the column “Search Query Match Type”

You may also want to descend the “clicks” column so that you can look at the high click keywords (very likely high cost as well) first to develop your lists.

Lastly, open your eyes big. Read all the filtered search queries one by one and pick those you want to kill or add. Afterall, there’s no solution called “one click does it all.”