Insights / Paid media operations
Search Terms Report Review: A Weekly Workflow
Build a weekly search terms report review with query categories, careful negative keyword decisions, a change log, and a repeatable team checklist.
Make the weekly review a decision process
For marketing teams running Search campaigns, a search terms report review should answer a practical question: what should change, and what needs more evidence? A spreadsheet full of unfamiliar phrases is not yet a decision. The useful work is connecting each query to the offer, the user’s likely intent, and the reason the campaign exists.
This workflow separates relevance judgments from performance judgments. It gives operators a way to classify queries, propose negatives carefully, and record uncertainty without turning every quiet week into a round of exclusions. The weekly cadence is a working convention for the team, not a platform requirement. High spending, a new launch, or a delivery issue may justify an earlier check.
Define the review scope and its limits
Start by recording the account, campaigns, date range, and comparison period. Use consistent boundaries so reviewers know whether they are looking at a complete week or a partial period. Note relevant promotions, landing page changes, measurement problems, and budget changes before interpreting a shift in the queries that appear.
A search term is what someone enters when searching; a keyword is an advertiser’s targeting input. This workflow uses the visible report, which omits some queries because of privacy and reporting limits. Results also depend on measurement quality and conversion timing, and the method promises no particular campaign outcome.
Record the conversion actions and timing assumptions used in the review. Recent clicks may not yet have their eventual conversions recorded. An apparent lack of conversions can also reflect a measurement issue. Evaluate commercially plausible traffic with those timing and measurement details alongside the relevance classification.
Classify intent before deciding an action
Read the complete query and compare it with the actual offer and landing page. Classify it as relevant commercial intent, potentially relevant research, clearly irrelevant intent, or uncertain. These are review categories chosen by the team, not Google Ads feature labels. Keep the definitions available so different reviewers do not silently use different standards.
Clearly irrelevant intent is a mismatch the business can explain without waiting for more performance data. For example, a hypothetical company selling installation services might not offer training courses. A query explicitly seeking an installation certification course would require a different response from a query asking about installation requirements. The reviewer would flag the course request for exclusion and retain the requirements question for an offer and landing page check.
Use an uncertainty category when the phrasing has more than one plausible meaning. Add a short note explaining what would resolve it: clarification from the offer owner, a landing page review, or additional evidence. Uncertainty should have an owner and a follow-up date rather than disappearing into an unreviewed backlog.
| Query category | Review question | Possible next action |
|---|---|---|
| Relevant commercial intent | Does the destination answer the request? | Retain and investigate any experience gap |
| Potentially relevant research | Does this intent fit the campaign purpose? | Review context before restricting reach |
| Clearly irrelevant intent | Can the mismatch be stated precisely? | Propose a scoped negative |
| Uncertain | What evidence would resolve the ambiguity? | Assign a follow-up owner |
Prioritize without turning metrics into automatic rules
Review meaningful concentrations of spending and repeated intent patterns early, then inspect unfamiliar queries and a broader sample of the remaining rows. This balances practical attention with the risk of overlooking a small but obvious mismatch. Record what was reviewed if the team cannot cover the full visible report.
Use performance data to ask questions about relevant traffic. A plausible query with spending and no recorded conversions may deserve a landing page or measurement investigation before exclusion. A clearly irrelevant query does not become suitable merely because it has little spending. Relevance and commercial evidence inform different parts of the decision.
Avoid a universal click count or spending threshold for negatives. Any operating threshold should reflect the business’s evaluation horizon, measurement reliability, and tolerance for exploration. Record those assumptions explicitly. A rule copied from another account can appear consistent while answering the wrong commercial question.
Treat match types as part of the explanation
When a query surprises the reviewer, inspect the keyword associated with it where that information is available. Broad, phrase, and exact keyword match types determine different ranges of eligibility; exact match can match searches with the same meaning or intent as the keyword. Read the complete query when explaining why it matched.
The match type shown for a search term describes its relationship to the keyword, and can differ from the keyword’s configured match type. Keep those fields distinct in the working record. Otherwise a reviewer may diagnose a configuration problem from a reporting label that means something else.
Negative keyword matching also differs from positive keyword matching. Check the official negative match definitions and relevant variations when setting an exclusion. Before changing a positive keyword’s match type, describe the intended coverage change and set a review date using the broader query pattern.
Choose the narrowest defensible negative
Write the reason for exclusion in plain language before choosing the negative text. Is the entire intent unsuitable, or is only this particular request unsuitable? Then evaluate the proposed negative’s match type and application level. A negative exact match addresses a narrower query shape than a negative phrase that could also exclude longer searches containing that phrase.
Use broader exclusions only when the business can defend the broader boundary. Check whether the words also appear in relevant queries, product names, or future offers. Terms such as free, jobs, and support are not universally irrelevant: their meaning depends on what the advertiser offers and the full request.
In a hypothetical B2B software review, the query free employee scheduling template appears beside employee scheduling software trial. Suppose the advertiser offers a free trial but no downloadable templates. The reviewer proposes a negative phrase for scheduling template in the relevant campaign, checks it against known commercial queries, and retains the trial query. Adding free as a broad exclusion would also restrict the offer the business actually wants to promote.
Review the scope separately from the wording. An exclusion suitable for one ad group may be inappropriate across a campaign or a shared list. Compare proposed negatives with existing keywords and known valuable query themes. Ask a second reviewer to inspect ambiguous or widely applied exclusions when the impact would be difficult to assess after the fact.
Run the weekly checklist in order
Keep the review repeatable enough for a colleague to take over. The checklist below produces a decision record, including decisions to wait, rather than rewarding the number of negatives added.
- Record the account, campaign scope, date range, conversion definitions, and any known reporting or tracking limitations.
- Collect the visible search terms with the associated context and retain the review snapshot in an access-controlled location.
- Prioritize spending concentrations and recurring themes, then classify queries by intent and record unresolved cases.
- Separate clear offer mismatches from relevant traffic that needs measurement, destination, or performance investigation.
- For every proposed negative, document the exact text, match type, application level, reason, and possible conflicts.
- Have the appropriate operator review material changes, apply the approved scope, and read back what was actually saved.
- Assign follow-up actions, record retained queries and unresolved questions, and schedule the next review against the stated reasoning.
Keep sensitive account information in the team’s authorized working environment. A shared checklist does not require publishing raw query exports. Give the decision log enough context for accountability while limiting unnecessary distribution of the underlying account data.
Log decisions so the next review can challenge them
A useful log includes the query or intent theme, classification, proposed action, reason, reviewer, change date, and follow-up date. For exclusions, also store the negative text, match type, and location where it was applied. Preserve enough detail to reverse an incorrect exclusion without reconstructing its scope from memory.
At the next review, compare the observed behavior with the reason for the change. Check whether the intended irrelevant theme still appears and whether relevant coverage may have been restricted. Use the saved exclusion settings, visible query patterns, and wider delivery trends together to assess coverage.
Send non-keyword findings to the right owner. A repeated question may reveal unclear page copy, a missing qualification, or an offer the business should explicitly explain. Give the page or offer owner the query theme, its business context, and a specific question to resolve.
Common mistakes to catch before saving
Bulk-adding negatives from isolated words is a common way to lose context. Other mistakes include excluding every query without a recorded conversion, assuming keyword and search term match types are interchangeable, or applying an ad group-specific judgment across the whole account. Each shortcut removes a decision the reviewer should make deliberately.
Check every borrowed negative list against the current offer. For a newly discovered relevant query, inspect the existing coverage and messaging before proposing a keyword addition. Judge the review by the quality of its decisions and the completion of its follow-up work.
Changing keywords, negatives, landing pages, and measurement together makes diagnosis harder. Schedule separate changes when practical, and record concurrent work when several changes are necessary. Preserve decisions to retain traffic as carefully as decisions to exclude it.
Close the review with a clear handoff
A sound search terms report review ends with a short list of implemented changes, assigned investigations, and deliberate decisions to wait. Keep intent, match behavior, and measurement limitations visible throughout the process. The objective is a defensible operating record that the next reviewer can test against new evidence. Consistent reasoning and completed follow-up work make the next review easier to act on.