Finally we’re getting more data about the search queries that trigger our ads to display in Bing.com. Google has had the search query report out for a while now, and Yahoo! has it but you have to request it personally from your Yahoo rep (if you have one). But now you can finally see raw search query data within your adCenter PPC account.
Search query reports show you the actual search queries that trigger your ads to show in the search engines results pages. Because you may have broad match keywords or even phrase match keywords, a user’s search query may not match exactly to what you have listed in your accounts. Therefore, this report will list common occurrences of a query that show your ads.
For example, you may have a broad match keyword in your PPC account for ‘pet album’ and MSN/Bing may end up showing your ad for, ‘pet store’ or ‘pet food’.
If you’re website doesn’t offer pet food or is not considered a pet store, you can add in these search queries as negatives – so the next time someone does type in ‘pet store’ or ‘pet food’ your ad will not show.
Advertisers can save a lot of PPC spend by running these search query reports regularly and adding in negative keywords that aren’t relevant to your product or services.
To run the search query report, simply go to the reports tab in adCenter, click ‘create a new report’, and using the drop down for report type, select ‘search query performance’.
To add negative keywords to your adCenter account, simply click on a campaign, click on a specific ad group, click ‘add or edit keywords’, and add in negative keywords in the negative keywords column at the bottom of the page.
Hopefully, soon we’ll be seeing many more features coming out of MSN/Bing.com. But this is one feature that I know can help advertisers save money but not having their ads displayed for irrelevant search queries. Adding negative keywords is a great way to weed out unqualified traffic but still use broad match keywords.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
Good news! Good to see Bing adding features.. Up until now the only way you could do it was if you had a 3rd party script capture that data.. It’ll be nice to capture that data on the keywords I don’t have that set up on yet or aren’t for some reason.. Besides negatives.. it’s also good for simply coming up with more ideas to try out!
Thanks!
-Matt
Unfortunately, Microsoft does not let you see conversions with this report, rendering it somewhat un-useful.
I was playing around with this report last week and was exceedingly frustrated to see many search queries that included “facebook”, which apparently means that this was a search conducted on Facebook. There is no way to block my ads from showing on the site because they’re one of Bing’s search partners. However, it’s unclear if they’re taking the insanely low CTR produced on Facebook into account when calculating my ad’s quality. If anyone else is seeing this, or can think of a good way to stop my ads from showing there – please let me know!
Pretty cool report for sure… but the next problem is knowing the actual search query when a conversion is made… Not sure how that is accomplished…