Search terms report
The search terms report is a Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising report that shows the actual search queries people typed that triggered your ads, along with the performance of each query.
The distinction that trips people up is keywords versus search terms. Keywords are what you bid on; search terms are what real people actually typed. With broad and phrase match — and with Google's close-variant matching, which now covers synonyms, implied intent and reformulations — the gap between the two can be enormous. The search terms report closes that gap by showing which queries your money actually bought, mapped to the keyword and ad group that served them.
It is the primary source for three routine jobs. First, negative keyword mining: find queries that spent without converting or that are clearly off-intent, and exclude them at the appropriate level. Second, expansion: promote high-performing terms into their own keywords or ad groups so you can control bids and write matching ad copy. Third, intent diagnosis: patterns in the queries reveal how the market actually describes your product, which feeds landing pages, RSA headlines and even product naming.
One important limitation: the report does not show every query. Google withholds terms that were not searched by a significant number of users, for privacy reasons, so a meaningful share of spend appears only in aggregate. Reporting has improved over time but the gap persists, which means you should reconcile search-term spend against campaign spend rather than assuming the visible rows are the whole story. Performance Max offers search-theme-level insight rather than a full query list, so the discipline there is different. A practical review cadence is weekly for high-spend accounts and monthly for smaller ones, always over a window long enough to have meaningful conversion data.
With Opus Growth you can pull the search terms report through your AI assistant, ask it to surface the queries that spent above a threshold with zero conversions, and add those as negatives at the level you choose — all in one conversation, across Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. The read is free-form and analytical; every negative it proposes comes back as a dry run you explicitly approve before it is applied.
Frequently asked questions
A keyword is the term you bid on; a search term is the actual query a person typed that triggered your ad. Broad and phrase match plus close variants mean one keyword can match hundreds of different search terms.
Google withholds queries that were not searched by a significant number of users, for privacy reasons, so some spend appears only in campaign totals. Compare search-term spend to total campaign spend to gauge how much is hidden.
Weekly for high-spend accounts and monthly for smaller ones, always using a date range long enough to contain meaningful conversion data. Reviewing too frequently on thin data leads to blocking terms that were simply unlucky.
