PPC advertisers have been waiting a long time for this. Just officially announced yesterday, Google AdWords is removing the ‘other unique queries’ label in the search query performance report. We wrote about this new feature in the search query report back in April but did not find an official announcement from Google until yesterday.
The Google search query performance report shows you actual search terms typed in by users from your phrase and broad match keywords. This was a great new report we all grew to love. However, on the flip side there was much frustration due to a large grouping of impressions, clicks and spend would be grouped into a “other unique queries category. “Other unique queries” simply meant that these keywords had too low of search volume and only triggered your ad one or two times. Therefore, Google didn’t feel they needed to show the actual search query. But like I said, most people noticed that a large number of impressions, clicks and spend were being attributed to this “other unique queries” label which made the report difficult to translate.
The purpose of the Google search query performance report is to find either new keywords to add to your account that may be getting many impressions and clicks or to find negative keywords to add to your account that may be spending too much and not converting – or they simply could be unqualified keywords.
At any rate, the good news is that Google will show all the queries that actually resulted in a click, and will no longer group all queries in that infamous ‘other unique queries’ label. They do mention that to continue to respect user’s privacy, anyone who has their referrer url blocked will continue to be blocked.
A good tip from Google about this new report update: although you will have information for queries that result in a low number of clicks, you should still focus your efforts on keywords that are yielding a larger number of impressions and clicks as these keywords will have the biggest effect on your account.
I’ll give credit to Google, it’s really nice that they listened to our complaints and took steps to fix the problem!
