Google Ads
Google Ads search terms: what should ecommerce advertisers look for?
The search terms report is where you find out what people actually typed before clicking your ads. Keywords are what you told Google you were willing to target. Search terms are what you paid for. That difference matters.
Look for intent, not just matching words
A search can contain your product name and still be a bad commercial query. Someone searching "how to repair leather boots" may be irrelevant to a store selling new leather boots even though the words overlap.
Classify terms by intent:
- Ready to buy
- Product comparison
- Research
- Support / how-to
- Jobs or careers
- Irrelevant meaning
- Competitor
- Brand
Find wasted spend
One irrelevant click is rarely important. Repeated clusters are. Ten slightly different searches about free templates may tell you that a broad keyword is attracting the wrong audience.
Use negative keywords to block clear waste, but avoid becoming so aggressive that you remove useful discovery traffic — a tradeoff covered in more depth in broad match vs phrase match vs exact match for ecommerce.
Find opportunities too
The report is not only a cleanup tool. It can reveal:
- Unexpected use cases
- Profitable product terms
- New category language
- Competitor comparisons
- High-intent long-tail searches
Those can inform ad copy, landing pages, product titles and SEO content.
Connect queries to purchases
A term with expensive clicks may still be excellent if it converts. A cheap term with lots of traffic can be terrible if nobody buys. Evaluate search terms through conversion value and profit, not CPC alone — which means the search terms report is only as useful as the conversion tracking feeding it.
Know which searches are actually driving customers
If your Google Ads account spends heavily but you do not know which real searches are driving profitable Shopify customers, send us an inquiry. We can review the query mix and clean up the account.