A while back Tom Crichlow gave us a sweet Whiteboard Friday on PPC basics. One of his main points is that data is king. Even though my business partner and I are still Adwords rookies, I wanted to share a great report that has been especially helpful in increasing performance on any broad match keywords that you’re using.

While in your Adwords control panel, click the “Reports” tab at the top. Create a new report and choose “Search Query Performance” as the report type. (Run it for whatever period of time you’re curious about.) What this report gives you is CTR info on any searches that triggered your ads. Of course, you’ll already have this info for any keywords that you have set to exact match, but it will be new info for your broad match keywords.

Let’s go through an example and then take a look at what you can do with the information. Let’s say you have an ecommerce site dedicated entirely to selling Levi’s jeans. Naturally, one of the things you would try bidding on is a broad match for “Levi.” After a week of running Adwords, you decide to run our new Search Query Performance report and see what you can learn. You see a lot of things that you’d expect: Tons of different searches all related to Levi’s Jeans. There is, however, one thing that seems very out of place: You got 300 impressions and 1 click for “levi coffin.” After a little research, you learn that Levi Coffin was apparently an important figure in the abolitionist movement in the 1800s.

Who cares? You should! Your quality score is being lowered by every wasted impression on every search for Levi Coffin. It’s probably time to add a negative keyword for “Coffin.” You might ask, “Why bother running this report? I already monitor my analytics for off-topic search referrals so that I can add them as negative keywords.” The big advantage to the SQP report (woot, acronyms!) is that you’re going to be getting so few clicks from these way-off-topic keywords that they may never show up high enough in your analytics for you to notice them. But an SQP report (sorted by impressions) could reveal pretty quickly that you’re wasting a ton of impressions on them.

Alternatively, an SQP report could reveal some on-topic searches that are getting you a lot of impressions, but not very many clicks. How about adding a negative match for those keywords to your current ad group (the one using broad match for “Levi”), and then creating a new ad group with specifically-tailored ads for those new keywords?

Mike Piper is one of the creators of the Joomla Made Simple tutorial course. He also writes about taxes when he’s looking for an exciting way to spend a Friday night.