Search term or keyword: the difference that costs you money

This is the distinction that surprises people in nearly every account we take over, and it fits in one sentence.

A keyword is what you put in your campaign. A search term is what somebody actually typed into Google before your ad appeared. Those two stopped being the same thing long ago, and the gap between them decides where your money goes.

Why they drift apart

Google matches your keyword to anything it believes carries the same intent. With broad match that is very wide. With phrase and exact it is narrower, but even there you get variants, misspellings and synonyms. In practice: you enter "replace boiler" and you also pay for "replace boiler yourself", "free boiler", "boiler engineer vacancy" and "boiler replacement cost forum".

Those last four are not necessarily wrong. They are rarely a customer.

How to see what you are paying for

In Google Ads, go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. Set the period to the last 30 days and sort by cost, high to low. Add the columns cost, clicks and conversions.

Then work down the list and ask one question per row: could this be somebody who wants to buy from me? Not "does this fit my keyword", but "is this a customer". You will recognise the hopeless ones by a few patterns:

• Words pointing at free or do-it-yourself: free, yourself, second-hand, manual, how does
• Job hunting: vacancy, salary, training, internship, course
• A competitor, or a brand you do not sell
• Comparing without buying intent: forum, experiences, complaints, a review of a brand you do not carry
• Wrong location: a city you do not serve, or a country you do not ship to

What to do with that list

Terms that clearly deliver nothing go on the exclusion list. Those are negative keywords, and a separate article covers them, including the trap of excluding too broadly.

Terms that do work well, you can add as keywords of their own. That gives you more control over them, and lets you write ad copy that speaks to exactly that.

Two things that often go wrong

A search term is not a keyword. Reports mix them up, tools included. If somebody hands you a list of "best performing keywords" that are really search terms, you are measuring something other than you think. We keep them apart in reports, because the confusion is expensive.

You do not see everything. For privacy reasons Google does not show every search term. Part of your spend stays unexplained as a result, and that part has grown in recent years. Anyone claiming they can show you the complete search term report is wrong. We show what comes out of the API and state what cannot be retrieved.

How often to do this

For an account spending a few hundred a month, once a month is enough. For larger budgets or a new campaign, weekly is wiser, because a wrong match costs money within days. AdWarp runs this check weekly and prepares a proposal with the terms that stand out, including what they cost and how many enquiries they produced. Applying it is a choice, not a default.