Ever wonder which keywords people are typing before they see your ad? If you get a lot of broad match or "phrase match" keyword impressions, you have no idea what they’re actually searching for, do you?

I tell clients to check their server logs or analytics programs, but they show only the search queries (a fancy word for "what they actually typed") that led to clicks. What about the thousands of keywords that you haven’t optimized your ad for because you just don’t know what they are?

Enter the new AdWords "Search Query Performance Report." It will show you, in a limited yet fantastically helpful fashion, what your prospects actually type into Google to get to your ad.

Here’s a sneak peak at a portion of a report I ran recently:

I didn’t understand a couple of things, so I called my "Deep Throat" at Google and asked:

Howie: What’s this "1 other unique queries" thing?

Deep Throat: The report has queries described as "other unique queries" because a report that included every query that triggered your ads to show is likely to be
unmanageable in size and difficult to process. To solve this problem, we’ve aggregated statistics for all outliers (i.e. queries that don’t meet our privacy and volume requirements) in the ‘other unique queries’ row. Please be assured that the vast majority of the Search Query Performance report includes queries that led to your ads being clicked on. 

So a bunch of queries that didn’t lead to clicks got aggregated to speed processing time. Too bad, but I still get a wealth of data about misspellings ("gaut diet") and phrases I didn’t think of ("diet for gout patients").

Howie: What’s this "gout diet more:condition_treatment" thing?

Deep Throat: this means that a user clicked on the "treatments" link above the search results (see first screen shot below). After you click on this link, you will see the query in the search box (see second screen shot below) matches the query you see in your report.

Which triggers this result when they click on "Treatment" above the organic listings:

Give the report a try and see what you discover. As always, any questions – askHowie.