Google last week announced that it was making more data available to advertisers in the search terms report for Search and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns, with immediate effect.
The data will be backfilled to 1 February and Google said the metrics would now be in line with the other metrics in Google Ads.
"This data will now be shown in your reports for queries you received starting from February 1, 2021.
This update can help you identify more relevant keyword themes, making it easier to optimize your ad copy, landing pages, and more. These metrics will now be more consistent with the rest of the metrics in Google Ads."
Advertisers will now see on average 6.5x more queries in their reports.
Speaking to SearchEngineLand, Google’s senior product manager Pallavi Naresh said they would now show data for queries that received impressions but no clicks. This is data Google started saving from 1 Feb 2021, which is why the additional data starts from that date.
The move comes almost exactly a year after Google restricted data in the search terms report, only including terms searched by “a significant number of users”. This meant advertisers saw less data and so was highly unpopular. Google says it has been exploring new “privacy-safe” ways to provide more insights, since the change last year.
The additional data Google is now making available is query data that meets its privacy standards. However, some historical data pre-September 2020 which doesn’t meet these standards will be removed in February next year.
“historical query data in your account that was collected prior to September 1, 2020 and doesn’t meet the current thresholds for the search terms report will be available in your reporting until February 1, 2022.”
What should advertisers do?
Google has given just under 5 months’ notice of the historical data removal, so advertisers should use this time to download the historical, pre-September 2020 data before it disappears.
This change by Google does not restore all the data which disappeared after the September 2020 change. Google says it is continuing to work on making more data available while maintaining user privacy, and that more resources will be made available on the Insights page in the coming months.
