This month’s Ask A PPC addresses a very real concern: Visibility of search terms continues to decline on some platforms while others continue to maintain more transparency. Advertisers still need to understand, diagnose and optimize their campaigns, even if they don’t have the full search term signal.s.
“With search terms increasingly unavailable, what technical signals should advertisers prioritize to diagnose smart bidding? »
We’ll review three techniques advertisers can use on any platform, then explore how Microsoft Advertising search term visibility can boost optimization across other channels.
Quick disclosure: I work for Microsoft and wrote this as objectively and platform-independently as possible.
Technique 1: Use Behavioral Analytics to Understand User Quality
Losing access to individual search terms does not mean you lose access to meaningful information. You can check traffic segments to see if they provide value:
- Times: Certain periods will be more conducive to impulsive purchases than to thoughtful investments. If your product/service experiences a lot of non-converting activity in a time period that doesn’t fit the conventional customer journey, you can make educated guesses about removing those times.
- Audiences: By including observation audiences, you can get an idea of how much traffic matches your desired demographics. This information can be used to understand the intent behind the traffic.
- Devices: If you know that you do better with phone calls and the lion’s share of your traffic comes from desktops, it may be necessary to apply device-specific rules to direct traffic more cost-effectively.
- Locations: Identifying placements with higher CPCs and lower conversion rates is the easiest way to ensure the budget is moving in the right way.
You can then begin to understand whether these sources merit further investment.
For example, if you see a big increase in conversions at 7 a.m. on mobile devices, but their value tends to be lower than conversions that happen at 4 p.m. on desktop, you might assume that the first group was making impulse purchases, while the second put more thought into interacting with you. The high-volume conversion group may also be on their way to work and not as clearly processing which brand they gave their information to.
That said, avoid hasty decisions. Some interactions help start the conversion journey even if they don’t complete the conversion action until later. This is why the signals coming from offline conversions and view-through conversions are very important.
Behavioral analytics and CRM/store data can help fill the gaps when search terms are missing
Behavioral analytics tools, including Microsoft Clarity, can help you understand how different humans and AI systems interact based on timing, platforms, and audience cohorts from which they come. This information can show if your landing page is distracting.
For example, if you see a large increase in traffic coming to your site without converting, check to see if they are trying to convert and not succeeding. Behavioral analytics tools can show you “rage clicks” as well as whether people are confused by the content on the page.
They can also highlight potential CRM integration issues. If you’re watching users perform conversion actions multiple times, but you don’t see their information in your CRM, you’re invite false positives in conversion tracking.
Technique 2: Open up To Click-less value actions
The AI era is changing the way people discover, evaluate and act. People can perform useful actions without clicking through to a website. Visibility of search terms may decrease due to privacy mechanisms, but limited visibility into the entire query or conversation does not mean no value was obtained.
Basic queries and citation counts can begin to provide useful information. For example, if AI viewability reports show a lot of core queries, check to see if those queries are contextually relevant to your brand.
For example, if you find that a basic query draws you to financial advice topics and you are a general business consultant, you may want to adapt your landing pages, search themes, and keywords to focus on “consultant.” Although “advisor” is a close variation of “consultant,” financial topics tend to have higher CPCs and will not be relevant for general business consulting. This is also where term exclusions and message constraints can come in handy, so that AI tools can provide a clearer picture of the product/service you are offering.
You can also decide to remove unnecessary JavaScript from pages you want AI systems to interact with to reduce any potential blocking. crawlers to access the page.
If AI systems can’t interact with a page, we remove ourselves from opportunities to connect with customers before customers even search for us. AI can only offer what it can understand, integrate and analyze as useful.
Technique 3: Use Offline Conversions Aand human data To Validate platform claims
This technique requires more work, but it gives you useful insights into campaign performance, or where AI-powered biddingstruggles when it doesn’t receive clean data. Provide auction systems with data that is as accurate and useful as possible, while also using directionally correct conversion values when campaigns need to meet certain thresholds.
Conversion values and conversion value rules generally communicate value more effectively than bid adjustments. This is important because when we’re trying to reduce waste, we need to use technology that’s tailored to how platforms work rather than forcing new models to work through existing controls.
Bid adjustments and bid caps can force bidding in a way that reflects old campaign management logic. Conversion Values and Conversion Value Rules provide a more robust path forward for reducing waste in modern automated systems.
A note on search term visibility
This month’s question assumes a Google-driven world. Microsoft Advertising takes a different approach: advertisers can see search terms for traffic that resulted in a click. This transparency is important because advertisers need to be able to understand how their budgets are being spent.
With transparency comes search terms that invite scrutiny. Some can become useful negatives, while others can challenge biases in your perception of search behavior and how certain queries generate valuable performance you may not have expected. People’s search habits are changing, and in a world where AI plays a larger role, bot-like queries won’t always mean waste. Sometimes they represent genuine and helpful requests.
A useful way to explore this is to review the AI Crawlers Report in Microsoft Clarity and look at the AI crawler ratio. This context can help you understand whether AI engagement is linked to meaningful behavior.
3 Ways to Use Microsoft Search Term Visibility on Other Channels
1. Identify the winners
Because Microsoft Advertising displays search terms that generate clicks, you have more transparency into what’s worth your attention. This information can inform better search themes for Performance Max campaigns, stronger keyword targets for traditional search campaigns, and content ideas worth building around.
Note that match types behave the same way between Microsoft and Google.
2. Find potential negatives
If a query idea clearly doesn’t make sense on Microsoft Advertising, chances are it won’t make sense on Google or other keyword-targeted platforms either. Microsoft requires negative keywords to use a phrase or exact match, but you can still identify root words and apply them as negatives in match types available on other platforms.
This added trust can make Microsoft Advertising useful as a source of search terms that inform broader account hygiene.
3. Combine behavioral analytics with conversion tracking
Search term visibility helps you identify winners and losers, but the real insight and optimization happens when you understand what users do after completing those searches. If a query brings people to your site but conversions aren’t recorded, you may have a conversion tracking issue rather than a query quality issue.
The opposite can also happen if conversions are increasing but the queries related to those conversions don’t seem quite right. Data exclusions can help both Google and Microsoft when you need to consider tracking or data quality issues.
Behavioral analytics combined with search term visibility gives you one of the most effective ways to understand why people search the way they search and what influences them after landing on your website.
Final Conclusion
Search term visibility may decrease on some channels, but it still exists on others. Rather than assuming that viewability has completely disappeared, advertisers can adapt their perspective and use multiple channels to capture different forms of information.
Google and Microsoft reach unique users, so the data won’t map perfectly. Still, if a search doesn’t make sense for your brand and you can see it on one network even if you can’t see it on another, you gain value by identifying that idea once instead of paying for it repeatedly.
More resources:
Featured image: Paul Poetry/Search Engine Journal
