Search Term (vs Keyword)

Concept

A search term is the exact query a user typed; the keyword is what the advertiser bid on. The gap between them — widened by broad match and close variants — is mined weekly for negative keywords (stop waste) and exact-match promotions (scale proven intent).

Layman Explanation & Analogy

You bid on "running shoes"; the customer typed "running shoes for flat feet under 3000". The keyword is your net; the search term is what swam into it. Reading the catch tells you which holes to close (negatives) and which fish deserve their own net (new exact keywords).

Worked real-world example

The word "jobs" spread across 214 tiny terms burns ₹38,400 a month with zero conversions — invisible row-by-row, obvious in an n-gram aggregation. One shared negative-list entry recovers ~₹4.6L annualised.

What people get wrong & common traps

Negating intent-adjacent terms before significance (~2x target CPA spend) destroys learning, and broad match without weekly mining optimises efficiently toward the wrong queries. Negate junk instantly, hold adjacent terms to the evidence bar, and negate at the lowest effective level.

Related terms