Try this One Simple Trick to See your Search Terms in Google Shopping and Optimise your Product Titles

The Problem with Search Term Reports

By default in the Google Ads Search term reports for standard Shopping campaigns, you’re not able to see exactly which product ID was triggered by a search term. Depending on the number of skus you’re advertising on and how you structure your campaigns, this can leave the search terms reports for Shopping campaigns quite unhelpful. 

Imagine how powerful that could be - to see exactly which search terms triggered a product ID and understand how well they were performing

You could then use this data to optimise your shopping titles and descriptions, including missing keywords that have high conversion rates and removing from your titles keywords which aren’t performing well. You could use find and replace rules within your feed management platform for specific terms, or use supplementary feeds within the Merchant Center to manually override titles for certain skus. 

With only a few small tweaks, you’ll be able to see your search terms at the product ID level in Google Analytics and unlock powerful insights to optimise your titles and descriptions. 

How to See Your Google Shopping Search Terms at the Product ID Level:

Step 1

In the Google Merchant Center

Settings > Conversion Settings > Enable Auto-tagging for free listings

This first step is to ensure that you’re correctly tracking traffic to your free listings in Google Shopping, as you will be removing any other UTM parameters from your shopping feed. 

Step 2

In the Google Merchant Center

Products > Feeds > Feed rules > + (to add a new feed rule)

Add a new feed rule to the link attribute. You will be adding a utm parameter to your urls 

Add &utm_term to the end of the url, followed by the product id

This will pull the product id through the utm_term parameter, enabling you to see the product id under the keyword dimension within the search terms report 

Step 3

In Google Analytics (Universal Analytics)

Google Analytics > Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries  

Add Keyword as a Secondary Dimension

You can then use a Regex filter to filter down to only show your product IDs

You will then be able to see session and conversion data for your search queries (though you won’t be able to see click data)

You can then review this data after some time has passed to understand exactly which search queries are converting for specific products and which aren’t, and test updating your shopping titles and descriptions