It’s September 2020.
The earth shattered.
People from all over the world muttered furiously under their breath.
The word was out:
“We are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users. As a result you may see fewer terms in your report going forward”
Signed, your anonymous friends at Google
Another monumental garbage move by the almighty less-do-no-evil-getting big G.
But hey, what can we do? Not much… except maybe promote Bing some more?
What we can do, however, is monitor the size and impact of this change.
Our friends at smec created a nice little free script to do just that (sign-up required):
Here’s what the script will do: the script generates a Google Sheet reporting the percentage of Clicks, Impressions, Cost, and Conversions from unknown search terms, for periods before and after the change.
And here’s what that looks like in one of my accounts:
(I am seeing sort of the same pattern in most of my accounts.)
How has the search term data change impacted your accounts?
Hit reply — I read every one of them.
– Nils