Viewing the search terms used to find my Ad

Or is this secret squirrel?

[rich_b]

Is there any way to see the whole of the search term that was entered into Google for each impression/referral? I've reviewed the conversion tracking and reporting info but that didn't help. I'm interested in this to help refine my negative keyword list.

[pmkpmk]

Use the logs, Luke!

192.168.1.11 - - [31/Jan/2005:12:01:57 +0100] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0" 200 22226 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=widgets" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8" "-"

See the "q=widgets" line? That's the keyword!

[rich_b]

Yeah I was afraid you'd say that! The website host doesn't give out logs as a matter of course, they give access to a GUI-based reporting system which is all nice and whizzy but not *quite* as useful. I was hoping Google might log the terms in the campaign reporting system. I think I''ll have to prod the host to get the raw log files.

[pmkpmk]

Sorry to say that, but if you're serious about your web-presence, then access to the raw logs is a must!

[rich_b]

Unfortunately I didn't choose the host. Still, I can't blame my family for their lack of webmastering skills...

[Sujan]

Change your host. You loose more without raw logs than by investing some hours to move your sites...

[marek]

You can also record your own logs. A very simple script in PHP or ASP will do the job and will be independent on the server.

[fischermx]

Go to :

[google.com...]

You'll find good choices at the first page.

[rich_b]

I'm going to ask the host for the log files but I have to say that the tool you mentioned looks excellent. Unlike the stats package the host uses, it will record referrer information passed like this: www.mydomain.com?GoogleAdwords. So I'll be able to tell what is from Adwords and what keywords they used.

[ffctas]

Any thoughts on how long a good programmer should take to write a program to pull adwords information from log files?
thanks

[pmkpmk]

2 Minutes

[HughMungus]

If you're using any scripting language whatsoever and a database, make your own logging script to populate your loggin database (in fact, you could even limit the logging to the google search referers).

[inasisi]

Any thoughts on how long a good programmer should take to write a program to pull adwords information from log files?
thanks

This is very straight forward to program. But if your log file isn't very big, you can even use Excel to do this for you.

[bellrj]

fischermx - I installed one of the tools from the search that you suggested. I won't mention which one but let's just say I didn't get to result #2. Anyway, it works extremely well and is totally free! Thanks again.