Can you see the actual serach term entered?

The phrase whcih triggered it isn't good enough

[ChrisXenon]

Hi, I'd appreciate any clarification you have on this.

In the keywords report, Google lists & counts those of my keyword phrases which caused one of my ads to be triggered.

For example, I may get told that the phrase from my keywords list PRIVATE TUITION (broad match) triggered ads to be displayed 3 times.
However, as far as I can tell, Google will cannot tell me what the actual phrases which triggered the ad were.

For example, the 3 phrases might have been PRIVATE MATHS TUITION, PRIVATE SPANISH TUITION and TUITION IN PRIVATE.

Clearly, in the case of exact match, the triggering phrase IS the search phrase, so that's not an issue.
And in cases where my ad is clicked, I get to see the exact phrase (usually) by looking at the referring URL and checking its query string.

But in all other cases, I cannot see the actual search phrase.

Now. I can only get better usage from AdWords by seeing my near misses - not by studying my hits - which clearly, already work.
So it would be extremely useful to see those phrases. Anyone know - is it possible - or planned to be so?

Thanks
Chris

[edited by: ChrisXenon at 8:34 pm (utc) on April 21, 2007]

[ChrisXenon]

... and if I forget to tick the TRACK THIS TOPIC box - is there a more elegant way to correct it than to add a worthless reply and tick it then? :-)

[edited by: ChrisXenon at 8:36 pm (utc) on April 21, 2007]

[RhinoFish]

you can't see the "searched for" keywords within adwords, but adwords and google analytics allow you to enable the urls used to bounce folks to you, to be appended with such data. so if you enable that feature, you can mine this data from the logs collected on the landing page you're sending them to.

help file:
[adwords.google.com...]

when logged in to adwords, go to my account tab...
My Account :: Account Preferences :: Tracking :: Auto-Tagging
then enable "Destination URL Auto-tagging"

if you use google analytics, it'll cull some of this data for you, but mining your logs is likely more productive if you have a lot of traffic because you can research deeper and manipulate the raw data in ways of specific interest to you, instead of working within the confines of GA (though an interface saves time and gets you 80%-90% of what you need).

[edited by: RhinoFish at 6:45 pm (utc) on April 22, 2007]