Optimize PPC Accounts With Less Search Term Visibility

This month’s Ask A PPC tackles a pressing issue: search term visibility is shrinking on some platforms while others maintain greater transparency. Advertisers still need to understand, diagnose, and optimize campaigns even when full search term signals are unavailable.

“With search terms increasingly unavailable, what technical signals should advertisers prioritize to diagnose smart bidding?”

We’ll walk through three techniques applicable to any platform, then explore how Microsoft Advertising’s search term visibility can strengthen optimization across other channels.

Quick disclosure: I work for Microsoft, and I’ve written this as objectively and platform-agnostically as possible.

Technique 1: Use Behavioral Analytics to Understand User Quality

Losing access to individual search terms does not mean losing access to meaningful insight. You can check traffic segments to see if they deliver value:

• Times: Certain times will be more prone to impulse purchases versus considered investments. If your product or service sees a large amount of non-converting activity during a time that doesn’t align with the conventional customer journey, you can make educated guesses about removing those times.From there, you can start understanding whether those sources deserve more investment.For example, if you see a high uptick in conversions at 7 a.m. on mobile devices but they tend to be lower value than conversions at 4 p.m. on desktop, you might guess the former group was impulse shopping while the latter put more thought into engaging with you. The high-volume conversion group might also be on their way to work, not processing clearly which brand they gave their information to.That said, avoid snap decisions. Some interactions help start the conversion journey even if they don’t complete the conversion action until later. This is why signals from offline conversions and view-through conversions matter so much.

Both Behavioral Analytics and CRM or Shop Data Can Help Fill Gaps When Search Terms Are Missing

Behavioral analytics tools, including Microsoft Clarity, can help you understand how different humans and AI systems engage based on the times, platforms, and audience cohorts they come from. These insights can show whether your landing page gets in the way.

For example, if you see a high uptick of traffic coming to your site with no conversions, check whether they are trying to convert and can’t. Behavioral analytics tools can show you “rage clicks” as well as whether people are confused by page content.

They also can highlight potential CRM integration issues. If you watch users complete conversion actions multiple times but don’t see their info in your CRM, you are inviting false positives in conversion tracking.

Technique 2: Open Yourself Up to Zero-Click Value Actions

The AI era is changing how people discover, evaluate, and act. People may complete valuable actions without clicking to a website. Search term visibility may shrink due to privacy mechanics, but limited visibility into the full query or conversation does not mean no value occurred.

Grounding queries and citation counts can begin to provide useful information. For example, if AI visibility reports show many grounding queries, review whether those queries are contextually relevant to your brand.

If you see that a grounding query is pulling you into financial advice topics and you’re a general business consultant, you may want to adapt your landing pages, search themes, and keywords to focus on “consultant.” While “advisor” is a close variant of “consultant,” financial topics tend to have higher CPCs and won’t be relevant to general business consulting. This is also where term exclusions and message constraints can be helpful, so AI tooling can provide a clearer picture of what product or service you offer.

You may also decide to remove unnecessary JavaScript from pages you want AI systems to engage with, reducing potential blocks stopping crawlers from accessing the page.

If AI systems cannot engage with a page, we remove ourselves from opportunities to connect with customers before those customers even look for us. AI can only put forward what it can understand, take in, and parse as useful.

Technique 3: Use Offline Conversions and Human Data to Validate Platform Claims

This technique takes more work, but it gives you useful insight into campaign performance or where AI-powered bidding struggles when it does not receive clean data. Give bidding systems data that is as accurate and useful as possible, while also using directionally correct conversion values when campaigns need to hit certain thresholds.

Conversion values and conversion value rules usually communicate value more effectively than bid adjustments. That matters because when we try to mitigate waste, we should use technology that aligns with how platforms work rather than forcing newer models to operate through legacy controls.

Bid adjustments and bid caps can force auctions in ways that reflect older campaign management logic. Conversion values and conversion value rules offer a stronger path forward for mitigating waste in modern automated systems.

A Note on Search Term Visibility

This month’s question assumes a Google-first world. Microsoft Advertising takes a different approach: advertisers can see search terms for traffic that resulted in a click. That transparency matters because advertisers should be able to understand how their budgets get spent.

With transparency comes search terms that invite scrutiny. Some may become useful negatives, while others may challenge biases in how you think about search behavior and how some queries drive valuable performance you may not have expected. People’s search habits change, and in a world where AI plays a larger role, bot-type queries will not always equal waste. Sometimes they represent genuine, useful queries.

One helpful way to explore this is to review the AI crawler bot report in Microsoft Clarity and look at the ratio of AI crawler bots. That context can help you understand whether AI engagement connects to meaningful behavior.

3 Ways to Use Microsoft Search Term Visibility Across Other Channels

1. Identify Winners

Because Microsoft Advertising shows search terms that result in clicks, you gain more transparency into what deserves focus. That insight can inform better search themes for Performance Max campaigns, stronger keyword targets for traditional search campaigns, and content ideas worth building around.

Do note that match types behave the same between Microsoft and Google.

2. Find Potential Negatives

If a query idea clearly does not make sense on Microsoft Advertising, there is a good chance it also does not make sense on Google or other keyword-targeted platforms. Microsoft requires negative keywords to use phrase or exact match, but you can still identify root words and apply them as negatives in the match types available on other platforms.

This added confidence can make Microsoft Advertising useful as a source of search terms that inform broader account hygiene.

3. Pair Behavioral Analytics with Conversion Tracking

Search term visibility helps you identify winners and losers, but the real insight and optimization happens when you understand what users do after they complete those searches. If a query brings people to your site but conversions do not register, you may have a conversion tracking issue rather than a query quality issue.

The reverse can also happen: if conversions increase but the queries tied to those conversions do not look quite right. Data exclusions can help in both Google and Microsoft when you need to account for tracking or data quality issues.

Behavioral analytics paired with search term visibility gives you one of the strongest ways to understand why people search the way they search and what influences them after they land on your website.

Final Takeaway

Search term visibility may be shrinking on some channels, but it still exists on others. Rather than assuming visibility has disappeared entirely, advertisers can adapt their perspective and use multiple channels to capture different forms of insight.

Google and Microsoft do reach unique users, so the data will not map perfectly one-to-one. Still, if a search does not make sense for your brand and you can see it on one network even when you cannot see it on another, you gain value by identifying that idea once instead of paying for it repeatedly.