Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, defended why so many search terms are hidden within the Google Ads advertiser console and reports. She said, “the threshold increase was solely privacy-driven.” She added this was a question she asked when she was joining Google, suggesting it was important for her to learn before joining the company.
The topic came up when Collin Slattery posted on his blog and on LinkedIn and X about how many hidden search terms there are within Google Ads. He wrote:
We all assume that hidden search terms waste money, but I wanted proof.
So I analyzed $20 million in spend, 14 million clicks, across 933 campaigns to see for myself.
Turns out they do and to a staggering degree!
For every $1 in ads you buy, Google siphons $0.85 in forced inefficiency through hidden search terms.
He also shared this graphic:
Ginny Marvin from Google replied on LinkedIn and X – here is her full response:
This was something I asked about when joining Google. What I learned: the threshold increase was solely privacy-driven. A search term is reported when it meets sufficient search volume across all Google searches. The threshold applies to all queries.
I get it’s frustrating. Our aim is to help you understand how your customers find you on Search, while respecting user privacy. We’ve worked to surface more insights in privacy-safe ways: aggregating misspelled terms with their correctly spelled queries, Search Terms Insights, etc.
There’s always a tradeoff between volume & marginal ROI. Our goal is to hit your bidding target. Queries are matched when predicted to help achieve your desired ROI, regardless if they meet reporting thresholds.
Performance isn’t homogeneous within a campaign or bidding portfolio. It’s helpful to see your analysis found little variance in non-brand campaigns when segmented by visible vs. “other”. The variance in brand is something we can look at more closely, but segmenting by other dimensions may provide more insight.
We’ll continue to seek ways to improve visibility in privacy-safe ways. And we’re looking to achieve more consistent ROI across traffic segments.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn and X.
Update from Collin and Ginny:
Hi Collin, The threshold applies to every query the same way. Any search term that is not surfaced in the report simply has not been searched enough times across all Google searches to meet the privacy threshold. It either meets the privacy threshold and gets reported or it…
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