How to see ‘Search Terms’ in your Google Shopping campaign by product ID (where ‘product ID’ is the product ID from Google Merchant Center)

As all know, and unfortunately, in the new, so called ‘interface’ there is NO WAY to see which product ID has triggered a particular ‘search term’ in your Shopping campaign.

What is the problem?
We have a lot of products, for example, ‘T Shirt 1’, ‘T-Shirt 2’, etc. with IDs 001, 002, etc., in our Google Merchant Center (GMC) feed file. Those products are (somehow) existing in our Shopping campaigns and they are triggering clicks.

We can see a ‘Search Terms’ report in a Shopping campaign, for example ‘blue t-shirt’, ‘ugly t-shirt’, ‘beautiful t-shirt’, etc, but there is no way to see which product has been shown on a particular ‘search term’

A working solution:

1. In GMC you have to add an UTM parameter (utm_term) to all products.

• Firstly you need to go to your GMC and create a rule for ‘link’ attribute

by adding ‘?utm_term=’ following by ‘id’ attribute.

(Don’t put apostrophe in the value, because it duplicates.)

The ready rule should look in that way:

• You have to ‘Save’ and ‘Apply’ the rule
• Then you have to ‘Fetch’ your feed file again

2. In Google Analytics (GA) in Admin -> Property -> Property Settings you have to change Advanced Settings by checking the box ‘ Allow manual tagging (UTM values) to override auto-tagging (GCLID values) for Google Ads and Search Ads 360 integration’

PLEASE DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK and read this before: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033981

3. WAIT… The time depends on when Google will populate the GMC feed file in your Google Ads account. You can see if it’s ready by checking ‘Products’ section in Google Ads ‘interface’. If you see that your Final URLs have ?utm_term=XYZ (where XYZ is the product ID) at the end, you are ready to go!

4. In GA -> Reports -> Acquisition -> Google Ads -> Search Queries

4. Set ‘Secondary dimension’ to ‘Keyword’

5. Depending on your IDs, if you have only numbers in them, you can create a filter like this: 0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|0

Some small issues with this approach:

1. We will see 0 clicks for those search terms!

2. If you have a filter at campaign level (by any attribute) you will see in the report also keywords like ‘product_type_l1==….&+custom0==… &+custom3==…’ (they can be filtered by a RegExp, of course)

BUT the data we will have is PRICELESS …