Lesson 3 of 5 · 8 min read · advanced
Keyword-level reporting: finding out which searches pay
What feed reports contain, how to read revenue by keyword and channel, why numbers arrive late and change, and how to avoid acting on noise.
A visitor reaches your page, sees a handful of related search terms and clicks one. That choice decides which advertisers appear and what a click is worth. A click on 'compare car insurance quotes' and a click on 'car insurance history' come from the same article and the same ad, yet one may earn ten times the other. Keyword-level reporting is how you see that difference.
A market stall that only counts the day's takings knows whether it was a good day. A stall that writes down what sold knows that mangoes paid the rent and turnips did not. Keyword reports are the list of what sold.
What a feed report contains
| Column | Meaning | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Date and hour | When the activity happened, in the feed's time zone | Needed for matching against spend and for dayparting |
| Channel or sub ID | The label you attached to the traffic (Channel ID, Sub ID) | Which campaign, lander or buyer the row belongs to |
| Keyword | The related search term the visitor clicked | Which searches attract visitors and advertisers |
| Country and device | Where and on what the visit happened | Rates differ sharply by geo and device |
| Searches | Visits that reached a results page | The numerator of Lander CTR |
| Clicks | Monetised clicks on sponsored results | The numerator of Ad CTR |
| Estimated revenue | What the feed thinks was earned so far | Divide by clicks for RPC, by visits for RPV |
Three numbers per keyword
For every keyword, the same short chain applies. Out of the visitors who saw the term, how many clicked it? Out of those, how many clicked a sponsored result? And what did each of those clicks earn? Multiply the three and you have revenue per visit attributable to that keyword.
| Keyword (illustrative) | Searches | Paid clicks | Ad CTR | Revenue | RPC | Revenue per search |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| compare car insurance quotes | 1,000 | 350 | 35% | $420 | $1.20 | $0.42 |
| cheap car insurance for new drivers | 1,400 | 420 | 30% | $336 | $0.80 | $0.24 |
| car insurance history | 600 | 90 | 15% | $27 | $0.30 | $0.045 |
The third row is the lesson. A term can be popular with visitors and nearly worthless, because few advertisers bid on it or because the people who click it are not looking to buy anything. The report lets you see that. It should also make you ask why the term is on the page at all: if it does not match what the article and the ad promised, it should go for policy reasons as well as commercial ones.
How granular can you get?
Google-based feeds report by channel, not by individual visitor. To see revenue for one ad or one buyer, you give that traffic its own channel. Channels are a limited resource. Since August 2025, Google lists access to more than 500 reporting channels among its Restricted Access Features, available only to AdSense for Search accounts in good standing. So the fineness of your reporting now depends partly on your, or your feed provider's, compliance record. Providers that send per-click postbacks with the keyword attached, as RedTrack documents for Tonic, give finer detail still.
Why the numbers move
- Within hours: first estimatesThe feed publishes early figures. These are estimated revenue, often incomplete for the most recent hours.
- Later the same day or next day: firmer estimatesMore clicks are processed and early guesses are replaced. Tonic, for instance, sends a separate estimate labelled as five hours later.
- Days to weeks: finalised revenueAfter invalid clicks are removed and quality adjustments applied, the feed confirms finalised revenue. Deductions at this stage are the clawback operators fear.
This gap is the revenue reporting delay. Its practical consequence is that the last few hours in any report always look worse than they are, because the cost has been booked but the revenue has not all arrived. Judge a campaign on hours that have had time to settle.
From report to action
- Keep terms that are relevant to the page and earn well per search.
- Review terms with high clicks and low value. Are they relevant? Is the audience wrong for them?
- Rewrite the article or the ad, not just the term list, when the audience and the keywords do not match.
- Feed the result upstream: revenue by keyword, joined to cost by ad through the tracker, shows which ads bring visitors who choose valuable searches.
Key takeaways
- The keyword a visitor clicks decides which advertisers appear and what the click is worth.
- For each keyword, track searches, paid clicks and revenue, then compute RPC and revenue per search.
- Recent hours always look worse than they are because revenue arrives after cost.
- On Google feeds, fine-grained channel reporting is a privilege tied to policy standing since August 2025.
- Use reports to remove irrelevant terms, never to force high-paying terms onto unrelated content.
Questions people ask
What is keyword-level reporting in search arbitrage?
It is a report from the feed provider showing searches, paid clicks and estimated revenue for each related search term visitors clicked. It lets you compare terms by revenue per click and revenue per search, and to join that back to the ads that brought the visitors. Without it you only see totals and cannot tell which searches are carrying the campaign.
Why is my search feed revenue delayed?
The feed has to collect click data from the search engine, remove invalid clicks and apply quality adjustments before it can say what was earned. Early figures are estimates and are revised over hours and days; final figures can take weeks. This is normal. Plan around it by judging campaigns on hours that have settled and by tracking how your estimates compare with final revenue.
How many clicks do I need before judging a keyword?
There is no fixed number, but a few dozen paid clicks is rarely enough because revenue per click varies widely from one advertiser to the next. Many operators wait for at least a hundred or more paid clicks, across more than one day, before drawing conclusions. The noisier the vertical, the more data you need.