Search terms go quiet. What agencies change now

Two things landed this month that change what we say to clients. One is a Google Ads reporting change most clients will never notice on their own, and one is a new surface every client will ask about by Friday.

We fulfil paid search and social for other agencies, so we get to see the same conversation happen in a lot of accounts at once. Here is what we are changing on our side, and what we think is worth saying to your clients before they ask.

What Google is changing in the search terms report

Google has told advertisers that the search terms report will only include terms that a significant number of people searched for. It is a privacy change, and it starts next month. Queries under whatever the threshold turns out to be simply will not appear in the report, while the clicks and the spend they generated still sit in the campaign totals.

So the report stops reconciling. The account will have spent money on searches you cannot name.

For a national advertiser this trims the tail. For a local account it is more than a trim, because a local account is mostly tail. “Emergency dentist open saturday” in one suburb is never going to clear a volume threshold, and queries exactly like that are what we build these accounts around. The smaller the geography, the more of the report goes quiet.

The reports that break first

Pull up the template you send clients and look at what depends on query data:

• The top search terms table, which is usually the page clients actually read.
• The “negatives added this month” count, which is how a lot of retainers demonstrate work.
• The wasted spend narrative, where you show the junk you cut and what it saved.
• Any script or scheduled export that pulls the search terms report into a sheet or a dashboard.
• Keyword expansion, if your process is to harvest new keywords from the report every month.

The awkward part is not the analysis. It is that the visible proof of work is about to thin out on the exact page the client reads first.

Do not wait for them to spot it. A paragraph in next month’s report explaining the change costs nothing. The same conversation in October, after a client has noticed the table shrinking and drawn their own conclusion about who stopped doing the work, costs a lot more.

The account has to do more of the work

When you cannot see what you bought, structure has to carry more of the load.

Broad match plus a fat negative list has been a perfectly workable structure for years, and it works because you can see what you caught and negate the rest. That loop gets slower now. We are moving local accounts towards tighter themes per ad group, more weight on phrase and exact, and fewer places where a keyword can pull in something we will never find out about.

The negative keyword process has to move onto sources you control:

1. Call recordings. The wrong calls tell you the wrong queries, in the caller’s own words.
2. Form entries and chat transcripts, for the same reason.
3. The client’s front desk, which already knows the three things people ring up asking for that the business does not do.
4. A “we do not do this” list from every client. Most local businesses have one and almost none have written it down. Ask for it in onboarding and turn it into a shared negative list.
5. Your own cross-account negative lists, which stop being a nice-to-have and become the main asset.

Export every account’s search terms report back as far as the interface will give you, this week. Whatever the historical view looks like after the change, having your own copy costs an hour and settles the argument.

And then Instagram Reels

Reels launched here at the start of the month and every client with a phone has seen it. Expect the question.

Give them one answer, and make it the same answer across the agency. Today it is an organic surface. There is no ad placement to buy in it, so it is not a media line item and it does not come out of the ad budget. It is production: someone has to shoot vertical video on a cadence, week after week, or it does nothing.

That distinction matters commercially. If your agency is going to make Reels for clients, price it as production with a named person and a set number per month. Do not drop it into a retainer as a goodwill extra, because it is the one deliverable that quietly eats a strategist’s week.

What not to promise: reach. Nobody has enough history on this placement to forecast anything, and a client who was promised numbers in September will hold you to them in November.

The other question coming your way is TikTok, whose availability is currently a news story rather than a media plan. We are not moving client budget onto a platform whose future is being argued about in public. Organic experiments, sure, as long as they stay cheap.

What to do this month

• Export every account’s search terms history this week, before the change takes effect.
• Rewrite the reporting template now, so next month’s report is already the new one.
• Send each partner a short, forwardable note about the change, written in their client’s language rather than yours.
• Read your live proposals and scopes for any promise of full query visibility, and change the wording.
• Start or consolidate cross-account negative keyword lists, and add a “what we do not do” question to onboarding.
• Set one agency position on Reels, price it as production, and brief the account team so everyone says the same thing.

Changes like this are cheap to absorb in August and expensive to explain in October. If you resell Google Ads under your own brand or hand paid social to a fulfilment partner, this is the month to get the reporting language sorted out with them. It is the sort of thing we handle for the agencies we do white-label work for, quietly, before their clients ever see a difference.