The most useful data in your Google Ads account that's often overlooked
Most marketers don't have a data problem. They've got dashboards, reports, keyword lists. What they don't have is confidence in what customers actually want.
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Insights & Resources
Practical thinking on customer intent, search strategy, and reaching the right people at the right moment. Written for in-house marketers and lean teams who want clarity, not more dashboards.
Walkthrough on how to shortcut to a drafted / empty Google Ads account so that you can quickly get starting prepping and planning with Keyword Planner tools.
When SEO and PPC teams work in separate rooms with separate dashboards, they're optimising for separate goals. Meanwhile, your customers see one search results page.
Intent gets treated like a label: informational, commercial, transactional. In reality, it's about timing. Two people can search for similar things and be in completely different headspaces.
A real search query isn't a keyword. It's someone trying to solve a problem, in their own words. When you use the words customers already use, things feel familiar.
Every business is different. Tools that give the same recommendations to everyone miss what makes your customers unique. The interesting stuff almost never lives in the neat keyword buckets.
If search queries are voice-of-customer data, their value shouldn't stop at bidding and ad copy. They should inform website messaging, landing pages, emails, and how you explain what you do.
How customers frame their problem. What they're worried about. What they're comparing. The questions that come next. None of this shows up clearly in a flat keyword list.
Instead of asking 'how do we target this keyword?', try asking 'what is this person trying to do, and what words are they using to describe it?' That shift is where clarity starts.