Harvesting search terms: turn discovery traffic into keywords that pay
Broad match and Search Match find queries you'd never think to target. Here's a simple loop for harvesting the winners into exact keywords and cutting the rest.
Your best keywords aren’t always the ones you brainstormed. They’re the queries real users typed that you discovered by accident — through broad match and Apple’s Search Match. The skill is turning that discovery traffic into a tight, profitable account.
The two halves of discovery
- Search Match / broad run as a discovery layer: cheap, wide, and noisy. Their job is to surface terms.
- Exact keywords run as the harvest layer: once you know a term works, you target it exactly so you control its bid and protect its budget.
Leaving winners in broad forever means you can’t bid them precisely, and you keep paying the discovery tax. Leaving junk in broad means you bleed spend on queries that never convert. If you’re fuzzy on how broad match, Search Match, and exact match differ, that’s worth understanding before running the loop.
The harvest loop
Run this weekly:
- Find gems. Look at your search-terms report for queries with strong tap-through and conversion rates that you don’t already target as exact. These are proven and untapped.
- Promote them to exact-match keywords in the right ad group, with a bid informed by their CPA.
- Find junk. Spot terms with meaningful spend, plenty of taps, and zero installs.
- Add them as negatives so your discovery layer stops paying for them.
- Repeat. Discovery keeps surfacing new terms as the market shifts; the loop never really ends.
What “good” looks like
A healthy account converges: a small set of exact keywords carrying most of the profitable volume, a lean discovery layer feeding it new candidates, and a growing negative list keeping the noise out. Cost-per-install drifts down and conversion rate drifts up — not because you bid harder, but because you stopped paying for queries that never pay you back.
Don’t do it by hand forever
The harvest loop is mechanical, which makes it perfect to automate. TapPilot’s keyword miner runs it continuously: it flags gems from your own search-term traffic and expands net-new candidates (competitor, variation, misspelling) scored against demand and competition — then lets you approve the winners straight into your account. See the keyword miner.
See your real cohort ROAS
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