Guides · Original data study
We Analyzed 1.3 Million Search Terms From 56 Google Ads Accounts: What People Type Before They Convert
By Josh Croom · Updated October 21, 2026
We pulled every search term that triggered an ad across 56 of our Google Ads accounts over one 12-week window in 2026: 1,313,810 search-term rows covering 133,912 distinct queries. The accounts span pregnancy resource centers, churches, nonprofits, home services and online stores. The corpus shows how real people in very different markets type their way toward a decision. We first published the study on June 11, 2026.
People ask Google questions before they act: question-form queries made up 19.5% of pregnancy center impressions and earned 17,000+ recorded conversion actions. Near-me behavior is wildly uneven by industry, at 14.3% of home-services impressions and just 4.4% for nonprofits. And plain-language offers beat clever copy: searches asking for a pregnancy test at no cost ran a 39% click-through rate (CTR). The portfolio average in the same 12 weeks was above 6%.
Where the data comes from
Emprise Digital is a Google Ads agency in Conway, Arkansas, founded in May 2016. We run 64+ active Google Ads accounts for 50+ clients, and 35+ of them are Google Ad Grant accounts (counted October 16, 2026). Ad spend across all of those accounts from May to August 2026 works out to $3M+ a year. In all, $18.1 million in Google Ads spend (measured through September 30, 2026) has run through accounts we manage or have managed since 2015. More than three-quarters of it was Google Ad Grant credit for nonprofits.
This study covers 56 of those accounts over a single 12-week window in 2026. Search term data is first-party by nature. You can only study what runs through accounts you actually manage, and that's why we publish ours.
| Study metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Search-term rows analyzed | 1,313,810 |
| Distinct search terms | 133,912 |
| Google Ads accounts | 56 |
| Time window | 12 weeks in 2026 |
| Industries covered | Pregnancy centers, churches, nonprofits, home services, online stores |
How to read the numbers
- A row is one search term's performance line in one account for one reporting period.
- A distinct term is unique query text. "Plumber near me" and "plumbers near me" are two distinct terms.
- Impressions, clicks and CTR come straight from Google's search terms reports. Take those at face value.
- Recorded conversion actions are conversions exactly as each account recorded them, so read the caveat below before you quote these.
Many accounts in this corpus run on the Google Ad Grant. The Grant gives a qualifying 501(c)(3) nonprofit up to $10,000 a month in search ads, and Google pays for the ads. Grant accounts commonly track micro-conversions, like a visit to a key page, alongside calls and form fills. So every conversion figure in this study is a recorded conversion action, not a lead. We count only form submissions, phone calls and completed purchases as leads for a client.
Our lifetime count runs from 2015 through September 30, 2026 and covers 887,000+ tracked actions in the accounts we've run. Of those, 611,000+ are engagement events such as page views, scroll depth and time on page. Calls, forms, appointments and chats make up 67,000+. The two yardsticks measure different things, and we keep them apart. We also round every number we publish down, and we never round up.
Finding 1: People ask Google questions before they convert
We filtered the corpus down to queries that start with a question word, such as how, what, can, is, do, when or where. Those questions made up 19.5% of all impressions in our pregnancy resource center accounts. That's 500,000+ question impressions in 12 weeks, and the question terms behind them earned 17,000+ recorded conversion actions.
Church accounts earned 5,400+ recorded conversion actions from question queries in the same window, so the pattern reaches past pregnancy centers. People ask Google what time service starts, what to wear and whether kids are welcome. Then they show up.
Nobody types "how much does an ultrasound cost" or "what time is church on sunday" idly. A question comes from a person partway through a decision, looking for one missing piece. The ad and the landing page that answer the literal question win the click, and usually the conversion behind it.
Some of those questions in pregnancy center accounts come from women weighing the hardest decision of their lives. We write and build for those searches with the care of a medical-adjacent category, because that's what it is. If you run a center, your answers to these questions are the first thing many women see from you. The woman asking a question often sits earlier in her decision than the one typing a service name. We meet her with a clear answer and no pressure, and that's the core of our pregnancy center work.
Question queries also help Ad Grant accounts. The Grant caps each campaign's daily budget and requires a 5% minimum CTR. That means you need plenty of relevant, mission-aligned searches to spend the $10,000 monthly credit and keep the account in good standing. Question searches give you that volume. They're a big part of how our Google Ad Grant management spends as much of the credit as it can.
Finding 2: "Near me" is a home-services behavior first
People talk about near-me searching as if every industry gets the same share, but our corpus shows big swings by industry.
| Industry | Share of impressions from near-me terms, 12 weeks in 2026 |
|---|---|
| Home services | 14.3% |
| Churches | 5.8% |
| Nonprofits | 4.4% |
Pregnancy resource centers sit in the middle in raw volume. Their near-me terms drew 188,000 impressions across 3,500+ distinct terms and produced 5,800+ recorded conversion actions. People found 3,500+ different ways to ask for help close by.
In home services, when someone has water on the floor, they don't research; they look for a person who can be at the door fast. One in seven impressions carrying explicit local intent means your reviews, your service-area pages and your map listing do as much selling as your ads. It's also why we pair Search campaigns with Local Services Ads for the trades, where Google's own local format meets that intent head-on.
For churches, 5.8% looks small, but each of those searches is worth a lot. The person typing "church near me" on a Saturday night is the closest thing search offers to a walk-in. We treat local-visit terms as the most valuable slice of every church account we manage, even when national content terms carry more volume.
Finding 3: The search term with a 39% CTR
Searches asking for a pregnancy test at no cost made the single most striking line in the corpus, at a 39% CTR. Average CTR across the whole 56-account portfolio was 6%+ in the same 12 weeks.
A short query like that outclicks everything else we manage because it names the service, the cost and the urgency at once, and the centers we manage really do offer it. The ad headline echoes the search, and the landing page delivers what the headline promised, so the match does the work without any clever copy.
Those clicks turn into contacts, too. Plain-offer terms like this one rank near the top for the calls and forms our pregnancy center accounts record, and we count those strictly, with no micro-conversions.
Every business has a version of this term: the plain-language offer your market already wants and you really fulfill. A roofer's might be "roof leak repair today." A church's might be "Christmas Eve service times." You'll find it in your search terms report, where it's usually already converting on too little budget.
What 133,912 distinct terms teach you about the long tail
The corpus holds 1,313,810 rows but only 133,912 distinct terms. The head of the curve repeats across accounts and weeks: the service names, the near-me phrasings and the brand searches. The tail stretches into phrasings you'd never brainstorm, like misspellings, half-finished thoughts and very specific situations typed out in full sentences.
Our weekly reviews find waste in the tail. Some queries will never become customers, and they eat budget until someone adds them as negative keywords. The same reviews find converting phrasings nobody bid on, and those should become keywords with their own ads. Search term waste is check 10 in our PPC audit checklist. From March 19 to May 25, 2026, that check turned up spend on zero-conversion terms in 55 of the 63 accounts our collector covered.
What we change in accounts because of this data
This data changed five things in how we run accounts, and each one works in yours too:
- Build question coverage on purpose. Set up ad groups for the questions your buyers actually ask, and answer them plainly in the ads and fully on the landing pages. The 17,000+ recorded conversion actions on pregnancy center question terms didn't come from service-name ads.
- Treat near-me as math for your industry. Near-me terms made up 14.3% of home-services impressions, so a home-services account needs location pages, a steady flow of new reviews and Local Services Ads. At 4.4%, a nonprofit needs near-me coverage but shouldn't bet the budget on it.
- Hunt your plain-offer term. Somewhere in your search terms report is your version of the no-cost pregnancy test: the term where your offer and the market's words already agree. Fund it, match your headline to it, and protect it with negatives.
- Review search terms weekly for the first 90 days. Then review them at least every two weeks for as long as the account runs. Every review should produce new negatives and new keywords.
- Use the corpus beyond ads. Your search terms report is a ranked list of what your market wants to know. It should steer your content as well as your bids.
This is standing weekly work inside the Google Ads management we sell, and it's most of what a management fee should buy. Every plan and its price is on our pricing page.
The AI search wrinkle
Question-form queries matter for one more reason: they're exactly what AI assistants answer. In June 2026 we ran a live experiment for a pregnancy center client in Massachusetts. We set the site up for AI search, then checked citations by hand instead of trusting a tool's dashboard.
The result was uneven. ChatGPT and Perplexity cited the site for relevant local queries, but Google AI Overviews and Gemini hadn't cited it yet. The engines differ sharply, and in that test ChatGPT and Perplexity rewarded citable, structured content much faster than Google's AI surfaces did. The full write-up is our AI search experiment.
Your search terms report is a word-for-word list of the questions your market asks. Publishing clear, well-structured answers to them is the core of the SEO we add to websites we build. The same corpus feeds both channels, because the question that triggers your ad is also the question an AI assistant answers. A page that answers it well can show up in both places.
Questions people ask
What is a search terms report in Google Ads?
The search terms report shows the actual queries people typed before your ad appeared, as opposed to the keywords you bid on. You can find it in Google Ads under Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. It's the most direct record in your account, because it shows real demand instead of your guesses about demand.
What share of Google searches are questions?
We can only speak to our own corpus. That corpus holds 1,313,810 search-term rows from 56 accounts in one 12-week window in 2026. Question-form queries made up 19.5% of impressions for pregnancy resource centers, and those questions earned 17,000+ recorded conversion actions. Church question queries earned 5,400+ in the same window. The share varies a lot by industry, so check your own search terms report before you assume an average.
What share of searches are near me searches?
Near-me terms in the same 12-week study made up 14.3% of home-services impressions, 5.8% of church impressions and 4.4% of nonprofit impressions. Pregnancy resource centers drew 188,000 near-me impressions across 3,500+ distinct terms. The behavior shows up in every industry, but it's far stronger where someone needs a local pro at the door.
How often should you check the search terms report?
Check it weekly for the first 90 days of a new campaign, then at least every two weeks after that. Every review should produce two lists. One holds queries that will never become customers, and you add those as negative keywords. The other holds converting queries nobody bid on, and you add those as keywords with their own ads. An account that hasn't had a search terms review in a month is paying for searches nobody has checked.