We Analyzed 1.3 Million Search Terms From 56 Google Ads Accounts: What People Type Before They Convert

We pulled every search term that triggered an ad across 56 of our Google Ads accounts over 12 weeks: 1,313,810 search-term rows covering 133,912 distinct queries. The accounts span pregnancy resource centers, churches, nonprofits, home services, and ecommerce, so the corpus shows how real people in very different markets type their way toward a decision.

Three findings stood out. 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: 14.3% of home-services impressions, just 4.4% for nonprofits. And plain-language offers beat clever copy: searches around "free pregnancy test" ran a 39% CTR against a portfolio average above 6%.

This post walks through the whole data set: where it comes from, what each pattern means, and what we change inside accounts because of it.

Where the data comes from

Emprise Digital is a Google Ads agency in Conway, Arkansas. We manage 64+ active Google Ads accounts for 50 billing clients, 35+ of them Google Ad Grant accounts, with $3M+ in ad spend moving through the portfolio every year. We have been doing this since 2016, and we have managed $12.5M+ in advertising in that time, most of it free 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, which is why studies like this are rare, and why we decided to 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
Verticals covered	Pregnancy centers, churches, nonprofits, home services, ecommerce

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. Read the caveat below before quoting these.

Here is the caveat, because honest methodology beats a bigger headline. Many accounts in this corpus run on the Google Ad Grant, the program that gives qualifying 501(c)(3) nonprofits $10,000/mo in free search advertising. 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 reported as a recorded conversion action, not a lead. When we count leads for clients, we count strictly: form submissions, phone calls, and completed purchases, nothing else. By that strict standard the portfolio produces 2,000+ real leads, calls, and purchases per month, and has produced 100,000+ since 2016. The two yardsticks measure different things, and we will not blur them.

One more rule: every number we publish is a floor. We round down, never up.

Finding 1: People ask Google questions before they convert

Filter the corpus to question-form queries: terms that start with how, what, can, is, do, when, where, and their kin. In our pregnancy resource center accounts, those questions made up 19.5% of all impressions. That is 500,000+ question impressions in 12 weeks, and the question terms behind them earned 17,000+ recorded conversion actions.

It was not a pregnancy-center quirk, either. Church accounts earned 5,400+ recorded conversion actions from question queries in the same window. People ask Google what time service starts, what to wear, whether kids are welcome. Then they show up.

Think about what a question signals. Nobody types "how much does an ultrasound cost" or "what time is church on sunday" idly. A question is 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.

In the pregnancy-center vertical specifically, some of those questions 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 is exactly what it is. If you run a center, your question coverage is your digital front door: the woman asking a question is often earlier in her decision than the one typing a service name, and meeting her with a clear, pressure-free answer is the entire job. This is the core of our pregnancy center work.

Question queries are also a structural gift for Ad Grant accounts. The Grant caps each campaign at $329/day and requires a 5% minimum CTR, so you need plenty of relevant, mission-aligned searches to spend the $10,000 monthly credit without wrecking your account health. Question inventory is exactly that. It is a big part of how our Grant management keeps accounts both compliant and fully spent.

Finding 2: "Near me" is a home-services behavior first

Near-me searching gets talked about like a universal law. In our corpus it is anything but uniform.

Vertical	Share of impressions from near-me terms
Home services	14.3%
Churches	5.8%
Nonprofits	4.4%

Pregnancy resource centers sit in the middle in raw volume: near-me terms drew 188,000 impressions across 3,500+ distinct terms and produced 5,800+ recorded conversion actions. Sit with that distinct-term count for a second. People found 3,500+ different ways to phrase one idea: help, close to me.

For home services, the implication is blunt. When someone has water on the floor, they do not research; they look for a person who can be at the door fast. One in seven impressions carrying explicit local intent means your local proof, your reviews, your service-area pages, and your map presence are doing as much selling as your ads. It is 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 a small share does not mean small value. The person typing "church near me" on a Saturday night is the closest thing search offers to a walk-in. Across the church accounts we manage, we treat local-visit terms as the most valuable slice of the account, even when national-content terms carry more volume.

Finding 3: The search term with a 39% CTR

The single most striking line in the corpus: search terms around "free pregnancy test" ran a 39% CTR. Across the whole 56-account portfolio, average CTR is 6%+.

Why does a three-word query outclick everything else we manage? Because it names the service, the cost, and the urgency at once, and the centers we manage genuinely offer it. The ad headline echoes the search. The landing page delivers what the headline promised. Nothing clever anywhere in the chain. Message match does the whole job.

And the clicks are not empty. Across 25+ pregnancy resource centers we count 1,000+ real contacts per month, strictly counted: form submissions and phone calls, no micro-conversions. High-CTR plain-offer terms sit at the front of that pipeline.

Every business has a version of this term: the plain-language offer your market already wants and you genuinely fulfill. A roofer's might be "free roof inspection." A church's might be "Christmas eve service times." You do not invent it in a brainstorm. You find it in your search terms report, already converting, usually underfunded.

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, the brand searches. The tail stretches into phrasings you would never brainstorm: misspellings, half-finished thoughts, hyper-specific situations typed out in full sentences.

In our weekly reviews, the tail is where both kinds of money hide. Waste hides there, as queries that will never become customers but quietly eat budget until someone adds them as negative keywords. Winners hide there too, as converting phrasings nobody bid on deliberately, waiting to be promoted to exact match with their own ads. Ignoring this report is mistake number two in our list of the seven most expensive Google Ads mistakes, and after this study we would rank it higher.

What we change in accounts because of this data

A study is only worth publishing if it changes the work. Here is what this corpus changes in ours:

1. Build question coverage on purpose. Ad groups for the questions your buyers actually ask, with ads that answer them plainly and landing pages that answer them fully. The 17,000+ recorded conversion actions on pregnancy-center question terms did not come from service-name ads.
2. Treat near-me as vertical math, not a slogan. At 14.3% of impressions, a home-services account needs location pages, review velocity, and Local Services Ads. At 4.4%, a nonprofit needs near-me coverage but should not bet the budget on it.
3. Hunt your plain-offer term. Somewhere in your search terms report is your "free 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.
4. Review search terms weekly for the first 90 days. Then at least biweekly forever. Every review produces negatives and promotions, or it was not a review.
5. Reuse the corpus beyond ads. Your search terms report is a ranked list of what your market wants to know. It should be steering your content, not just your bids.

None of this is a one-time project. It is the standing weekly work inside our Google Ads management, and it is most of what a management fee should buy.

The AI search wrinkle

Question-form queries matter for one more reason: they are exactly what AI assistants answer. In June 2026 we ran a live experiment for a Massachusetts pregnancy-center client. We optimized the site for AI surfaces, then verified citations by hand instead of trusting a tool's dashboard.

The result was honest and uneven. The site is now cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity for relevant local queries, and it is not yet cited by Google AI Overviews or Gemini. The engines differ sharply, and right now ChatGPT and Perplexity reward citable, structured content much faster than Google's AI surfaces do.

The bridge between that experiment and this study is direct. Your search terms report is a verbatim list of the questions your market asks. Publishing clear, well-structured answers to those questions is the core of SEO and AI-search optimization. One corpus, two channels: the same question that triggers your ad today is the question an AI assistant answers tomorrow, and you want to be the source either way.

Frequently asked questions

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 is the most honest data set in your account, because it records real demand instead of your guesses about demand.

What percentage of Google searches are questions?

We can only speak to our own corpus, but across 1,313,810 search-term rows from 56 accounts, question-form queries made up 19.5% of impressions for pregnancy resource centers, and church accounts earned 5,400+ recorded conversion actions from question queries in the same window. The share varies a lot by industry, so check your own search terms report before assuming an average.

What percentage of searches are 'near me' searches?

In our 12-week study, near-me terms accounted for 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 vertical, but it is far stronger where someone needs a local pro at their door.

How often should you check the search terms report?

Weekly for the first 90 days of a new campaign, then at least every two weeks after that. Every review should produce two lists: irrelevant queries to add as negative keywords, and converting queries to promote into exact match keywords. An account that has not had a search terms review in a month is leaking money.

What is a good click-through rate for Google Ads?

Across our portfolio the average click-through rate is above 6%, and our strongest plain-offer terms run far higher; 'free pregnancy test' searches hit 39% in this study. For Google Ad Grant accounts, Google requires a 5% minimum CTR, so anything below that puts the grant itself at risk.

Do question keywords convert, or just bring traffic?

They convert. In our corpus, question-form queries on pregnancy-center accounts produced 17,000+ recorded conversion actions in 12 weeks, and church question queries produced 5,400+. We report those as recorded conversion actions rather than leads, because Grant account setups often include micro-conversions, but the pattern is clear: people who ask questions take action.