Search Terms Report vs Keyword List: What's the Difference?

A keyword list is the set of terms and phrases an advertiser deliberately adds to a campaign to bid on - what they chose to target, based on match type settings that control how closely a search has to align with that keyword.

The search terms report shows the actual queries real people typed that caused an ad to show - what genuinely happened, as opposed to what was intended when the keyword list was built.

These two lists are rarely identical, and the gap between them is exactly why the report exists. Depending on the match type used, a keyword can trigger ads on searches that share its meaning without sharing its exact wording - a keyword like "running shoes" can surface an ad for searches like "running shoe repair" or "are running shoes tax deductible," queries the advertiser never explicitly targeted but that the matching logic judged relevant. The search terms report is what makes that divergence visible and actionable: reviewing it regularly is how an advertiser finds search terms performing well enough to promote into their own dedicated keyword, and just as importantly, finds irrelevant queries worth excluding as negative keywords before they keep quietly burning budget. A keyword list left unreviewed against its own search terms report tends to drift over time - continuing to pay for traffic the original targeting was never actually meant to capture, simply because nobody checked what was really triggering the ads.