In the first post of this two-part series, you learned the basics of how Adwords can help you create great keyword lists and how you can manage keyword types. You now know that a great keyword list can boost your marketing potential but a poor list can severely hinder its effectiveness. This time around, you will learn how to use the Adwords Keyword Planner to generate more ideas for keywords and control your budget.
New Keyword Ideas
First and foremost, Keyword Planner acts as a search tool that can generate ideas for new keywords. Do you have a campaign planned for launch but are still unsure about which words and phrases best describe its message? If you can come up with just a few ideas, you can plug those initial snippets into Keyword Planner and have it create some additional keywords you may find useful.
The basic steps are simple:
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Click “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas”
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Follow the prompts and enter words, phrases, or categories pertinent to your campaign; then click “Get ideas”
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This will create a list of potential candidates, which you can select with the double arrow: “>>”
Once you have finished that step, be sure to look at the planner’s ability to show you historical statistics. Create your list of keywords and then let Keyword Planner get to work. It will scan your collection and predict how the list will perform in the real world. You can even see how your budget will fare, given such predictions.
Which Keywords Will Perform?
For new campaigns, you may start in the dark and have no idea which keywords to use. In that case, this service can boost your ideas from one or two keywords to an effective list of 10 or 20 (according to Google, most good ad groups have between five and 20 words). You may want to begin with keywords that have a high search volume so you can maximize your exposure.
Existing campaigns can also benefit from refined lists. Here, however, you may want to narrow down your current list of words that have a high search volume to ones that are more specific. A broad scope can work well for new campaigns because it can give you a good idea of which keywords work best. Targeted phrases, on the other hand, may cause ads to appear in front of fewer viewers, but they can lead to higher conversion rates. The details of each keyword are available with every search in Keyword Planner.
Work Within Your Budget
Now that your keyword list has attached itself to your campaign, you can see a graph in Keyword Planner that shows the number of clicks per day that Google expects your keywords to receive. You can also test drive your bid price to see the number of clicks fluctuate and then change your bid when you’re satisfied with the results. Keyword Planner can even show you how your keyword groups can perform as a whole – listing clicks, impressions, costs, clickthrough rate, average cost-per-click, and average position.
To read more about the potential benefits that Keyword Planner can have on your campaigns, you can check out the AdWords help site. The information here will get you started, and further reading can show you exactly where to click to see your results.
Come back in two weeks for a full rundown of how to use the AdWords Display Planner.
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