Is this goodbye to our decade long love affair with Google’s awesome keyword tool, set to be replaced by a newer, fresher version? Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner has been launched within the Adwords interface and this is something pretty special. It takes all the good bits from the External Keyword Tool, Traffic estimator and even historical campaign data and smashes them into one cool tool, right within your adwords interface.
With the keyword planner, you can now get more in depth keyword and industry data, with clearer CPC and estimated volumes. There is also the ability to easily import the additional adgroups and keywords right into your campaign.
You can find the keyword planner within your Adwords interface. In the Tools and Analysis tab, you will see the Keyword Planner option in the dropdown menu:
Then you will be taken to the Keyword planner options. Here you can select how you want to use the planner. Remember this is a few tools (and a few cool new features) bunched into one so this step is necessary:
If you select the first two options then, just like the old keyword tool, you can manually input your keywords as well as search for keywords. This time however you can go a bit deeper with traffic selection and can finally choose to get search volume by city, not just state. From there you have the option of adding the select adgroups to a plan like this.
The column on the right hand side allows you to select that group and add it to a plan. After you have added your groups you can select the ‘get estimates and review plan’. This is where the tool gets really interesting.
I have used an example of a florist and search terms around searching for a florist in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The review plan looks like this. You need to remember to put in your Avg big data as well as your budget per day in order to get the information you need.
Now we have some valuable keyword CPC and budget estimates for these adgroups and keywords which give us an indication of what we should expect from a campaign.
If you are happy with this then you can click ‘Save to account’ which is missing from the above picture but is located on the top right. You can then choose a new campaign to name it under or use add it to an existing campaign.
In the keyword planner menu, there is another option, third down the list, called multiply keyword lists to get estimates. This is where you can take this tool to the next level. This is especially good if you have a business servicing multiple locations or you need to add words before or after a core term.
For example if you are a florist in the eastern suburbs you may want to have the word ‘florist’ and target Bondi, Bronte, Rose Bay.. all the way to Maroubra and everywhere in between. Typing each variation is time consuming especially if your excel skills are not up to scratch. This tool makes it super easy, just add your core term in one column and the variances in the other and Google will do the rest for you.
You can then get ideas for these keywords and start the process of analysing the data and easily importing it to your campaign.
Google seems to be making the ability to run additional campaigns and add keywords quicker and easier with every update they make. At the same time however, they have successfully managed to improve the user experience significantly along the way. The grouping of keywords into group themes is a great way to set up fast and granular campaigns while taking the legwork out of building keywords lists and grouping them.
We will definitely be using this tool moving forward as it provides great insight as well as allows us to easily add groups and keywords to existing and new campaigns. It still does not provide the granularity that we ask for from our campaigns, but we have not tested the tool to its fullest but I can see it being part of our process to some degree.
