The Keyword planner feature is available for any clients that have an up and running AdWords account/ campaign. This tool is extremely useful to find new relevant keyword ideas what may help your ads and business (or whatever it is that you are advertising for) be found more often.

While I have mentioned the importance of keyword selection before, let me show you an example here on how the Keyword planner can help you. This is what you will see when you click on ‘Keyword Planner’ under ‘Tools’ at the top bar. The features that I personally use the most are the first two under ‘Find New Keywords & Get Search Volume’.

If you have been reading my previous posts, you would see that I like using Plumbing Pipers. Co as my go-to example. Let’s say that I have several possible keywords that popped into my mind without any research:

… And I have run out of ideas for plumbing keywords. If I use only these 3 keywords, I will definitely be missing out on so many impressions when people are searching for plumbing services!

This is when I will use the first feature: ‘Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category’. This feature not only will give me new keyword ideas, but gives me the volume trends of the keywords that I had in mind. Volume trend refers to the average number of searches of said keywords within a certain duration – in Google AdWords, the default date range will show the volume trends for the past 12 months in the regions you selected.

I key in the 3 keywords I have in mind, and used Malaysia as my location targeting setting. Although I will be targeting Subang Jaya – one small city – in my ads, I use the country as my targeting option for this so that I can get more ideas for what the Malaysians search for when in need of my services.

Think of it this way, if you want to carry out a survey about what food people like generally, you will get answers of wider variations if you ask a bigger group as compared to asking just your family members. You can try other settings too, such as the keyword filters where you can choose to look for new keyword ideas with average monthly searches more than, say, 200; or new keywords with a suggested bid of equal or less than RM3 as an example.

There’s a lot to experiment and explore on the keyword planner, really. Feel free to ask me about other features on the keyword planner if you’d like.

So, when you click on the ‘Get ideas’ button, you might see something like this:

From the first table on the page, I could see that the ‘plumbers near me’ and ‘plumbing services’ perform quite well at 720 & 1000 average searches a month. However, their suggested bid prices are a little on the expensive side. If my daily budget is only RM25, it wouldn’t make sense for me to bid RM6.50 for a click since that would mean that I can only get about 3 to 4 clicks a day at max. The 3^rd keyword, broken pipe repair, didn’t do too well at only 10 searches a month on average.

Wow, I’m going to need more keyword ideas at this rate! Something with a lower suggested bid, perhaps, and about 500 searches a month hopefully?

Before I proceed I would like you to know that the suggested bid is mostly for your reference only. You can start off with lower bids and if you see that your ads are at position lower than 2.5 and there’s a remark next to your keyword saying something like ‘Below First Page Bid; estimate: RM5.00’ or whatever. There are times when your ad’s average position is quite healthy at 2.5 or sometimes just 1.0, and it would still show this ‘below first page bid’ message. At times like this, you may ignore the comment. If your ad does perform quite poorly, perhaps at position 4 or even 7 sometimes, you can either change the keyword’s match type or straight out change the keyword if you cannot increase the max CPC bid.

So, back to looking for better keyword alternatives.

I applied the keyword filter to look for keyword ideas with more than 20 monthly searches and a suggested bid of less than RM3, just to be on the safe side. From the table, ‘toilet plumbing’, ‘clogged drain’, ‘plumbing pipe’ and ‘water heater installation’ could be promising since I provide these services and products!

Now, how to we implement the keywords into our account? You can use the slow and manual way of entering the keywords one by one, or you can add the keywords to your plans immediately!

Let’s assume that you do not have any ad groups in your account yet. At the right side of the keyword planner, you might see this:

You can add your ad groups in the ‘or start with an empty ad group’ button, and then add each wanted keywords into the ad group you select.

As an example, I want to put ‘toilet plumbing’ into the ‘toilet drains’ ad group. I click once on the newly added ad group, and click on the arrows under the ‘add to plan’ column in the new keyword ideas table. Keep adding relevant keywords to the relevant ad groups, and you can click on ‘review plan’ and click on the ‘save to account’ button at the top right corner which appears afterwards.

If you don’t already have ad groups in your campaign, you can select ‘add to an existing campaign à add as new ad groups’. You can even add the keywords into an existing ad group as well! If you don’t have a campaign, simply choose ‘create a new campaign’ and put your max CPC bids and your daily budgets before you save and continue! You will see your keywords when you click on ‘campaign’ at the top bar, then ‘keywords’. Remember, you can play around with the match types of your keywords once you add them into your account using this method!

Voila, your keywords are ready to trigger your ads for you!

And remember, you can always come sign up for Google AdWords with us, a Google Premium Partner (AdWords certified!!) to help you create and manage your campaigns! Simply click HERE and submit a form for us to start helping you out :) 

Interested to know more? 

Here are some relevant links from other blog posts under the 'Google AdWords' tag!

• The Structures of Google AdWords
• How Keywords Work in Search Advertising
• Making Text Ads More Prominent
• Dynamic Keywords & Ad Extensions