Under the Hood of Google Keyword Planner

By Google Adwords Leave a comment

As it has been known for quite some time, Google has been planning a big change in replacing a couple of their major tools – namely the famed Keyword Tool and their accurate Traffic Estimator – with a new application designed to provide convenient, all-in-one functionality to help business owners achieve better results with their marketing campaigns.

The new Keyword Planner unleashed by Google, which combines everything that the two tools can offer into a single efficient program, has been designed to assist you in getting superior keyword and ad group ideas, better estimates that will help you find your optimal budget, and gaining access to improved methods of searching for, filtering and targeting keywords.

The Difference between the Keyword Planner and Tool

Many people still tend to confuse the new keyword planner with the old Adwords keyword tool, which provided a more limited amount of information about keywords.

The keyword planner, on the other hand, is a far more complex and targeted version of both the keyword tool and traffic estimator, focusing more on PPC management and various ad campaigns and making it easy for advertisers to have a more structured approach to actual Adwords campaigns; the old keyword tool was more general, having been used for anything from SEO to simple campaigns that did not yield overly good results unless you added various other tools to the mix.

Another important difference between the two is shown clearly by the new, intuitive interface of the planner, which allows for a far easier approach and a larger number of options when it comes to starting ad campaigns.

The Highlights of Google’s New Keyword Planner

Now that we have at least a vague idea of what the keyword planner does and doesn’t do, it’s time to take a closer look at exactly what you can expect from it:

  • The first thing that seems to be different when it comes to the new keyword tool is the fact that any modifications made to your keyword and group ideas, as well as other sections, will quickly be displayed without the need to refresh the entire page.
  • Unlike what some SEO professionals may have thought the fact that this online application will be replacing the old keyword tool is not bad news for search engine optimization. Quite on the contrary, it will provide SEO experts with accurate data regarding exact matches, phrase matches and broad matches for keywords and keyword phrases.
  • Targeted searches will be far easier to conduct, as the new Google keyword planner introduces local searches targeted by city – not just by country as was the case with the old keyword tool.
  • Additional filtering options have been introduced based on CPC, search volume, keyword exclusion and much more.

Finding Keyword and Ad Group Ideas

 

The similarities that the planner has in comparison with the Google Keyword Tool are shown best when you try to find new keyword and ad group ideas to use with your campaigns.

Basically, you will just have to use it the same way as you would the keyword tool, seeking ideas associated with your site, various categories or those related to specific keywords. A new option exists, however, which will let you combine keyword lists to generate new keywords. Also, you will only get specific ideas that apply to the term in question, making for better targeted results.

After using various filtering options to decide upon what keywords to actually use, the next tasks are fairly straightforward: you just add your keywords to a “plan” and examine the performance estimates for every match.

How to Efficiently Filter Your Keywords

 

One of the greatest advantages of using the keyword planner is that you can really get selective while filtering your keywords. Here are a few of the filtering options you have at your disposal:

  • You can, first of all, include or exclude various keywords that fall within a certain average monthly search volume.
  • To avoid the problem of working with duplicate phrases in your account, the keyword planner can exclude those that you have already selected.
  • Keyword competition is another potential factor that the new program will help you keep an eye on while filtering your keywords.
  • For solid ad campaigns, the possibility exists to conduct detailed searches and place accurate filters on the keywords of your choice depending on whether they are below or above a specific CPC value.
  • You will be able to create accurate filters not only according to keywords containing certain terms, but also based on excluded phrases or words.

Managing Your Keyword Plan

As you continue to discover promising new phrases you can use as part of your various campaigns, it becomes imperative that you be able to save them in an organized way for future use and reference.

The keyword planner will make this very easy by allowing you to add them to “your plan” – a temporary storage area designed to keep an account of all your most interesting and useful groups and keywords. This takes all the hassle out of the time consuming work you had to do in the past by saving data from the keyword tool in order to later use it within the Adwords Traffic Estimator.

Performance Estimates

 

The keyword planner also makes it easy to wrap up all the factors that contribute to CPC bid estimates – such as your location, budget, bid amount and others – allowing you to set a keyword bid and budget for your keyword groups and providing you with daily estimates on average ad positions, costs, impressions and clicks.

Although the new keyword planner seems quite complicated at first, many have stated that it actually makes things much better by handling a wide variety of tasks that, up until now, had to be performed using separate online tools.

While it may take some time until businesses get adjusted to working with this tool, Google, as well as everyone else, impatiently awaits the results and feedback presented by companies working with the keyword planner on a long term basis, most experts being highly optimistic about this entire transition process.

Tagged under:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.