Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free software tool used by webmasters to learn about the popularity of keywords and keyword phrases, how Google search engine users are looking for certain keywords, the competition to buy Google Ads advertisements using those keywords, and the cost per click.
Paid advertising campaigns are conducted on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. On the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), both non-paid (also called “organic”) and paid search results appear. The estimation is that 70% of Internet users will click on organic search results and 30% will click on a paid advertisement.
Even though the amount of clicks is fewer on the paid ads than the organic results, it is still possible to conduct PPC campaigns that produce a profit.
ALSO SEE: Understanding Google Algorithm Updates
Getting Started with Google Ads Keyword Planner
It is simple to learn the basics of Google Ads Keyword Planner.
If you already have an Ads account, skip this paragraph. A new user needs to establish a Google Ads account by visiting the Ads website. A YouTube video showing how easy it is to set up a Google As account in about ten minutes.
For those with an Ads account just go to the Google Ads Keyword Planner webpage and sign in with your Ads account information.
Google describes the Ads Keyword Planner as a tool used by those launching a paid advertising campaign, expanding an existing campaign, or considering the launch of a paid advertising campaign to help them do the following:
- Conduct an extensive keyword search
- Get ideas for ad groupings, which are clusters of ads that create a greater overall response
- Review and historical research statistics
- Estimate how a list of potential keywords may perform
- Predict the outcome of the multiplier effect by combining many keyword lists together
- Helps to choose the amount to offer under the competitive bidding structure
- Helps to decide on the budgets for paid advertisement campaigns
The Google tips to make the best use of the Google Ads Keyword Planner has a video of how to organise your keywords and the suggestions of the Google Ads Keyword Planner Help, which include:
- Try to think, as if you are your own best customer.
- What would you search for, to find your own company, products, or services?
- What would you actually type in the Google search engine?
- Select keywords that are less generic and more likely to target your best customer.
- Use more general searches of keywords to get more people (more costly), but get very specific to find the best target customers.
- Choose the right balance of keywords in an ad group. Usually, this is five, to no more than twenty. Google automatically includes misspellings and plural versions of keywords, so there is no need to add those to any ad group
Here are a few simple tests to perform:
- Get the help of a young person (age 12 to 18) who is very used to using the Internet to find things. Ask them to find a company in your target market area that sells a certain type of product or service. Then watch and record what they find.
- Repeat the test of #1 above, but the second time uses an adult (19 to 34).
- Repeat the test of #1 above, but the third time uses an older adult (35 to 65).
Please note: If all three categories of youngsters, young adults, and older adults do not find your company as listed in the organic search results on the SERP or as a paid advertisement on the SERP, then this clearly points out a problem with your online marketing campaign and a need for adjustment.
Taking it to the Next Level
For those willing to give some simple registration information and an email address, Hubspot offers a free Ebook to help beginners learn how to use Google Ads Keyword Planner effectively.
Google claims that the goal of every advertiser using Google Ads should be to make $2 in revenue for every $1 spent on Ads advertisements. According to a study conducted during 2009, by Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, this was the average performance taken from a large sample of advertisers using Ads.
There is the possibility of losing money when conducting Ads campaigns. The biggest mistake made by less experienced advertisers is to use keywords that are too broad in scope. For example, a search for the keyword “mechanic,” will find all types of mechanics, such as auto mechanics, airplane mechanics, and so on. Additionally, it will find everything related to mechanics, such as mechanic jobs, or parts used by mechanics.
Understanding this problem, paying for the keyword “mechanic” on Ads, to advertise an auto repair shop in Glasgow would be a horrendous waste of advertising dollars. A better choice would be to pay for the keyword phrase “auto mechanic Glasgow,” or “Glasgow auto mechanic.”
Conversion is the Key
Unless the goal of a media campaign is only to create awareness, such as brand recognition, then conversion is the most important benchmark to track. Conversion is a process that comes from web traffic. Web traffic is the number of visitors to a website.
When an organization engages in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online advertising campaign using Google Ads, they bid in an auction for keywords and keyword phrases. Every time an Internet user clicks on a paid advertisement (click-through rate) for a keyword or keyword phrase, the prepaid Google advertisement account receives a debit for a certain amount for each click, until there are no longer any funds available in the account to pay for clicks.
Conversion happens after an Internet user clicks on something and it depends on what they do next. Conversion can be that they give their email address, they register for a new account on the website, they ask for a sales call, or they directly purchase a product or service from the website.
Return on Investment
Conversion is the monetization of web traffic. It is a measurable benchmark to see if paying for clicks is worth doing.
Here is a simple example of a return on investment (ROI) analysis of a pay-per-click program.
The company used for this example is a plumbing company in Dublin, Ireland. This company does both residential and commercial plumbing. While it is a fact that the company serves many residential customers, it is also a fact that the company makes more profit by providing plumbing services to commercial customers.
Therefore, the company wants to target commercial plumbing customers in Dublin, Ireland.
Here is a checklist of the counter-intuitive things they should NOT do:
- Use generic keywords in a Google Ads campaign such as plumbing, plumbers, or even commercial plumbing.
- Fail to have a landing page for a click-through that specifically addresses the keyword or phrases that they advertise on Google Ads.
- Have the mistaken idea that spending money (perhaps a lot of it) on a Google Ads campaign will produce a wonderful result. The expectation of this is always higher than the actual results, which can sometimes be abysmal.
The Supreme Effectiveness of Localized Results
This is the “Zen” of how to use Google Ads and the Google Ads Keyword Planner effectively, in spite of the oh-so-helpful, yet completing misleading, Google suggestions of how to use the Google Ads Keyword Planner.
Google’s official helpful suggestions are absurd. They use as an example, a small shoe store that just opened, with a brand new website, which uses the keyword of “shoes” and other such generic keywords to attract attention.
This is COMPLETE nonsense and this introductory stuff only serves to make the “newbies” waste a lot of money on paid advertising.
To avoid this waste of money, use the Google Keyword Planner as a research tool and start searching for new keywords and identifying search volume data,” and then be very careful and explicit in how you fill out the information requested by the form, in order to do a Keyword Planner search.
For this test, we used the Google Ads Keyword Planner for our example of a Brighton Plumbing company looking for a business that is more commercial.
Here are the exact entries we made in the requested fields of the Google Ads Keyword Planner for:
- Your product or service: commercial plumbing
- Your landing page: brioghtonplumber.com (Note: We are not affiliated at all with this real company, but we do hope they get lots of new business because we used them as a real example. That’s good karma.)
- Your product category: plumbing
- Targeting: Brighton, England, United Kingdom
Here are the suggested keywords that come up using the Google Ads Keyword Planner that specifically relate to commercial plumbing in Brighton, UK:
| Keyword | Average Monthly Searches | Suggested Bid Per Click |
| Plumbing fittings | 10 | US$ 0.11 |
| Plumbing snake | 10 | US$ 0.74 |
| Leaky pipe | 10 | US$ 0.75 |
| Plumbing pipe | 10 | US$ 0.83 |
| Plumbing jobs | 30 | US$ 1.05 |
| Plumbing and heating | 10 | US$ 1.05 |
| City plumbers | 10 | US$ 1.20 |
| Brighton plumbers | 30 | US$ 13.58 |
| Plumbers Brighton | 110 | US$ 14.57 |
| Emergency Plumber | 30 | US$ 14.64 |
| Central heating Brighton | 10 | US$ 17.23 |
| Blocked drain | 20 | US$ 18.24 |
| Blocked toilet | 30 | US$ 20.78 |
Summary
The conclusion from our research regarding the effectiveness of the Google Ads Keyword Planner is that the tool is useful as an overview, yet more serious and detailed evaluation is necessary to achieve successful results in any paid advertising campaign on the Internet. Have you any different view on this?
