How to Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner is the one must-have tool for any Google Ads campaign so you can find profitable keywords.

You’ll learn how to add “seed keywords” that help you uncover hidden gems, how to interpret the information the tool gives you, and how to estimate how much traffic you’ll receive from a particular keyword.

Your first step is to log into your Google AdWords account. Click on “tools and analysis,” in the top toolbar and choose “keyword planner” from the list. On this screen, you’ll find three different tool that will allow you to find new keyword ideas or see how an existing list of keywords will perform in AdWords.

The first, “search for keyword and ad group ideas,” is great if you want to brainstorm and find new keywords to add to your campaign. And there are a few ways to do it. The first is just to add keywords related to your niche. So if you sold fitness products you would include things like fitness, weight loss, and other keywords that you think your target audience is using when they search on Google looking for products that you sell.

Landing page is simply a page that you want your AdWords traffic to land on. So if you have one set up just copy and paste the URL into this field, and if you don’t you can just use your home page or an internal page on your site and Google will visit the page, extract keywords and use those to give you new ideas for your AdWords campaign. Or you can also choose a product category. So Google has built in product categories, so just click here and you can choose one of the product categories that fits within your industry. And you can also target the keywords ahead of time.

So if you want to target, let’s say, only people in the US, you’d leave this the same, but if you wanted to add a country or target a different country click on this and choose a different country. If you want to target a different language you can do the same thing. If you want to target Google only and not their search partners like AOL, you just want to leave that like it is.

And if you want to include negative keywords, which are keywords that you don’t ever want to show up in your Google AdWords account, you can just include those here. And you can also use keyword filters. And what that does is it allows you to filter out keywords that don’t meet your criteria. So if have specific monthly search volume that you want to meet or cost per click that’s above a certain level you can click this and then set the criteria here.

Now, keyword options is simply to hide keywords in your account, so if you already have an active AdWords account, you obviously don’t want those to appear again, because you’re looking for new ideas so you want to leave that like it is. And if you want to include or exclude certain keywords, you can include those here. And once that’s all set up you want to click on “get ideas.” But we’re actually going to move on to the next tool. which is “enter or upload keywords to see how they perform.”

And this is really straight forward. This isn’t actually looking for keyword ideas, this is if you already have a list of keywords; for example if you advertised on bing before or a different network you can include those keywords here, or upload them in a CSV file and Google will give you information about how those keywords will perform within AdWords.

Now finally, we have the multiply keyword list feature. And what this does is it allows you to enter different keywords in list one and list two and Google will combine them together. So if you had that fitness site, you’d put keywords like fitness, health, wellness and weight loss and in list two you combine totally different keyword and they’ll combine them with this.

You can put thing like premium products tips and it’ll combine them all together. So once you have a list going you can click on “get estimates” and Google will show the same information just like it would show you from the search for keyword and ad group ideas feature. And that’s actually what we’re going to go over now.

So let’s enter a few seed keywords. And generally want these to be pretty broad unless you have a specific keyword in mind. Just to give you the most amount of ideas. So you’d want to put fitness, weight loss, health, health tips. So you could put general keywords like that. If you’re more in the brainstorming phase.

But if you have specific keywords that you want to use for example, product related keywords like fitness dvds, you could include those keywords into the list instead of or in addition to the more general keywords. But just for the video we’re actually going to use some general keywords so we can see the most amount of ideas.

So you want to put two or three general keywords or include your landing page and then set any criteria that you want and then click on get ideas. Now once you’re here, it automatically shows ad group ideas. Now this is something you might want to do if you’re still in the brainstorming phase.

But you don’t want to specifically just take on an ad group because this might not be appropriate for what you’re selling and the traffic that you want to get. So for example, “weight loss plan,” might be great if weight loss is the primary focus of your product. But if not it may include a lot of keywords that you don’t want. So just to check you can always click on it. And see the keywords that they suggest within that ad group.

Okay, and if you want to add all those keyword to you ad group just click on “add all” and it’ll add all of them, otherwise go back click on the keyword ideas tab and now the tool shows you information about specific keywords related to the keywords that you gave it. So at the top it actually shows the keywords that you entered.

So if you included, let’s say, five keywords it would show five keywords here under search terms. And it also shows you keywords related to the keywords that you entered. So these are basically new keyword ideas. Now if you see one that’s good you can always add it to your account or search for it and get ideas based on that keyword and repeat the process until you’ve found all of the keywords that look like good fits.

So now I’m going to go over what all of the categories mean next to a keyword. So the first is this little graph icon and all that does is when you hover over it, it shows you the variations in search volume over the last 12 months. So this gives you an idea of whether the keyword popularity is trending up, trending down, or whether it fluctuates a lot, for example seasonal keywords. And then average month searches is very straight forward.

It’s the amount of people that search for that keyword per month. Competition represents the number of different AdWords advertiser that are targeting that keyword. Average cost per click is the average cost per click that advertisers pay to get one click from that keyword. And ad impressions share is the percentage of times that your ad appeared when someone searched for the keyword.

So if you haven’t actually advertised that keyword before this will always be zero percent. So when you see a keyword that look good you can click on the blue button here and that keyword will be added to the ad group “my keyword ideas.” And you can always go back and add that to a specific ad group that you want to advertise on later.

So what this little your plan feature does is it gives you an idea of how many click you’ll get depending on how much you bid. So if you bid zero dollars obviously you’re not going to get any clicks and if you bid $21 a click. you’d get 847 clicks a day. which is extremely high because this bid is ten times above the average cost per click.

So what we want to do is move this bar to a more reasonable bid. Something like $2.38. And with that you’d get 645 click which is still actually really really good and it would cost you about $543 a day to advertise at that bid level and you can adjust it left and right to see how many click you would get depending on your bids.

So that’s all there is to using the Google AdWords keyword planner. As long as you add several seed keywords into the tool and then take some of the keywords suggestions and add those back into the tool you’ll find plenty of great keywords that you can advertise on to get targeted traffic to your site.