Features
So, what are the key features for Google Ads Keyword Planner?
- Discover New Keywords: Search for words or phrases related to your products or services. The tool will help you find the most relevant keywords for your business.
- Understand Your Keyword Forecast: Shows you how many conversions, clicks, or impressions you’re likely to get for your keywords based on your spend.
- Create Campaign Based on Your Plan: Implement your keyword plan by creating it as a campaign. You can always view your forecast again by selecting Keyword Planner in the tools menu.
- Insights Page: Grow your business with insights and trends tailored to your business.
- Recommendations Page: Improve your campaign performance and efficiency with tailored suggestions.
- Google Ads Mobile App: Stay connected to your campaigns on the go, monitor them in real-time, and take quick actions to improve performance.
What’s great about Google Ads Keyword Planner?
- User-Friendly Interface: Even if you’re new to the tool, it’s easy to get started and understand how to use it.
- Detailed Forecasts: Provides insights into how many conversions, clicks, or impressions you might get based on your spend.
- Integration with Google Ads: Seamlessly create campaigns based on your keyword plans.
- Tailored Insights and Recommendations: Get suggestions and trends specifically tailored to your business and campaign needs.
- Mobile App: Monitor and manage your campaigns in real-time, even when you’re on the move.
What you need to be aware of:
- The tool primarily focuses on keyword planning for Google Ads, so it might not provide insights for other advertising platforms.
- As with all forecasts, the predictions are based on current data and trends, and actual results may vary.
Google Ads Keyword Planner Access:
Free to Use
- Google Ads Keyword Planner is available for free to all Google Ads users.
- Some features might be limited based on your Google Ads account type or spend.
Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool provided by Google as part of their Google Ads platform. It allows advertisers to find and analyze keywords that are relevant to their business to help improve their Google Ads campaigns. The tool provides estimates on monthly searches, competition, suggested bid prices, and other useful data to inform keyword selection and ad strategy.
In this review, we will take an in-depth look at the features and functionality of the Keyword Planner, including:
- Overview and purpose of the tool
- Interface and navigation
- Keyword research capabilities
- Filtering options
- Data columns and metrics provided
- Integration with Google Ads accounts
- Generating keyword ideas
- Keyword analysis and organization features
- Pros and cons compared to other tools
- Tips for getting the most out of Keyword Planner
By the end, you should have a comprehensive understanding of how Keyword Planner works and how it can be leveraged to enhance Google Ads campaigns through improved keyword targeting.
Overview and Purpose
Google Ads Keyword Planner is designed to help advertisers research and select profitable, relevant keywords to bid on in their Google Ads campaigns. Choosing the right keywords is crucial for successful PPC campaigns, as your ads need to show for searches highly relevant to your business in order to drive clicks, conversions, and sales.
Keyword Planner lets you input seed keywords relevant to your business to generate new keyword ideas and view statistics like monthly searches, competition, and suggested bid prices. This data helps you determine which keywords are worth targeting in your ad campaigns and how much to potentially bid for them.
Having a properly researched list of keywords to target increases the likelihood that your ads will be seen by your ideal customers. It also improves your quality score, which is Google’s metric for ranking your ad relevance. Keyword Planner is an invaluable tool for this important first step in creating and optimizing a Google Ads account.
Interface and Navigation
Keyword Planner has a simple, intuitive interface that is easy to navigate. The layout consists of just a few main sections:
- Keyword ideas – View keyword suggestions and data
- Ad group ideas – Get keyword ideas grouped by ad theme
- Keyword lists – Save and manage your keyword lists
- Keyword research history – View recent activity
- Location and language targeting options
The tool also has a navigation menu on the left side with links to access Keyword Planner and other Google Ads tools. The interface is clean and user-friendly.
Within the keyword ideas section, you can seamlessly sort, filter, and analyze keyword data with just a few clicks. Keyword Planner makes it easy to generate thousands of keyword ideas and then drill down on the most promising ones for your campaigns.
Keyword Research Capabilities
Now let’s explore the core keyword research capabilities that Keyword Planner provides.
Generating New Keyword Ideas
The main function is entering seed keywords relevant to your business to generate new related keyword ideas. This works great for keyword discovery and expanding your ideas list.
You can enter up to 2000 seed keywords or upload a CSV file with seed keywords. Keyword Planner will then show keyword suggestions that are closely related to your seeds along with estimated monthly searches and competition data.
The more seed keywords you use, the more suggestions you can uncover. You can generate thousands of new keyword ideas this way to thoroughly research all relevant themes and topics.
Analyzing Search Metrics
For every keyword Keyword Planner generates, you can view key metrics like:
- Monthly searches – Estimated averages for the keyword
- Competition – Ranges from low to high
- Top of page bid (low and high range) – Estimated cost per click
- Ad impression share – Percentage your ads could show for the term
These metrics help you estimate search volume, difficulty of ranking, and potential costs for keywords so you can decide which ones to target or avoid. Being able to analyze this data within Keyword Planner is invaluable.
Filtering and Segmenting Keywords
Keyword Planner offers several ways to filter and segment the keywords it generates so you can drill down on the best ones to target. Useful filters include:
- Monthly searches – Show low, medium, or high search volume
- Competition – Filter by low, medium or high competition
- Suggested bid – Show keywords within a certain bid range
- Average CPC – Filter by cost per click
- Impression share – By percentage of impressions
After filtering, you can save subsets of keywords into new lists to keep your research organized. These capabilities make it easy to zero in on the most relevant keywords with sufficient search volume and reasonable cost.
View Search Trends Keyword Planner provides a graph showing the search volume trends over the past 12 months for a given keyword. This helps you identify seasonal fluctuations that may impact performance. You can leverage this data to guide budgeting and bid adjustments.
Generating Ad Group Ideas
In addition to individual keywords, Keyword Planner can provide bundled ad group ideas, which are sets of keywords grouped around a similar theme or topic. This helps kickstart your ad group creation process by automatically clustering relevant keywords.
For example, for a flower shop it may generate ad groups like “roses”, “tulips”, “wedding flowers”, etc. Each ad group contains keywords related to that topic. This makes it very easy to start structuring your ad groups directly within Keyword Planner before even setting up your Google Ads account.
Integrating with Google Ads
A very useful feature is the ability to connect your Google Ads account to pull in additional data and save keyword lists directly to new or existing campaigns.
When linked, Keyword Planner provides search query data from your account to generate more relevant keyword ideas tailored to your customers. You can also get more accurate monthly searches and forecasted traffic estimates.
Saving keyword lists directly to campaigns streamlines implementation. Keyword research seamlessly flows into campaign setup.
Analysis and Organization Features
Once you’ve generated a large list of possible keywords, Keyword Planner provides useful tools to further analyze and organize them to identify the best options.
You can add keywords to different lists to group them by category or priority. Useful list types include:
- High-potential keywords – Most relevant keywords with sufficient search volume and reasonable cost
- Question keywords – Keyword questions searchers may ask
- Long tail keywords – Very specific, multi-word keywords with lower competition
- Branded keywords – Keywords containing your company or product names
You can also filter and segment your keyword ideas by all the available metrics to zero in on keywords aligned with your targets.
Keyword Planner gives you the flexibility to thoroughly analyze thousands of keywords and create customized lists to select the top options for your ad campaigns.
Pros and Cons Compared to Other Tools
Keyword Planner has several advantages:
Pros:
- Free to use for all Google Ads accounts
- Get search volume data directly from Google
- Easy integration with Google Ads
- Simple and intuitive interface
- Generate thousands of keyword ideas
- Useful analysis and filtering options
- Provides ad group keyword bundles
- Shows historical search volume trends
Potential cons compared to paid tools:
- Search volume estimates may not be completely accurate
- Competition data is simplistic (just low-high scale)
- Limited location targeting options
- Lacks some advanced features of paid tools
- Cannot see exact CPC data
So while it may lack some capabilities versus paid tools, Keyword Planner provides tremendous value at no cost. It’s a top choice for Google Ads advertisers who want a free solution directly integrated with their campaigns.
Tips for Using Keyword Planner Effectively
Here are some tips to help you get the most value from Google’s Keyword Planner:
- Use a wide variety of relevant seed keywords – More seeds uncover more ideas
- Try seeds with questions like “how to” or “where can I”
- Analyze keywords in bulk then break into priority lists
- Link your Google Ads account to get more robust data
- Use filters to identify most profitable keywords to target
- Focus on sufficient search volume keywords (e.g. over 500/mo)
- Avoid keywords with “high” competition initially
- Download keyword lists to CSV to further analyze data
- Use ad group ideas to kickstart campaign organization
- Re-visit Keyword Planner regularly to find new ideas
Following these best practices will help ensure you get quality keyword ideas, efficiently analyze them, and seamlessly transfer them into well-organized ad campaigns.
What we think?
Google Ads Keyword Planner is an invaluable free tool for researching and selecting profitable, relevant keywords to target in Google Ads campaigns. It provides ample keyword discovery capabilities along with metrics like search volume and competition data to inform keyword selection.
Planner’s integration with Google Ads accounts, useful organization features, and ease of use make it highly effective for developing successful Google Ads and shopping campaigns. While it lacks some advanced functionality of paid tools, Keyword Planner packs tremendous value for guiding data-driven keyword strategy. For any Google Ads advertiser, Keyword Planner should be among the first tools leveraged when creating new campaigns or optimizing existing ones.
