The Basis of a Google Adwords Campaign – Keywords

15th February 2009 · Paddy · No Comments »

I know it may seem obvious, but I often see Adwords campaigns with very basic errors. Some of which involving the selection and use of keywords. It amazes me that despite this being the fundamental basis of any Adwords campaign, so little time is spent selecting, testing and refining keywords. So where do you start?

A good place to start is a good keywords tool. Now at the moment there isn’t one single keyword tool publicly available that you can use. You need to use a combination of keyword research tools.

Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool

My favoured piece of keyword research software at the moment in the new search based tool from Google – http://google.com/sktool/. If you have an existing Adwords account, this tool can suggest additional keywords related to your website, that are not already being used. This isn’t totally accurate (the tool is still in beta) but its pretty good for generating additional keywords you may not have thought of. Google will even give you the most appropriate landing page to use – in their opinion.

This is how I use Google’s keyword tool -

1. Log out of all Google accounts – I don’t want my searches to be limited.

2. Enter a base keyword which is very broad. At this point I’d look at the category structure of my website and use the category names as my base keywords.

3. Export these keywords into a spreadsheet and name the tab whatever the base keyword was. By doing this you should have a nice set of keywords which are split into different sheets which are roughly the same as your category structure. You will also need to create a new sheet/keyword list for sub-categories as well.

This category and sub-category structure will be reflected in your Adwords campaign structure in the form of Campaigns and Ad Groups.

4. Repeat this process with your other main keywords until you have a large spreadsheet with different sheets containing all your keywords.

5. Go through each sheet and insert a new column, in this column insert a formula that multiplies the keyword CPC by the number of searches, something like this – =E3*F3

6. Sort your this column so that the highest keyword value is at the top.

7. Go through the lists and remove any that are not relevant to your website or which are obviously not going to being targeted customers.

8. Get yourself a copy of Google Adwords Editor (its free)

9. Using the category structure, start to create Campaigns which will be roughly the same as the top level category structure of your website. Then within these Campaigns create some Ad Groups – think of these as your sub-categories. Don’t be scared to create an Ad Group with one a few keywords in it, trust me it is worth it in the end. Paste in your keywords from your spreadsheet. Set them to exact match (for now).

Thats the basis of a Google Adwords Campaign. You do need to bear in mind that the Google Keyword Tool is in BETA and is not totally accurate. I’d recommend using Google External Keyword Tool as well so you have a fuller picture.