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Helping You Choose Keywords

Keywords are search terms that trigger the display of your PPC ad on a search engine. We design your PPC Campaign by choosing the right keywords and adjusting your bids and budget to make them work for you.

keywords.gifKeyword Targeting: Exact, Phrase, Broad:

  • Exact: only shows up when people search exactly for the your keywords, in order, and no others. Thus it has the highest relevancy, lowest reach, and a lower cost per click than the broad terms.
  • Phrase: shows up when people search for anything containing your keywords plus other words in the query.
  • Broad: shows up when people search for anything containing any of your terms or other terms that are semantically similar. Due to it's broad reach it typically has the lowest click-through rate and may drive up ad costs by costing more per click and charging for irrelevant traffic. However, it can also be used to help you mine keyword data to see what people are searching for. Try it for a short time.

Keywords to the Wise:
Many search engines including Snap, Clusty, Gigablast, Teoma, and Yahoo! Search offer alternate search suggestions which may help you find related keyword phrases. Good Keywords is a free downloadable keyword software tool which accesses the Overture search term suggestion tool and a few of the search engine see also searches.

Search Spy:
A variety of search engines allow you to see what people are currently searching for or buying. A few examples are Froogle, SearchHippo, Yahoo! Shopper, Kanoodle, MetaCrawler and a variety of others are listed on SearchEnginez.com.

How do I use the Keyword Tool?
You can access the Keyword Tool from within your ad group to get results based on your existing campaign settings and your account's performance history. Alternatively, you can access a standalone Keyword Tool from within your AdWords account that will not consider either of these factors. If you do not have an account or do not wish to sign in to your account, you can use our external Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

To access the Keyword Tool from within your ad group:

  1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
  2. Select the appropriate campaign and ad group.
  3. Select the Keywords tab.
  4. Click Keyword Tool.
  5. Continue on with the instructions below.

To access the standalone Keyword Tool:

  1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
  2. Click Tools.
  3. Select Keyword Tool.

The Keyword Variations Tab

Use this tab to generate additional keywords by entering one or more of your existing keywords. Here's how:

  1. Enter your keywords. In the box provided, enter your keywords so that each word or phrase appears on its own line.
  2. Leave 'Use synonyms' checked to get the widest range of keyword results. If you uncheck the box, the Keyword Tool will only give results that contain at least one of the terms you entered.
  3. Click 'Filter your results' to restrict the keyword ideas that the tool generates
  4. Click 'Get More Keywords.'
  5. Review your results. The resulting keywords will be sorted by relevance to the terms you entered. You can show or hide columns in the statistics table with the Choose columns to display drop-down menu.
  6. Select your keywords. Build your keyword list in the shaded box.
  7. Download keywords by clicking 'text,' '.csv (for excel),' or '.csv.' You'll need a spreadsheet program to open a .csv file.
  8. Click 'Estimate Search Traffic' to see traffic estimates for the keyword list you've built. Click delete next to any keywords you no longer want. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page when you're happy with your keyword list. Your new keywords will be lost if you click Cancel. We recommend that you not click Estimate Search Traffic until you've finished building your keyword list.
  9. If you didn't go to the 'Estimate Search Traffic' page, save your keywords by clicking Save to Ad Group in the shaded box.