Recently, Google has rolled out some changes to the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads. This is a great tool for every digital marketer and it allows you to search for keywords to review specific data in regards to competitions and trends. When working on Google Ads accounts, tools that provide you with an insight into trends, audiences and forecasts should be taken advantage of.
What is the Keyword Planner?
The Keyword Planner is a free tool provided by Google for both new and experienced advertisers to provide them with an insight into particular keywords and trends. It allows you to search for keywords and review how they may perform. You can also see competition levels and low/high-level bids for keywords.
This tool offers numerous benefits to an advertiser to make it easier for them to create new campaigns and ad groups. Now, Google has introduced even more updates to Keyword Planner based on feedback from users.
You can find some highlights from the Keyword Planner update below…
Budget Suggestions
Now, when you add keywords to a plan using Keyword Planner, Google will suggest a daily budget that should be implemented for these keywords. These are optimised to stop the campaigns/ad group becoming limited by budget and also allow you to capture all potential searches for all keywords used.
A Grouped Ideas Section
Under the Keyword Ideas section in the left-hand column of the Keyword Planner, you can now see Grouped Ideas. This shows you all of the related terms that the seed keywords which you implemented, to begin with, are related to. For example, if one of your seed keywords was “Gym Shorts”, you may see grouped ideas of “Gym Clothes”, “Activewear” and so on. These grouped ideas are accompanied by keyword suggestions underneath.
Ideas Turn Into Plans
Keyword ideas can now be saved into a plan or directly into existing campaigns. All you need to do is click the check box next to the ideas that you are wanting to add and then select where you are wanting them to be added. There is also now an option to select the match types that you are wanting to the keywords to be.
Monthly Keyword Trends
Although this is not new, the formatting of specific keyword trends is. Previously, you could see average monthly searches for a keyword and also a small graph displaying the trends. Now, when you hover over this small graph, it is enlarged into a bar chart to provide you with search volume data for every month within the date range that you have selected. This allows you to draw insights from specific keywords to determine seasonality trends and overall search volume. You can also download this too.
Competition (Indexed Value)
Prior to the update, there was only the option to view high, medium and low competition levels for particular keywords. This was incredibly broad and did not provide advertisers with many ideas into the actual competition for terms. Competition (indexed value) is a new column option that puts a number to the previous competition levels. Based on a scale of 0-100, Google gets the number from the number of ad slots filled then divides it by the number of ad slots available to give users an approximate idea of how competitive particular keywords are. With limited data, you may still see (-).
More Seed Keywords
With Google’s update, you can now enter up to 10 seed keywords when searching for potential new keywords in the Keyword Planner. This allows Google to fetch more data based on the keywords that you have inputted. Then, from this data, you can find a range of terms and their competition levels, bids and search trends to make a decision on whether you are wanting to implement them to the campaigns.
If you’re looking to learn more about Keyword Planner or other tools provided by Google then contact our PPC team today!
