Google Ads Keyword Planner PRO Guide. Get the best out of it

If the tumbleweed started running through this section of your interface, get ready to surprise yourself! Google Ads Keyword Planner is better than ever, so get comfortable and enter your field. The knowledge of the seasonality of your campaigns can save you from drowning and take you to the crest of the wave if you know how to take advantage of it.

There are many tools with which we can do a keyword study, and you will surely already know: SEMRush, Google Trends, Ubersuggest, Google Correlate… but today we want to focus only on one of them: the Google Ads keyword planner.

Knowledge of search trends in our market is vital to the success of our campaigns. For example, in some sectors summer is synonymous with lean times while others literally make their August. And many others are struck by doubts at this time. Should I sell more in summer? Or less? Going on vacation imply a decrease in the volume of searches? The study of seasonality will allow us to answer these questions and take advantage of our competitors, or concentrate efforts when it is most worth it.

Today I am going to show you how the Google Ads keyword planner is an essential tool that will provide you with new ideas and traffic estimates that will allow you to create successful campaigns at the right time.

Google Ads Keyword Planner functionalities

In recent times the Google Ads Keyword Planner has changed a lot, being increasingly useful and also completely free.

In this guide we will explain your new features, we wanted to wait for the perfect moment to tell you our findings!

1. Search Volume Trend

Keep in mind that the search volume trend taught by the Google Ads planner includes the average monthly searches for keyword ideas that appear below the search term.

This function will not propose new keywords, but it will make us an estimation of what we want, therefore we must have our keywords well defined.

The tool gives you the option to enter those keywords or directly upload a file.

And so, the planner will show you an estimate of the results and forecasts of the metrics you would get, in addition to serving you to establish a hierarchy in these keywords.

2. New keyword ideas

Thanks to this tool you can discover new keywords and new ad groups based on the terms that describe your product or service, your website or a product category related to what you advertise.

You can also upload an initial list of keywords and the tool will provide you with a new list with the combination of all of them.

In the following images you can see it in practice from the word “furniture”, which in this example would be our main term, and the product that defines us.

In addition, you can also filter this list according to different metrics, as you can see in the following image.

The most useful filters are:

• Keyword text: allows you to indicate which term you want the keyword to include or exclude all those that contain it.
• Average monthly searches for example if you only want to show you keywords with a large number of monthly searches, such as> 5000.
• Bid at the top of the page: it shows you an estimated calculation of the CPC bid required for your Ad appears at the top of the first page (first 4 positions) of the search results when exactly one keyword is used in a search.
• Competitiveness: allows you to classify keywords with a “high,” “medium” or “low” level of competitiveness.

3. Segmentation

Segmenting your audience is very important, so that these forecasts should be as close as possible to reality, you must specify in the tool the following sections:

• Target location where you want to focus.
• Language in which you want your ads to appear.
• Search Networks , or partners such as Google Maps, Google Shopping or YouTube.

4. Mobile trends and breakdown by devices

The planner also shows us the search trends on mobile devices. For example, in summer, mobile devices are used more because people tend to be away from home, on vacation or from a party, and do not spend so much time in front of the computer.

For example, in July and August, searches for closest ATMs from mobile phones are 41.5%, the highest proportion from these devices throughout the year:

5. Breakdown by location

We can break down into several levels: province, Autonomous Community, municipality, city or even our own segmentation locations. With the Google Ads keyword planner we will know the performance geographically.

Here we see an example with «study online master». Madrid and Barcelona show significant percentages, while most of the searches are dispersed in other cities.

6. New opportunities

Thanks to this tool and having as reference more generic terms you can investigate which keywords are being positioned or what are the search terms used.

From them you can see the average monthly searches and the competitiveness of keywords to identify keyword opportunities with little competition and high searches.

And we go with the million dollar question …

7. When should you use the Google Ads keyword planner?

We should use this tool more often in our account management, but in many cases it is essential and mandatory, word of Account Manager!

• Working SEO:

It is advisable to work the H1 titles, H2 and meta descriptions to get a good SEO positioning. In all of them it is important that the keywords detected in a keyword study appear.

• Create content:

To write the content of a website, product descriptions or blog entries, it is also necessary to use this tool.

Only using keywords with good search average will you be able to position yourself in the search engines.

• Create campaigns in Google Ads

And the last and most important (with the permission of our fellow SEO and design team), when creating new campaigns in Google Ads, when it is 100% a previous keyword study will be necessary.

Google Ads search campaigns work based on the search terms that users use. To detect what words users use, whether long tail or short tail, and therefore create campaigns in Google Ads, the keyword planner will be necessary.

To summarize, we specify in some lines the most recent improvements of this tool, which account managers have been asking for for some time, and finally they have heard us:

• More seed keywords: enter up to 10 seed keywords when looking for new ideas.
• Keyword trends: view or download the ideas trends for specific keywords.
• Grouped ideas: see keywords by topic or add them all as an ad group.
• Save ideas in campaigns you already have: add new ideas to campaigns you have already created.
• Recommended budget: check the recommended daily budget based on the maximum CPC bid and the expected cost.
• Competition value column: see the detailed classification of the competitiveness of keyword ideas.

We hope this post has been helpful to know how to use the Google Ads keyword planner.

Of course, the platform has more features and options, but here we let you take your exploratory nature and investigate on your own. True SEM Managers do it!

It’s time to make your own keyword study! You will tell us!