PPC-Advice.com

In marketing, vendor and partner transparency is king; more transparency equals better client relations.  In the online marketing world, there’s the tendency for vendor relations to languish or stagnate by maintaining the status quo. After watching Google as an advertising vendor for many years, they simply aren’t that kind of company.  With the web being what it is today, clients and agencies that use Google Adwords are very vocal about improvements they’d like to see made, including the improvement of transparency.  Google’s new Search Based Keyword Tool is one such improvement: more better.

Problem: Vendor Transparency

Wait, what?  I just praised Google for being proactive and smart, and fun to be around, but now I’m trashing them for not being transparent?  That’s right.  For years, Google sucked!  They sucked big time.

Have you ever run a Keyword Performance Report within Google Adwords to see a ton of keywords you already know about, or actually filter out using negative match?  Sure, we all have.  How about reading a report that has a line like “15,839 other keyword matches?”  What the heck am I supposed to do with that?  Can you give me a little insight as to what those 15,839 other keywords that matched my expensive generic terms were?

“Not at this time, we’re sorry, but might we offer you a campaign optimization?”

No thanks, the point of me running that report in the first place was to spend less money, more wisely, for better ROI: spend less more better.

Campaign optimizations are helpful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re helpful for finding new business, or testing new campaign ideas.  They will not necessarily help you get better ROI through keyword optimization, which we’re really trying to accomplish here.  For that reason, their service should probably not be called optimization at all, but whatever, that’s trivial.

Problem: the Long Tail is Long

Well duh.  The long-tail is long, water is wet, and the only things inevitable in life is death and taxes.  Yes, all true, but hear me out for a minute: the long tail is longer than you think.

Whereas your broad match and/or phrase match keywords based on generic terms and branding might generate 15 thousand “other matches” that only Matt Cutts knows about, your actual long tail can be 15 gazillion terms long.  So writing up a bunch of broad match or phrase match keyword combinations isn’t going to cover your keister.

First Possible Solution: Testing

Anything short of Google making their log files public wouldn’t really excite me as an advertiser, I don’t care if what anyone says, the number one solution for my money is testing my own marketing intuition using hypotheses.

Notice I didn’t say hunch or guess?

A hypothesis is most often defined simply as an “educated guess”.  Nine times out of ten, marketers will know enough about their products, services, and consumer to come up with some great testing hypotheses in a brainstorming session within their organization or business unit.

Second Possible Solution: Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool

The Google Search-based Keyword Tool or “SKTOOL” really does a great job of providing you insight into the 15 gazillion other search queries your campaign might have generated in the past.  You won’t want to necessarily throw out what you’ve learned from the Keyword Performance Report, but you will want to stock your arsenal with new data the SKTOOL contains.

As with everything branded with “Google”, it’s a beta, meaning it’s probably got a long way to go along the lines of product development.  In fact, I’d be willing to bet they roll the SKTOOL into a future Google Adwords release, it only makes sense.  That being said, it’s already simple as pie to use.

Try it out for yourself at http://www.google.com/sktool/ and login with a Google account that’s tied to your Adwords login, and away you go.

Using the SKTOOL, you can start to unlock the secret of that “15,839 other matches” line in the Adwords Keyword Performance Report, but not only that, you get a bunch of other useful tidbits:

• Monthly searches per query
• Competition in that good old Google green progress bar thingy
• Suggested bid in your home currency (to show up in the top 3 results)
• Ad/Search share, again measuring competition for terms already used on your campaigns
• Recommendations as to which page best relates to the search term
• Trending via Google Insights for Search, giving you an idea of what keywords are popular, or which aren’t (the holy grail of long tail)

Problem: Oh great, more crap to read

C’mon, give me a break, the old “I don’t want to read or interpret more data” argument?

I’m with you, I am.  But would you rather read and interpret more data from your own business, brand, or product specifically, or wade through thousands upon thousands of reports from external sources?  You may not find yourself, or worse yet, you might not find anything insightful.

Solution: Find Insight

Let’s say you’re tasked with creating a campaign for Canon digital cameras for a photo site such as Henrys, or B+H.  Both have a bunch of different cameras available, and it would be pretty easy mining their databases and creating phrase and exact-match keywords based on in-stock models.

But what about the long tail?  Did you know for instance that many Canon point and shoot cameras in the Americas are called Canon Digital Elph and the same models in Europe are called Canon Digital IXUS?  That might be useful insight that SKTOOL could provide.  It can dig deep into what people are searching for, in fact it will include all nonsensical queries as well, so if a competing advertiser made a typo, you might find a few diamonds in the rough.

Or what if prospective shoppers were searching for something like, “appropriate replacement for Canon Digital Elph S100″?  That’s a super old camera!  It was phenomenal at the time because of it’s compact size, but you’d never know it existed if you just started the job with your photography ecom site a few weeks ago.  SKTOOL can help you with that too.

Cue the EASY button

There are a tons of potential uses for the Google Search-based Keyword Tool, but they can all be summarized with two words: more better. More keywords, better ROI.  More long tail results, better exposure.  Go nuts.