PPC Campaigns Easier with Automatic Tools

Google AdWords... most companies had to deal with in order to increase sales irrespective of the field of activity. Pay per Click campaigns can be a headache or even costly and without results if done incorrectly.

As you already know, Google AdWords is Google's advertising platform offering both cost per click, cost per impression and cost per conversion pricing for advertisements served on Google.com and partner sites.

Only the people who have invested money or managed AdWords with results are aware of the exact effort that is behind the AdWords campaign: making up full lists of keywords, testing, bidding, etc. Therefore, we propose through this article to present 10 such tools to aid you in the AdWords campaign and to reduce some of the time spent on research. Also, what is worth mentioning is that most of them are free of charge.

1. Google Website Optimizer

This is a tool provided by Google and you have to register or sign in before using it. It is an easy-to-use tool for testing site content that delivers actionable results to increase your conversion rate. Google’s website optimizer’s strong asset is allowing you to carry out loads of tests at the same time for: headlines, images, prices, offers and buttons. By means of Website Optimizer you can obtain significant increases of the website conversion rates, of the time spent on your website and last but not least, an increase of your visitors’ satisfaction with the website. But what does this tool really do? The answer is...testing in two ways:

• Run A/B experiments (compares the performance of entirely different versions of a page)
• Run multivariate experiments (compares the performance of content variations in multiple locations on a page simultaneously)

Lately, several Google Website Optimizer authorized specialized companies appeared. Those from Future Now, Inc. have really valuable resources on how to use Google Optimizer on their blog, Grokdotcom. For instance the 10 Minute Guide to Testing with Google Website Optimizer (PDF) is a very nice list with the most important things about Google Website Optimizer. I recommend also another article with 101 tips for Google website optimizer.

2. AdWords Wrapper

This is a tool that practically wraps keyword phrases in „quotation marks” (phrase match) and in [square brackets] (exact match) for use in Google AdWords campaigns. Thus, the list is sorted in character code order, while duplicates are automatically removed, which I find really useful. This Google AdWords tool gives you the possibility to change keyword matching options in order to better target ads.

Google AdWords Wrapper works rather easy. All you have to do is enter a list of keyword phrases and right afterwards the AdWords Wrapper turns it into four separate lists. Then you can copy the needed lists into a text file, or an Excel spreadsheet and that’s all.

Additionally, the tool also helps you in creating negative lists. But which are the rules by which negative keywords are set? Negative keywords are words that cause an ad not to be shown provided that any of the keywords are in the search phrase.

This is important for a few reasons: the ad will not be shown for keyword phrases that are not relevant and the overall CTR (click through rate) will be higher because there will be fewer instances of searchers viewing the ad but not clicking. Consequently the best criterion for selecting negative keywords is the relevance for your products or services.

3. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Another helpful tool is the keyword tool provided by AdWords, by means of which you can get ideas of new keywords for your advertising campaign. The main benefit of this program is the fact that it eases your work in cases like:

• When creating a new ads group
• When the current keywords are not extremely efficient and better options are needed
• When you have a very efficient keyword and you wish to find others alike.

But, what you must bear in mind is the fact that the keyword tool works best with short keywords or expressions containing one or two words, because when your “keyword” contains several words, the keyword tool might work much slower and with difficulty in finding the most appropriate words and alternatives. For instance, “antivirus software” will get better results than “cheap antivirus software for better protection”.

4. AdWords Keyword Juggler tool

This is a tool provided by MaxiVista which could prove really time-saving. The AdWords campaigns „administrators” do not have to type in keyword combinations, neither singular nor plural forms of the desired keywords. When „juggling” keywords, you can also opt for results with quotation marks, square brackets or again exact matches.

5. Google Trends

Google Trends charts how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. This tool also enables its user to make a comparison between the volume of searches between several items or terms. An additional feature of Google Trends is its ability to show news related to the search term overlaid on the chart showing how new events affect search popularity.

How to use Google Trends? Well, some of Google specialists regarded this tool as a crystal ball, a tool to predict the evolution of search volumes for some terms. One of the assets that I consider of vital importance is the graphs that it comes with, conducting comparative analyses for different terms. You just insert some keywords, you select the region and the time you are interested in and voila: you get a comprehensive graphic with the search volume evolution.

You can see below the exact way in which Google Website Optimizer works. You just insert the keywords you are interested in and observe their overall evolution. Also, you may observe on the right the main news with reference to those keywords.

6. Ad Preview Tool

Judging by its name, this is a tool by Google AdWords that just previews the way your site will look in the SERP.

What are the benefits of using this program? First of all you’ll get a hint of how your ad will look like and secondly, you will see the contextual placement of your ad, i.e. whether your ad has well defined keywords. Thirdly you get improved location targeting for your ads. In this respect it is important to add that you can refine the results page by adding location attributes and values manually to the URL of the ad preview page. Optional attributes include a target country, longitude/latitude coordinates, regions, and cities. In the U.S., you can also set a target ZIP code or designated market area (DMA).

Generally speaking, the "APT", as some call it, provides "clean" search results page for a given keyword, domain, language, and geography. You can monitor in this way your local campaigns in different geographies (you shouldn't employ it for national campaigns). Nevertheless, you should take into account the "relativity" of this tool - the SERP won’t look the same at all times. For more details about this tool, check out "Google's Ad Preview Tool Gotchas You Should Know".

7. goRank

This is again another useful keyword tool providing related terms to the one you are looking for. It works something like an automatic brainstorming process: it reveals other terms, not necessarily synonyms, belonging to the same lexical area.
The goRank ontology lookup tool checks the top 1000 Google results for your keywords by running a related word query. It will undoubtedly help you with your AdWords campaign in setting keywords, but also in your SEO campaign.

8. Google Sets

Google Sets works similarly to goRank offering lists of keywords that are inter-related to some extent; you can create sets of terms starting from just a few examples. If you insert only a few items from the same set of things, by means of options Large Set or Small Set you can get larger or smaller sets of the respective item. This tool represents an efficient way in finding lists of related terms. For instance, I entered some words (software, antivirus, protection), I chose option Large Set and I obtained the following predicted items: tools, free, computer, security, freeware, design, open source, etc.

9. Trellian Keyword Discovery

The Demo version of this tool is extremely useful to a business reuniting and analyzing statistics concerning internet usage (you do not have to insert your credit card details). By means of Competitive Intelligence, you are enabled to monitor competitors’ websites and thus you can detect their main traffic sources. You can discover the sites that send traffic to their pages and also the keywords used in their campaigns. The main benefit is the access to an impressive data base and the fact that it helps you find long-tails that you didn’t even suspect.

10. The Keyword Typo Generator

This tool contains a list with the most common misspelled keywords, based on the keyword combination typed into the search box. It is extremely useful since it helps you find certain keywords even though they are misspelled. But wait a minute! Why would anyone try and use misspelling voluntarily? The answer is simple enough: users do often mistype the terms they are searching for.

Using typos in the AdWords campaign is one of the most overlooked and effective at the same time methods of catching the audience you are interested in. Here are 4 reasons why typos are worth using:

• Your customers misspell things
• There are more ways to spell words incorrectly than to write them right
• The bid prices are cheaper because people bid less

Conclusion

To sum up, all these tools are extremely useful for the success of your business, meaning to help you in your AdWords campaigns. They help you save a lot of precious time. Still, they will not do all the work for your, they will rather make it easier. You still need some inspiration in order to choose the proper keywords.

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