Keyword Expansion Tutorial: More Clicks for Less Money from PPC

Today I released the Free PPC Keyword Expansion Tool for Windows. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how it can be used to expand your Adwords adgroups, helping you take advantage of the long tail and get the same or more clicks at a lower cost per click.

To start with, let’s imagine that you have an adgroup that looks a bit like this:

Keyword	Avg CPC	Clicks	Cost
widgets	$0.30	6,500	$1,950
blue widgets	$0.25	4,700	$1,175
red widgets	$0.20	3,200	$640
green widgets	$0.22	3,850	$847

There is a very good chance that a lot of the keyword clicks above are actually being driven by searches like “buy green widgets”, “blue widgets review” and “cheap widgets uk”. To check this and see what people are actually typing in, you can run a Search Query Report in Adwords. Doing this is easy: just log in to Adwords, click on Reports, Create New Report and Select “Search Query Report”. Set your date range and click Run Report. Once its generated it will produce results a bit like this:

Campaign	Ad Group	Search Query	Clicks
Widgets	Widget Types	widgets	3,400
Widgets	Widget Types	cheap widgets	1,200
Widgets	Widget Types	widgets uk	780
Widgets	Widget Types	buy widgets	640

The Search Query Report shows the queries that users are actually entering into the search engines to find your keywords. This can be a powerful source of information, as irrelevant keywords can help you to choose good negative keywords, and relevant keywords that you don’t already have in your account can help with keyword expansion.

So what is keyword expansion?

Keyword expansion is when you take the basic “must have” keywords in an Adgroup, and expand them to lots of variations, attempting to match exactly what people are searching for. Generally speaking, Adwords favours advertisers that target search terms precisely, rewarding these ads with a higher position and a lower cost per click than the advertiser would have got from a more generic keyword.

Just recently Google pointed out that 20% of the queries Google receives in one day have not been seen for 90 days or more (if ever), so there is a huge variation of search terms out there, and capturing all of them is not easy. Imagine this, just for the keywords “widgets”, “blue widgets”, “red widgets” and “green widgets”, and the generic terms “buy”, “cheap” and “uk”, you’ve got 32 variations:

buy cheap blue widgets uk
buy cheap blue widgets
buy cheap green widgets uk
buy cheap green widgets
buy cheap red widgets uk
buy cheap red widgets
buy cheap widgets uk
buy cheap widgets
buy blue widgets uk
buy blue widgets
buy green widgets uk
buy green widgets
buy red widgets uk
buy red widgets
buy widgets uk
buy widgets
cheap blue widgets uk
cheap blue widgets
cheap green widgets uk
cheap green widgets
cheap red widgets uk
cheap red widgets
cheap widgets uk
cheap widgets
blue widgets uk
blue widgets
green widgets uk
green widgets
red widgets uk
red widgets
widgets uk
widgets

Add in a few more terms like “low cost”, “high quality”, “best” or more colours, and you are very quickly looking at hundreds of keywords. Coming up with all of these variations by hand is not easy.

Using PPC Keyword Expansion

The PPC Keyword Expansion Tool makes generating keywords much simpler. When you load it up you are presented with the following:

The five boxes along the top are where you want to put the terms that will make up your expanded keywords. In the first box, put “buy”, “find” and “purchase”:

Now click on the “Mode” dropdown to indicate that the Keyword List is Optional. This means that the Keyword Generator will generate variations of keywords with these terms in them, but also variations without these terms:

Now fill in the other boxes:

• In the second box, put “cheap”, “low cost”, “high quality”, “best”. Set this list as optional.
• In the third box, put “blue”, “red” and “green”. Set this list as optional too.
• In the fourth box put “widget” and “widgets”. This should stay mandatory (you want the word widget or widgets in every that keyword you generate).
• Finally, in the fifth box put “uk”, “england” and “london”. This should be optional.

Your PPC Keyword Expansion screen should look like this:

Now click on the Generate Keywords button, and your keywords will begin generating:

Once your keywords are generated you’ll see the keyword list at the bottom of the screen, containing 480 variations. You can expand this further by clicking on the Match Types Output button and selecting more match types than just “Broad Match”:

Generate your keywords again and you’ll end up with 1,440 keywords in all three match types. If you’re feeling really adventurous, try selecting “Swap Keyword Order” – this will produce 93,132 keywords, with every keyword in every conceivable order. For most situations this is overkill, as a lot of the terms (like “blue cheap uk buy widget”) are nonsense!

When you have a keyword list that you’re happy with, there are a number of ways of getting this into Adwords. The simplest is to click on the copy button:

You can then paste your keywords directly into Adwords, using the Quick Add tool. If you need to tweak your bid prices and destination URLs however, you can select Google Friendly Version from the Export menu:

This will bring up a dialog box that lets you enter a bid price and destination URL, and apply it easily to every keyword:

The output from this screen can be pasted directly into Adwords, and Adwords will automatically apply all of the bids and URLs that you specified. Initially we recommend that your bids for the expanded keywords match the bids for your existing keywords – once they’re there just watch and see the average CPCs come in lower!

Finally, from the Export menu you can also export to a text file or CSV file, so that if you need to send the keyword list to someone else you can. You can even open the keyword list in your favourite text editor by clicking on “Show in Text Editor” so that you can make some final tweaks:

How do I know what to put in?

The trickiest part of keyword expansion is not generating thousands of keywords, it’s really knowing which terms to put into the expansion tool. Have a good look at the Search Query Report to see which terms your visitors are using, and also take advantage of keyword tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, WordTracker or Keyword Discovery. Looking at your natural search results in your analytics package or your on-site searches can also give you clues.

Conclusion: The Ideal Campaign Journey

Generally speaking, a good campaign looks like this:

• Start simply – don’t get too excited with keyword expansion right from the start. Start with a simple keyword list, bid intelligently for a few weeks, work out where you’re meant to be and start looking at your Search Query Reports.
• Expand intelligently – expand your keywords intelligently using the PPC Keyword Expansion Tool, basing the keywords you generate on data from the sources above.
• Run your campaigns well – having a great keyword list is not an alternative to sensible bid management or budget management. If you’re not already using a bid management system, and you’re getting a reasonable number of conversions recorded in your Adwords account, try the Google Adwords Conversion Optimiser, built directly into Adwords.
• Test and optimise – continue testing new keywords, and also continue testing and refining your creatives and landing pages. The more relevant your landing pages are the more likely your visitors are to convert, so if they type in “red widgets”, take them to a red widgets page. Google will recognise this increase in quality and reward you accordingly with higher positions and lower CPCs. The same applies with your creatives – try variations on creatives and see which ones get a better click through or conversion rate. Again, keywords like “red widgets” should show a creative about red widgets, and Google will reward you with cheaper clicks.