How to Use Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool [Step-by-Step Tutorial]

So you're running ads or want to look up keywords for SEO purposes. The Google Ads Keyword Planner tool is absolutely essential to be using in your keyword research process. It's super easy to use and there's tons of data information to go through. So in this video, I've got a complete tutorial step by step on how to use the Google Ads Keyword Planner tool so you can find the exact keywords that you're looking for your keyword research process. Let's go ahead and dive in. All right, so I am inside of the Keyword Planner tool already to get there and yours might look different. Google's interface is changing, however, you will be able to either use search, so if you just type in Keyword Planner, you'll be able to find it in the search function. Whether your interface looks like this or not. Google changes what the interface looks like all the time. Otherwise, I went to Tools and Settings, you go to Planning and then Keyword Planner. So that's how I got to where I am right now. Then there are several different options here. There's Discover New Keywords, get Search Volume and Forecast. And then they have a new organized keywords into ad groups. I will talk about all three of these, but where you'll be spending most of your time is the Discover New Keywords function. And then also the Search Volume forecast is, is good to have too, once you have keywords that you've already have picked. So let's go ahead and hit Discover New Keywords. So in here you can start with keywords or you can actually start with a website. If you start with a website, it's going to give you a lot of different data. This can be good though, if, if you want to plug in a competitor just to see what Google is indexing for keywords based off of their website, you can use it for your own. If you are looking to pick keywords to advert, maybe you have a large website and there's some terms there that you don't know about. So I'll show both. But for now I'm going to start with the start with keyword section. So I'm going to do sectional sofas and I'm going to hit get results. So now this brings us into the actual keyword ideas plan and there's a lot going on here. So I'm going to explain all these different metrics and settings that you can play around with. So in here, sectional sofas, keywords you provided they have it right here. There's an average monthly search column. Google is saying there's 165,000 searches per month for sectional sofas. Now, you have to remember that is the exact search for sectional sofas. There's obviously a million different variations of sectional sofa keywords. So this doesn't mean the entire search volume for sectional sofas as a theme is 165,000. They're saying this exact search of sectional sofas is 165,000. I've had some people ask. They'll put a keyword in and say, hey, it says there's only 100 searches a month. How would I ever advertise on just something that gets searched so little? And normally you add the keyword in your ad account and realize, no, it's a hundred, maybe for that exact search. But most people aren't searching just exactly how that that keyword is that you put in. So there's lots of variations for keywords. So there's more volume generally than what you're showing here. So if we were to bid on sectional sofas at like 100% impression share, I'm sure we would be, you know, at a million searches a month, not just 165,000 impressions for that term. So keep an eye out on that. Really good idea is if you're already running a brand campaign and you have 100% impression share there, you can actually match it up. I've done it. So the brand that I'm actually using right now is home Reserve. I use them a lot in our videos and it is a furniture company. So it's saying that we have 9,9900 average monthly searches for the exact search of home reserve. This is fairly close. Last month we had 11,000. I have 100% impression share on my brand term Home reserve, and it's just that search. So home reserve 9900 and we were at 11,000. So it's fairly close. So just to give you an example of that, now, again, we get way more than that due to all the other variations of how people search for, for home reserve. So the amount of impressions to the campaign was much greater than 9,900. But this exact search term, home reserve, was at 11,000. So Google's data is fairly close. Go back to sectional sofa, though. And then I wanted to show you the rest of these settings. So right now I am in targeted United States. You can change this to whatever you want. I'm going to leave it at us. But if you wanted to change this to Canada only, or you wanted to expand to Europe, Mexico, whatever It may be you just add those countries in there or you can even go to the state level. If you wanted to do just California, we could just target that area. So if you're a local service business, obviously you wouldn't want the United States. You would want just the city or areas that you service. But let's, for this case we're going to use United States. And I'm already on that. So I don't. It doesn't do anything. Language, you can change that. I'm leaving it to English. And then you have this setting where it's Google and then there's Google and search partners. I recommend just doing Google only. I don't normally do the Google and Search Partner. So just keep this set to Google. And then this does give you a timeframe. So this is the last pretty much 12 months here. And then this gives you also a, a bit of a forecast in search volume here. So you can see the peaks here of increased search activity for these keywords. Here's a perfect example. Christmas trees, Boom. It's totally dead. And then all of a sudden it starts picking up a little in September. October grows, November, it explodes. And then December, it's pretty high and then it dies off. Makes complete sense, right? There's probably no searches taking place for Christmas trees in April. So this is a good forecast to know what the sort of peaks and valleys of search volume is for keywords that may have seasonality to them. And let's go back into sectional sofas. All right, so we're, we're back here now. I'm going to show you these other columns. So you have the metric three month change. You have year over year change. These are giving you differences in search volume over the last three months and year over year. I don't read too deeply into these numbers. Like in this case, it's saying you're over your change for modular sofas up 50%. Something like that, you know. No, I don't believe modular sofas. There's been a 50% increase in the universe of people searching for it. So sometimes these numbers I take with a grain of salt and I truly don't look too deep into it unless I'm investigating whether or not a particular product category is starting to just fit fade out over time. A perfect example would be like fidget spinners back in the day, 2017, it exploded and then it, it died off there. You could start seeing some data truly from Google where it would start showing some of that. So you can use these metrics for information like that. But otherwise I don't, I don't dive too deep into it competition. This is just showing you how competitive other advertisers are on those search terms. I do, you know, for the most part on terms you're going to be bidding on that are going to be generating conversions or sales for you, a lot of time they're to be high. So I don't, I don't go too deep in this competition column. It doesn't mean a whole lot to me. If it does say low, though, a lot of times, then I'll do a Google search organically to determine this. Is, is this a keyword that's more informational versus transactional? I will look into that. Also, we have a video on keyword research talking about different keyword types. So you have, you know, transactional terms, you have navigational terms, you have people who are looking up just information. Full video on that. Make sure to go check that out. We dive deeper into the actual keyword research process, which is actually using this keyword planner tool. So on a competition of low, it could mean it's just more of an informational keyword, not necessarily someone looking to make a purchase. So I will glance at that, but I don't actually use it in my keyword research process. Ad impression share. That's if you have the keywords added in your account. Kind of shows you where you're at with impression share on it. Then top of page bid, low range. Top of page bid, high range. So low range would be about position three or four. High range would be, you know, the one first position or second position. What I do here, this is very good for me to know how expensive are some of these keywords? So if I added sectional sofas into my account, how much is it actually going to cost me on average per click? Well, on the low range it's saying 80 cents. On the high range, it's saying three. What I do normally in my keyword research process, or to get an idea of how expensive a particular term is going to be, I take the median of these two numbers and that gives me about a range of where I expect to be bidding to be competitive and actually drive traffic. Because if you go too low or too conservative with your numbers, then it's just going to be unrealistic to actually be able to compete. Most of the time if you go too high normally you're not going to be that high unless you actually dominate that particular keyword. So the middle, the median here of these two numbers is normally what I use for the math. This is great though. I've talked to many companies where they're like, hey, our goal is $100 CPA. And I'm like, well, you get a 2% conversion rate and clicks cost $5, so how's that even possible, right? So sometimes just this alone is enough information to tell someone you're totally off and you have unrealistic goals due to the fact here's the math that explains how much a click is going to be just to be competitive. And you would need, you know, an insane conversion rate to even make that work, which is highly unlikely. So I do use these numbers quite a bit in my research process as well when I'm using this tool. You also have filters you can use. So there's lots of different filters here. I like coming in. Usually I'm using average monthly search filter. So in here I can only now look at terms that have greater than 30 searches per month, greater than or equal to. To weed out any of those like onesie twosie types terms, I could also start adding like so keyword text contains we'll say Reddit or we don't offer leather. So leather we don't offer. So we're not Ikea. So I'll add another brand. So I want to does not contain those terms. Start weeding out some of that. If I want to refine this list some more because there are a lot of keywords in here right now, then there's actually a refined keyword section on the right side, you'll see. So here you can start pruning this keyword selection as well. So here you have non brands and then you have right here a bunch of retailers. Okay, well if I don't want to show up, I don't want to see the Ikea or Costco or Pottery Barn terms. These are all retailers or competitors of ours. So I can just uncheck that and that will refine it for me so I don't have to use individual filters of typing their names in here's other brands. Again, these are all competitors. I don't want that. Now I may want those if I'm doing negative keyword research or I want to find negative keywords. So this is a perfect tool to be using that as well and easily pick out some of those top competitors right here from the keyword planner. Then you have in here we have different furnitures. I don't sell recliners, I don't sell beds. I. I don't have tables. And this other thing I'll Just probably take out as well material. We don't have leather, so I'm going to pull leather out. So you can come in here for your keywords and start refining the process if you want to. Again, sort of prune because there's 1800 keywords that are related to sectional sofas. So now using filters and using the refined keyword settings, I'm able to start bringing that number down to a more refined list. There's also a section called Forecast. Forecast will give you an idea of what your terms may be. So if you came in here and I started adding some of these keywords, sectional couch, modular sofa, etc. And I started adding these or saving these keywords. So add keywords to create a plan. And then I'm going to go to view save keywords. So here's the save keywords I had. Hey, these are keywords that look good to me. A lot of times in my keyword research process, I'm using a Google sheet, but we're just talking about how to use the tool here. Again, watch the video on keyword research that we've done if you want to learn more about that. But I use Google Sheets more than I do actually using the save keywords thing. But here I'm able to actually come in. Now that I've saved keywords, I can check a forecast of them. Take the forecast with a grain of salt. But this forecast is going to give you, hey, based off those keywords and different bid strategies, you're able to determine and match types you're able to determine in the future. You can't go in the past, but you can go in the future. So it's giving me December of 2023 here it's saying based off of your plan with those terms, you know, you could expect to be spending get 590 conversions for $40,000. If you know, we had the, the spend level set to that. That's based off the average daily budget of a thousand. They give you this graph here. This kind of shows you where your cap's going to be in regards to spend based off that because you'll see it just dies out at basically a thousand. So it's really at this like $260,000 range is probably the max I could actually go that's if I were willing to spend $270,000 on those keywords. And again, this is based off a bit strategy of max conversions and match type of broad. So in here I'm actually going to do exact match sometimes or phrase to see what the numbers start showing for that, it's going to usually be a bit higher. I also will change the bidding strategies up a lot like I like. I'll use manual CPC and a lot of times this is based off of a max cpc. If you remember, the keyword planner tool showed us in a range of bottom of about a dollar and top of about $4. I'm just going to use like a $2.50 max CPC to show. All right, for the exact match search of Those keywords at $2.50, what am I potentially looking at? And that is saying, hey, you could get, you could spend $27,000 and generate 255 conversions based on a click through rate of 10%. It's saying an average CPC here you're able to actually add in. I'm going to use a 2% conversion rate and $1,000 value here for some sofas. So now it's going to give me like revenue data once that populates. And there we go. So it's saying hey, you could spend 27,000 and generate about 400,000 in revenue based off of these numbers. Now the reality is I'm not going to get a 10% click through rate my conversion rate, even though I did edit it to be about a 2%. These numbers to me still are pretty far fetched. So I do not. A lot of times I don't even show clients this. But sometimes I will use this to see like what sort of volume potentials there are for keywords. If in a perfect world where I had infinite budget and no success metrics to to go off of. So sometimes it's cool to just see what the full potential is for certain terms. But with that said, do I ever use these numbers down here? Like hey, if we spent $27,000 in December, we're going to generate 400,000 in revenue. Absolutely not. That won't happen. This is so far fetched. So take that those numbers with a grain of salt. I wouldn't even really look too deeply into any of these numbers, but use the forecast more as a volume tool. What is the volume potential for some of those search terms? That's what I tend to use it for as well. You also have different areas to organize keywords. This is kind of in beta. This is fairly new. You have an auto organize or manually organize that will go back. So I'm actually going to go back to the keyword planner tool and you can come here. So if I started with some keywords. So I'm going to use sectional Sofas again. And then I just hit auto organize. This will actually come in and draft a plan for you on how it would organize keywords based off of the sectional sofas keyword. Now it is using some old campaigns here. So it's saying, hey, these are the keywords you have in these campaigns now and we recommend adding these particular keywords. I never use this to be honest. This is here for you to investigate if you want. This is something that we, we just don't use very much. It is fairly new too though. But I would not come in here and then add these to the campaigns or ad groups that we already have. But this is just an area of seeing how Google would actually organize certain keywords based off of sectional sofas keyword here. So that's how the organized keyword section works. Again, not something I use. And then here get search, volume and forecast. You've already seen this. This actually is shown inside of the keyword plan, our keyword idea plan tool. But if you just, if you don't want to look at all the other information, cost data and the refined keyword sections here, you could again just look at a forecast of this term for sectional sofas. And again, if I wanted to, so Christmas trees. This will just show the forecast of that again, not showing all the other metrics. It's a very condensed version of what you see inside. Of here. Boom. All right, so last part here is I did tell you on the discover new keyword part is start with a website instead of starting with keywords. So you can put in a website here and you can do the entire website or you can just do a specific page of a website if that's something you would want to look into. But just plug the website in. It's going to give you all the keywords that Google has data on for that website. Good. If you want to check competitors or even your own website if there's missing areas there. All right, there you go. There's a quick and easy, easy tutorial on how to use the Google Ads keyword Planner tool. Free to use for anyone who actually has an account. You don't have to spend any money. You just have to have a Google Ads account to actually get to the Keyword Planner tool. Great to use if whether you're using ads or for SEO purposes. Hopefully you found some good value from it. If you have questions, put them down below. And again, I mentioned it earlier in the video. Make sure to check out our keyword research video. I go fully into how to do keyword research, and most of it is done with the Keyword Planner tool. So now that you're a guru on the Keyword Planner tool, the research part should be fairly easy with you. I will see you in future videos. Thanks.