[PPC] – Google Ads Tool: Keyword Planner and Performance Planner

In this post, I want us to know even more about the Google Ads tools that help us to improve the management of PPC campaigns.

Many of us use third party tools to reinforce our campaigns. In our case, at AdKonversion, we are in favour of using the SEMrush Boston platform. While there are other people who can use the Ubersuggest because it is free.

Here everyone is free to use what they want. We chose SEMrush at the time because of its usability and the reports you can get from it. In addition, other really interesting aspects (apart from keyword research) can be analysed.

Google, as is normal, did not want to be less and over the years has added certain tools that help us, the account managers of Google Ads, to make our work easier. Or, at least, that’s the idea.

These two tools of which I am going to talk to you about are two. The first is the Keyword Planner. This tool has already been in use for a few years. For those of us who base a large part of our accounts on search campaigns, we know the importance of having a good programme or page that generates good keyword studies.

Then there is the Performance Planner. This is younger than the keywords. But that doesn’t make it any worse, in fact it’s a great tool for planning your budgets at the end of the month.

The Keyword Planner

The first Google Ads tool, free of charge, which he added to his interface to help in the creation of campaigns. This Google Ads tool is totally free for those who have a Google Ads account.

Ah! they don’t require you to have any active campaign, so it’s free of charge. Here you can go directly to the planner.

If the majority of your campaigns are search campaigns, the Keyword Planner will be a great allyin the creation and management of your campaigns. We all know how important it is to choose the right keyword for each product so that your ads are activated. So, before creating any campaign this point must be something really important.

With keyword researchyou will make many deductions including knowing the client and how they search for your products, the level of competition based on monthly searches, competitiveness and the CPC of each keyword.

And you will also get keywords for writing posts (as there are many informative searches), and on the other hand for creating negative keyword lists.

How to use the Keyword Planner or Google Keyword Planner?

That said, first of all you need to have created or create a Google Ads account so that you can use the planner from its interface. So if you want to use the Google Ads tool, you must first create an account.

With this already created the next step is to go to: “Tools and Settings”, from there to the “Planning” column and select “Keyword Planner”. And you’ll get the following view:

As you can see, you can do two different analyses. The first is to do a keyword study and the second to see the volume of searches and future estimates.

So let’s take it one step at a time.

Discover new keywords

If what you want is to enter a seed keyword and from there make a study to see what related searches there are or how the target customer searches for your products and services you should choose this option.

You can add a normal keyword (it is best to add three, and based on those three you will generate Google listings) or a long tail keyword. How to place the URL of a page to which you want to compete directly and get a list of keywords.

It will generate a view, with the chosen keywords or URLs, with different columns. In these columns you can see:

• Average monthly searches
• Competitiveness
• Quota of ad impressions
• Bidding at the top of the page (low intervening)
• Bidding at the top of the page (stop)
• Account status (whether you have it in use or not)

For example, we want to create a campaign to obtain leads for our Google Ads campaigns. The first thing I would do would be the following:

I have put three very basic keywords such as “google ads agency”, “ppc agency” and “adwords agency”. In addition to including the link to our website so that you can read all the words on our website (landings and posts) and trace words from there as well. Although… you can also enter the URL of the competition and you can make your own deductions.

The result obtained is as follows:

Here you will be able to appreciate all the metrics that appear at the level of volumes, competitiveness, an idea of the costs of CPC and whether you are using it or not.

Then what you can do is select those keywords that you like the most and “add them to your plan”. On the left bar you can see that the penultimate option says: “Keywords”. Well, if you select it, what you’ll get is a pretty good estimation table. What it comes down to: the consultation of future searches.

To get an estimate of what might happen, it is clear that nothing is certain. You can select whether your target is conversions, clicks, impressions, etc… In the case of our campaign there is not much data as we have gone to very exact keywords. But if you do this with a group with a good search ratio, you get some interesting graphics.

Although my recommendation, by way of keyword research, is that you download in a .csv format (or the one you like best) all the keywords and upload it to a Google Drive Spreadsheet (to have it in the cloud at everyone’s fingertips) and do a proper keyword study.

Some advice for this study would be to try and classify the key words into groups. These groups can be; so if we talk about a product with different variants then try to classify it in groups of searches such as colours, sizes, formats or specific characteristics.

You must also remove those keywords that can be used for SEO/posts and then make that list of negative keywords in which you will add those words for which you do not want to appear.

Here, within the Keyword Planner, you can go further and segment by location or device and see where and in which format it is most worthwhile or has the largest audience. I know that with this you are liking the Google Ads tool even more.

Consult the volume of searches and forecasts

We have already seen it before but following the previous example; we have already made a search and among all the key words we have made a study to get the best ones. Now, the next step is that these key words you have selected are going to be put into this estimator so that it can draw up some graphs of what you would get for each case.

You can complement these two things with Google Trends to see a little bit of the performance of each keyword and thus complement all this with more Google Ads tools.

The Google Ads Performance Planner

For me,it’s the best Google Ads tool there is. It is very useful for forecasting seasonality, stronger market trends and in short: to optimise every penny of your monthly budget. All this thanks to Google’s databases.

What is the Google Ads Performance Planner?

The Google Ads Performance Planner is a Google Ads tool that will help you create estimated plans.

These plans are made from the data history that Google Ads has, as well as the history of your own account.

In it you can see an estimate of how your campaigns will perform tomorrow, next week, next month, next quarter or the period you choose.

The planner tries to make a scenario simulation taking into account the searches made on the keywords within the campaign, the seasonality of the moment (it will be different in the case of hotels), the competition in auctions, and so on.

Note: these estimates should be reviewed a couple of times before implementation. The data is updated every 24 hours and may vary. So if you analyse this on three different days you can get a much more accurate estimate.

With the help of the Performance Planner, conversions will be increased by up to 43%.

Source: Google.

How does the Google Ads Performance Planner work?

Previously I told you that the Performance Planner is updated every 24 hours in relation to different data such as searches, competition, bids, seasonality and others. All this to improve the reliability of your Google Ads tool, as it also takes into account past performance as well as current performance. The advantage is that you get a conversion forecast.

According to Google the performance planner says that: “If you increase spending by X euros, you can increase clicks, conversions, or the value of Y conversions”.

It is very useful for measuring investment and other adjustments such as clicks, conversions and the value of conversions.

How to use the Google Ads Performance Planner?

Before you start using this wonderful Google Ads tool you should know that it has some requirements (like all cool Google stuff, it’s a classic already). These requirements are as follows:

1. Campaigns must be active during the last 72 hours.
2. Have atleast 3 clicks in the last 7 days.
3. Must be Search type.
4. That they use bidding strategies such as: manual/enhanced CPC, CPA, Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions.
5. Some conversion in the last week.
6. Do not have shared budgets.

And it cannot be used in those that:

1. The campaign was deleted
2. Use shared budgets.
3. Use different types of bidding strategies.

With all this in mind, you can start using it now. But before explaining how to use it I’m going to tell you a series of “best practices” from Google:

• Take the conversions that are not attributed to the model of the last click.
• If you have campaigns with different objectives: don’t put them together in your plans.
• Use the recommendations to optimise them better.
• Use performance targets to make it more accurate.

To start using the planner, first of all you must choose which campaign you want the forecast to be made for, then choose the forecast period, the metric you want it to analyse, whether it be clicks, conversions or the value of these so that you can see its impact, and finally the objective you want to achieve: conversions, investment or CPA.

After that it is time to click on: “Create plan”. It will send you to a screen, in the form of a graph, where you can see in detail the indexes I mentioned before. As well as trying to modify them based on dates or metrics.

You can add the conversion rate if the campaigns do not require data to “suck it” from Google Ads.

The fact that you can interact and that everyone likes the graphics due to their low complexity makes it a more than powerful Google Ads tool.

With these two tools you should start to get much more out of your campaigns with quality keywords and budgets in line with them.

If it is not clear to you that you are going to take advantage of these two tools, do not hesitate to contact us, we will help you to achieve those objectives you want.