AdWords Keywords: Are Your Keyword Research & Grouping Tools Holding You Back?

Your AdWords keywords are the foundation of your AdWords pay-per-click campaign. Bid management and manipulation won't get you anywhere if you don't start with the right keywords.

You can greatly improve your PPC marketing results with a two-pronged approach to Google AdWords keywords: 

• Better keyword research
• Better keyword grouping and organization

Chances are, even if your keyword research is solid and you have a system in place for keyword organization, you could be doing better on both fronts. Why? Because the tools most search marketers use to find and sort AdWords keywords are limiting.

For example, most keyword suggestion tools are built for one-time use. They're not good for ongoing keyword expansion or discovering a long tail of AdWords keywords. Moreover, they return the same data to everyone, so your keyword research isn't competitive.

Keyword organization tools are no better—in fact, there are few tools on the market designed specifically for organizing keywords. Likely, you resort to Microsoft Excel—an application built for accountants, not search engine marketers. AdWords keyword grouping in Excel is a messy, time-consuming task. 

The WordStream keyword management system was built to meet the unique needs of search marketers using Google AdWords. In the coming paragraphs, you'll see how WordStream's AdWords Tool suite can improve the quality of your keyword research and grouping processes and boost your productivity at the same time.

Better AdWords Keyword Research: Personalized, Private, Data-Driven

WordStream offers a completely different way to discover keywords for AdWords advertising. While our product includes a keyword tool that offers the same functionality as the AdWords keyword tool, WordStream goes beyond the basics to give you more relevant keywords, and more of them—lots more. 

We believe that keywords should be private, personalized, and based on real data—as such, your AdWords keyword research becomes a powerful piece of competitive intelligence. WordStream enables this by mining your private website data for the real keywords that people have used to find your site. Your competitors don't and will never have access to this body of keywords.

Not only are these keywords more relevant to your business niche than the ones a third-party tool returns, they're a renewable resource. WordStream also enables continuous keyword research by way of a JavaScript tracker that aggregates new keywords from your website every day. So your AdWords keyword database is always growing in size and value. You'll quickly amass many more keywords than you could obtain from typical keyword tools, while devoting less energy to finding and maintaining them.

Better AdWords Keywords Organization: Smart Segmentation

Having a sea of AdWords keywords at your disposal is important for long-term PPC success and growth, but it's crucial that you have a process in place for organizing all those keywords. Let's say you have 100,000 keywords—you can't possibly craft a unique AdWords ad and landing page for each and every one of them. At the same time, you can't write one ad or 10 ads or even 100 ads that will speak to all those keywords.

The most efficient way to approach your AdWords keywords is to segment them into small, manageable semantic keyword groups, so you can write strong, targeted ads for a number of keywords at once. For example, instead of trying to address all your keywords related to bird supplies with one broad text ad, you can create an ad for the "bird cages" group and one for the "bird food" group and so on.

Your results will be even better if you further segment those groups into subgroups, with individual ads for "small bird cages," "decorative bird cages," "natural bird food," "bulk bird food," and so on. These ads will be more likely to speak specifically to each searcher's query, raising your click-through rate and increasing the chances those visitors will convert.

Of course, extensive and effective keyword grouping can be difficult to accomplish when you have limited time and tools that aren't really built for the job. This is where WordStream comes in. We make AdWords keyword grouping quick and simple with a suite of tools that analyze your keywords and provide suggestions to maximize PPC effectiveness. The Keyword Group Segmenter helps you whittle down your database into appropriate groups based on frequency and the amount of traffic each segment is driving.

You can preview a group before creating it, and when you're ready, just click a button and WordStream does the aggravating, time-consuming part for you, gathering all those keywords together instantly.

With the right AdWords software, your search marketing team can become markedly more productive and get a lot more value out of your AdWords keywords, in one fell swoop.

So I've Got AdWords Keywords Down—Now What?

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