The objective of search engine marketing is to target the users based on their intention & show them relevant ads. Search ads are the backbone of any search engine marketing.
With search ads, advertisers target the users when they are searching for any query on search engine(s). Thus, when the query matches with the previously defined keywords in SEM platform, the user sees a search ad relevant to that query.
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Since the evolution of SEM, digital marketing world have observed various platforms. However, the stronghold of Google’s platform i.e. Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) cannot be breached.
Google Ads is now at the zenith of its service. With users query stored in its database, Google allows advertisers to research and select the specific keywords based on their needs.
Google Ads provide a tool for keyword research which is known as ‘Google Keyword Planner’. Keyword Planner is a free tool for building new search campaigns.
You can use Keyword Planner to get relevant keywords around seed keywords and see how they would perform. With keyword planner, you can decide competitive bids and budgets for your campaigns.
Google keyword planner can help you-
Find the search volume of any keyword
Get relevant keywords around seed keyword
Get ad group ideas
Add keywords directly into account/campaign
Get keyword trends
New Features
1. More seed keywords
In Google Ads Keyword Planner, it’s the keyword that generates many other suggestions or ideas.
For example, let’s say you are interested in learning more about what related potential phrases could be or important to targeting “buy shirt.”
You would insert your “seed keyword” buy shirt and see that there are numerous keyword ideas around that seed keyword.
Image: Seed keywords
You can now enter up to 10 seed keywords when searching for new ideas.
2. Keyword trends
Within the interface of Google keyword planner is a powerful tool for finding trending keywords. Keyword Planner shows you the actual number of monthly searches for a term over the last 24 months.
Through a custom setting, you can go back as far as 48 months. This tool is useful to see if external factors affect a particular keyword or group keywords.
Image: Keyword trends
In the new keyword planner, you can see trends for individual keyword ideas. Hover over the chart in the ideas table, or download trends directly. Let’s take a look at the results of our term buy shirt:
Image: Search result in keyword planner
3. Grouped ideas
Keyword grouping is an overlooked part of the Google Ads workflow. Many people fail to realize that having tighter, better organized ad groups in your Google Ads account can surely have a big positive effect on overall account performance.
That’s because well-organized keyword groups improve account’s relevance, which raises Quality Score and reduces cost per click.
Productively grouping and organizing keywords improve your PPC strategies by allowing you to create:
More Quality–Score-friendly ad groups
And more relevant search ads
More effective & converting landing pages
In keyword planner, you don’t need to manually group keywords. Google keyword planner takes care of this tedious task.
Image: Keyword ideas
Use Grouped Ideas to manage multiple keyword ideas. View keywords by theme or add the entire set as an ad group in your plan.
Image: Grouping keywords by relevance
4. Save an idea to an existing campaign
From keyword planner itself, you can add keywords directly into an existing campaign or make a new plan. Similarly, you can insert the keyword to an existing ad group or create a new one.
Image: Saving an idea to existing campaign
Moreover, you can select the keyword match type as per strategy.
5. Suggested budget
In ‘Get search volume & forecasts’ section, you can see search volume and other historical metrics for keywords added into a plan. Additionally, you may be able to forecast how they will perform in the future.
Google keyword planner also suggests a daily budget based on the max CPC bid and forecasted cost.
Image: Budget suggestion
With this information, you can easily plan your budgets prior to the campaign start.
6. Competition value column
Google added a new feature in its keyword planner called “Competition (indexed value)”. Competition (indexed value) shows how competitive ad placement is for any keyword. It considers location and search network targeting while reviewing ad placement slot.
The competition level from 0-100 is calculated by the number of ad slots filled divided by the total number of ad slots available. If not enough data is available, you’ll see a dash (-).
Image: Competition value column
How to search for new keywords
1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. In the upper right corner, click the tools icon . Then go to “Planning” & click Keyword Planner.
3. Type or paste one or more keywords or URL in “Find new keywords” search box and press “Enter”.
Image: Finding new keywords
4. Click Get started to get new keyword ideas and historical statistics, like average monthly searches, ad impression share, top of page bid etc.
How to get forecasts and historical metrics for your keywords
1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. In the upper right corner, click the tools icon . Then go to “Planning” & click Keyword Planner.
3. In the “Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords” search box, enter or paste a list of keywords. Make sure to separate them by commas or line breaks.
Image: Getting search volume and forecasts
4. Click Get started to see your forecasts.
5. To see your historical statistics, like average monthly searches or ad impression share, click Historical metrics at the top of the page.
Image: Checking historical metrics in keyword planner
Summary
The New Google Keyword Planner tool supports various workflows for creating ad groups and ad campaigns either starting from scratch or based on your existing keyword list. It provides a more productive user experience than previous AdWords’ keyword tools.
It integrates the keyword selection, keyword grouping, keyword analysis, forecasting, ad slot based competition and filtering aspects of the keyword selection workflow.
Watch: New Google Keyword Planner Replacing the Old Version Explained
For Curious Minds
The 'Grouped Ideas' feature in Google Ads Keyword Planner is a powerful organizational tool that moves beyond simple keyword suggestion to actively improve campaign performance. It automatically categorizes vast lists of keyword ideas into tightly-knit thematic clusters, which serves as a blueprint for creating highly relevant ad groups from the very beginning.
Using this feature has a direct, positive effect on your overall account health by improving structural relevance, which is a key factor in raising your Quality Score and lowering your cost per click. By using these pre-sorted groups, you can:
Build more Quality-Score-friendly ad groups because each group contains keywords with a very similar user intent.
Create more relevant search ads with copy that speaks directly to the specific theme of the ad group.
Develop more effective and converting landing pages that align perfectly with the ad copy and keywords, providing a consistent user experience.
This systematic approach ensures your campaigns are well-organized before they even launch, setting a strong foundation for better performance. Discover how this and other features can refine your PPC strategies by exploring the tool's full capabilities.
The 'Competition (indexed value)' provides a granular, numerical score that clarifies how competitive ad placement is for any given keyword, offering more nuance than generic 'low,' 'medium,' or 'high' labels. This score, calculated from 0-100, is determined by the number of ad slots filled divided by the total number of ad slots available, factoring in your specific location and search network targeting.
Strategically using this data allows for more precise budget allocation. A high score indicates many advertisers are bidding for that term, which will likely require a higher cost per click (CPC) to secure placement. A low score suggests an opportunity to gain visibility at a lower cost. For example, you can prioritize budget for high-intent keywords with moderate competition to maximize return on investment, or you can identify lower-competition keywords that still align with your goals to capture traffic more efficiently. This metric empowers you to build a more cost-effective campaign by understanding the competitive landscape at a deeper level. To fully see how this data impacts planning, you can analyze it alongside other forecasting tools within the platform.
Using multiple seed keywords fundamentally broadens the scope and relevance of your keyword discovery within the Google Keyword Planner. While a single seed keyword provides a linear set of suggestions, inputting up to 10 seed keywords allows the tool to cross-reference concepts and uncover a more diverse and comprehensive range of related search queries.
This comparative approach helps you discover valuable long-tail keywords and semantic variations you might otherwise miss. For instance, instead of just researching 'buy shirt,' you could simultaneously input 'men’s cotton t-shirt,' 'online shirt store,' and 'formal shirts for sale.' The tool will then generate ideas that bridge these related concepts, giving you a richer, more nuanced understanding of the user search landscape. This method helps in:
Identifying different facets of user intent.
Building out more comprehensive ad groups.
Uncovering niche opportunities with lower competition.
By combining multiple starting points, you create a more robust foundation for your entire search campaign. See how this technique can reveal untapped potential in your market by experimenting with different keyword combinations.
The two primary workflows in Google Ads Keyword Planner, 'Find new keywords' and 'Get search volume & forecasts,' serve distinct strategic purposes. 'Find new keywords' is an exploratory process for discovery, ideal when you need to expand your keyword list and understand the breadth of search queries related to your topic. In contrast, 'Get search volume & forecasts' is a validation process used when you already have a list of keywords and need to assess their potential performance.
You would choose the discovery path early in campaign creation to build your ad groups, while you would use the forecasting path to finalize your selections and set budgets. The forecasting tool provides crucial data points like estimated clicks, impressions, cost, and click-through rate, along with a suggested daily budget based on your maximum CPC. This allows you to make data-driven decisions on which keywords to include and how to allocate your spending for maximum impact. Each workflow is a critical step in a comprehensive planning process.
An online clothing retailer can leverage keyword trend data within Google Keyword Planner to strategically prepare for seasonal shifts in consumer behavior. By analyzing search volume trends for a term like 'winter coats' over the past 48 months, the retailer can pinpoint exactly when user interest begins to rise each year, typically in the early fall, and when it peaks.
This historical data provides actionable insights for campaign timing and budget allocation. For example, the data might show that searches for 'winter coats' consistently start increasing in September and peak in November. Armed with this knowledge, the retailer can:
Schedule ad campaigns to launch just as interest begins to grow, capturing early shoppers.
Increase budgets and bids during the peak months to maintain competitive visibility.
Create relevant ad copy and landing pages that align with the seasonal demand well in advance.
This proactive approach, supported by concrete data from the Google Ads platform, ensures marketing efforts are perfectly timed to match consumer demand, maximizing sales potential. Understanding these patterns is key to staying ahead of market trends.
Creating tightly organized ad groups using insights from Google Keyword Planner has a significant and direct impact on campaign performance, primarily by enhancing ad relevance. When an ad group contains a small, closely related set of keywords, you can write highly specific ad copy that perfectly matches the searcher's intent, which in turn leads to a higher click-through rate (CTR).
This increased relevance is a critical component of your Google Ads Quality Score. A higher Quality Score is Google's rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads, and it directly influences your ad rank and cost per click (CPC). Well-organized keyword groups, informed by the 'Grouped Ideas' feature, improve your Quality Score by ensuring there is a strong connection between:
The user's search query.
The keywords in your ad group.
Your ad copy's message.
The content on your landing page.
This alignment signals to Google that you are providing a high-quality experience, which is rewarded with lower costs and better ad positions. Proper keyword grouping is not just an organizational task; it is a foundational strategy for account optimization.
For a small business, using the Google Keyword Planner is the essential first step to building a targeted and effective search campaign. This process ensures you are bidding on terms that your potential customers are actively searching for, laying the groundwork for a profitable campaign.
Here is a stepwise plan to get started:
Sign in to your Google Ads account and navigate to the Keyword Planner under 'Planning.'
Select 'Find new keywords' and enter up to 10 'seed keywords' that describe your product or service, such as 'local coffee shop' or 'artisan roasted coffee.'
Click 'Get started' to review the list of keyword ideas. Analyze metrics like average monthly searches and competition to identify promising terms.
Select the checkboxes next to the keywords you want to target. As you do, a blue bar will appear allowing you to add them to a plan.
Create a new ad group, give it a specific name like 'Artisan Coffee Beans,' and then select a match type (e.g., phrase or exact) before adding the keywords.
This structured workflow ensures your new campaign is built on a foundation of relevant, data-backed keywords. From here, you can continue building out your campaign with confidence.
The 'Get search volume & forecasts' section of the Google Keyword Planner is where you transition from a broad list of ideas to a refined, actionable plan. This tool allows you to validate your keyword choices by providing concrete data on their potential to drive traffic and incur costs, ensuring you launch your campaign with realistic expectations.
To finalize your plan, follow these steps:
First, paste your curated list of keywords into the 'Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords' search box.
Click 'Get started' to see a forecast, which projects metrics like clicks, impressions, and average cost per click (CPC) based on a sample bid.
Adjust the maximum CPC bid at the top of the forecast to see how it impacts your potential performance. This helps you find a balance between traffic volume and cost.
Review the suggested daily budget, which is calculated based on your bid and the keyword's forecasted cost. Use this as a guide for your campaign's initial budget settings.
This analytical step is crucial for transforming a simple keyword list into a strategic, budget-conscious campaign plan within the Google Ads ecosystem.
The evolution of Google Keyword Planner into an all-in-one platform for research, grouping, analysis, and forecasting is set to streamline PPC workflows significantly. By consolidating these functions, the tool reduces the reliance on third-party software and manual spreadsheet work, allowing marketing teams to move from strategy to implementation much faster within the Google Ads interface.
In the future, this integration will likely lead to more agile and data-centric campaign management. Instead of a linear process, teams will be able to operate in a more dynamic cycle of real-time analysis and optimization. For example, they can immediately see the budget implications of adding a new group of keywords or test the performance forecasts for different keyword match types on the fly. This shift will empower strategists to make smarter, quicker decisions, fostering a workflow where strategy, planning, and execution are more tightly interwoven. As the tool continues to evolve, its role as the central nervous system for search campaign creation will only become more prominent.
The availability of long-term trend data, showing up to 48 months of search history in Google Keyword Planner, provides a strategic roadmap for aligning content creation with predictable consumer interest. Businesses should use this data to move beyond reactive marketing and adopt a proactive, long-term approach to both SEO and paid search, ensuring their resources are deployed when they will have the most impact.
By analyzing these recurring patterns, you can build a content calendar that anticipates yearly demand cycles. For instance, a financial services company might see a consistent spike in searches for 'retirement planning' every January. To capitalize on this, they can plan to refresh blog posts, launch a targeted ad campaign, and schedule webinars on that topic in the preceding months. This long-range planning helps ensure that content is indexed and ranking in organic search just as user interest peaks, while PPC campaigns are ready to capture high-intent traffic. This strategic foresight transforms keyword data from a simple PPC tool into a cornerstone of an integrated digital marketing strategy.
Failing to create tightly-themed ad groups is a frequent error that leads to low ad relevance, poor Quality Scores, and consequently, wasted ad spend. The 'Grouped Ideas' feature in Google Keyword Planner provides a direct solution by automating the tedious and often confusing task of keyword organization, guiding advertisers toward a best-practice account structure from the outset.
This feature takes a broad list of keyword suggestions and automatically clusters them based on semantic relevance. For example, if you search for 'running shoes,' it might create separate groups for 'men’s running shoes,' 'trail running shoes,' and 'discount running shoes.' This structure solves the problem by enabling you to:
Write highly specific ad copy for each group, improving click-through rates.
Match users to the most relevant landing page, increasing conversion potential.
Boost your Google Ads Quality Score, which lowers your cost per click.
By enforcing a relevant structure from the start, the tool helps you avoid bidding on irrelevant clicks and ensures your budget is spent reaching users with a clear intent. This foundational step is critical for running profitable campaigns.
Relying on intuition for keyword selection is inefficient because it is based on assumptions about user behavior rather than actual search data, often leading to a mismatch between your ads and what users are truly looking for. The Google Keyword Planner provides concrete data that validates or corrects these assumptions, forming the basis of a more effective strategy.
The evidence of a data-driven approach lies in its impact on key performance indicators. By using the planner, you can target keywords with sufficient search volume, assess the competitive landscape with the 'Competition (indexed value)' ranging from 0-100, and understand seasonal trends. For example, you might assume 'buy shoes' is a top keyword, but data could reveal that a long-tail keyword like 'buy waterproof hiking boots for men' has lower competition and a much higher conversion rate. By building campaigns around such specific, data-backed terms, advertisers consistently achieve higher Quality Scores, lower costs per click, and a better return on investment within their Google Ads account. This methodical process removes guesswork and aligns your strategy with real market behavior.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
