10 Useful tools for AdWords Campaigns

Google Adwords has become an important member of every marketing strategy. No matter what area you do business in, many of the companies that are promoting themselves online are using Google Adwords. If they are not properly managed however, campaigns can prove to be very expensive and inefficient.

AdWords is an advertising platform offered by Google that offers pay per click campaigns, pay per impression and cost per conversion for ads on Google.com and partner web sites.

Only people who invested a lot of money and successfully managed Adwords accounts know how much effort is required for such a campaign: creation of keywords lists, testing, bidding, etc.

We are going to present to you a list of 10 tools, most of them are free, which will help you save research time and finding the proper keywords for you to use in a PPC campaign.

1. Google Website Optimizer – http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

This is a content testing tool, easy to use and which offers concrete suggestions for increasing the conversion rate. The big advantage that Google Website Optimizer offers is the possibility to run many tests in the same time for: titles, images, prices, offers and buttons.

With the help of this online tool you can obtain visible growth of converstion rates, time spend on a site by the visitors and their satisfaction. Here are the main benefits:

- A/B testing ( comparing two different version of the page to identify the element that produced a change in visitor behavior

-  testing with multiple variations ( performance compare of content variations in multiple locations on the site )

Lately, companies specialized in using this tool have appeared. Future Now, Inc, for example, provides on its own blog enough resources about how this tool can be used.

2. AdWords Wrapper – http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/adwords-wrapper.html

Is a tool that places the desired keywords between ” “, [ ] and using the “-” system to help you with your AdWords campaigns.

- ” keyword” – ads will only appear when someone will search the keyword in that exact order, and possible along with other keywords before or after the expression.

- [keyword] – only the exact keyword match will return ads.

- -keyword – negative keywords, ads will not appear for searches that contains that keyword.

So, the list will be arranged based on the character code, while duplicate worlds are automatically deleted. This Google Adwords tool gives you the possibility to change matching keyword options to have more targeted ads.

AdWords Wrapper works very easily. All you have to do is insert a list of keywords and they will be immediately shared into four different columns. You can then copy these columns in a .txt file or excel file.

3. Google AdWords Keyword – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Another useful tool is the keyword search engine tool offered by Google.

You can use this tool for:

- when you create an ad group

- when current keywords are not very efficient and new options are necessary

- when you own a set of keywords and you want to find similar ones

This tool works better with short expressions of two or three keywords, otherwise the tool will have a hard time finding the right keywords.

4. AdWords Keyword Juggler Tool – http://www.maxivista.com/adwords_keyword_juggler.php

This tool is offered by Maxivista and it saves you time for building keyword lists. You do not have to think anymore of different keyword combinations.

5. Google Trends – http://www.google.com/trends

Google Trends show us the difference between the number of searches for a specific keyword compared to the volume of searches from different parts of the world and languages and allows you to compare the search volume for different keywords. Further more, Google Trends offers news and things that are related with these keywords which helps you to see the way in which new events affects the keywords popularity.

The most important aspect of this tool is probably the very precise graphs that offers comparative analysis for different keywords. All you have to do is enter the desired keyword, select the region and period. You will get a very suggestive graph with the evolution of the search volume. Also, on the right you will notice all the news with references to that specific keyword.

6. Ad Preview Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

A tool offered by Google that offers a preview of the way ads will look on results pages Google.

What are the benefits you might wonder. Well firstly you will be able to see how your ad will look like and second you will be able to notice the contextual frame of the ad. Also, you will have e better targeting. Regarding this, it’s important to add that you can improve your results pages by adding location attributes and manual values to the Preview page URL.

Optional attributes include a specific target country, latitude and longitude coordinates, regions and cities. In the US you can also specify a zip code.

This tool shows you the result pages for a specific keyword, domain, language and or geographical location. This way you can monitor local campaigns in different geographical ares. Even so, you need to take into consideration the relativity of this tool – the results pages will not look the same all the time. For more details, you can read a good article on the subject: Google’s Ad Preview Tool Gotchas You Should Know ( http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/06/02/ad-preview-tool/ )

7. goRank – http://www.gorank.com/

goRank is a very useful program that provides similar keywords to the ones you are searching. It works almost like a brainstorming session: it shows other keywords, not necessarily synonyms, which belong to the same semantic area. This tool checks the first 1000 Google results for your chosen keywords.

8. Google Sets  – http://labs.google.com/sets

Its a service similar to goRank providing lists of keywords that are inter-connected. You can create sets of keywords from only a few examples and you can establish their number by using the “large set” or “small set” options.

Google Sets is an efficient way of finding similar keywords. For example, I picked a few keywords like: software, antivirus, protection, I have selected the “large” options and got the following keywords: tools, free, computer, security, freeware, design, open sources, and so on. Very nice and helpful, right ?

9. Trellian Keyword Discovery – http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

The demo version of this software is very useful for campaign, reuniting and analyzing statistics regarding internet use.

The software allows you to monitor your competitor’s web site and thus you can detect their main sources of traffic. You can discover that sites that bring traffic and words used in their campaigns. The main benefit is that it accesses an impressive database and the fact that you can find new expressions used by users in their searches.

10. The Keyword Typo Generator – http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

The following question is raised: Why would someone type a word wrong? The answer is very simple: search engine users often use typos.

Keyword Typo Generator generates a list with the most frequent typos, so you can use them in your marketing strategy.

Using typos in AdWords campaigns is one of the most efficient but lost methods of getting traffic.

Here are two reasons for which you should use typos:

- regular users often type words wrong

- bid prices for typos are lower, because there is less competition for them.

To conclude this post, the tool above can help you save some precious time. They should only be used after you have created a  clear marketing strategy.

Google AdWords offers a series of features that will help you with your promotion needs: contextual advertising, geographical location, multiple ads formats, etc. Their efficiency can be measured with programs like Google Analytics.

Google AdWords