At its core, what makes pay per click advertising one of, if not, the most effective source of traffic is the fact it provides advertisers traffic from web users that are contextually targeted so that they are genuinely interested in the contents of the campaign, leading to better conversion rates than other forms of advertising, such as banner. However, for this reason, a PPC campaign can only ever be as good as the keywords that are selected for it. For example, if you have an advert looking to target those interested in electric cars, having keywords related to ‘trucks’ and ‘diesel engines’ will not do the campaign well at all (extreme example but you get the jist). With this in mind, here are five tips to help advertisers perform the right research to select the best keywords for their respective PPC campaigns.

#1 Use All Available Online Tools

What some advertisers do not realise is just how many free tools are readily available out there that can help advertisers determine what the best keywords are for their campaign. For example, you may have narrowed your selection down to 10-20 keywords (and want to take this down further). There are online tools which can help quantify keywords to enable you to determine how successful they will be for you. This includes the popuarlity of a keyword search phrase (will it be cheaper because it is niche and has less competition)?

These tools include:

1. Google’s search tool to identify the number of times a search phrase of your choice is searched.
2. Google Trends to show you how the keyword search phrase fluctuates in searches over time.

#2 Test, Test and Test

At the end of the day, you might think you have chosen the right keywords for your campaign. But, the truth behind whether you have or not comes down to quantifiable figures from your campaign. For this reason, it is always vital to make sure you drop poorly performing keywords, replace them with alternatives and keep the best performing keywords on going on your campaign.

As a general rule of thumb, this could be taken once every 7-10 days to ‘update’ to your keywords – anytime sooner than that will not give the keywords sufficient ‘live’ time on your campaign to develop data accurate enough of the success of the keywords you have used.

#3 Always Brainstorm Keyword Ideas

By far the best way to determine what keywords to choose is to go the old fashioned route and brainstorm yourself, as well as with others if you have the chance. For me, I found it is best to categorize keywords into different sub headings and then use these headings to how you want to target your campaign. Do you want to target generic keywords, aim for those looking at your brand name or steal traffic from competitors? General headings to go for follow below:

• Brandable keyword terms
• Competitor keyword terms
• Generic keyword terms
• Related keyword terms
• ‘Those that are merely browsing’ keyword terms
• ‘Those wanting to purchase (or complete a conversion)’ keyword terms.