Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 8 - Keyword Planner

You're planning a new Google Ads campaign. What will your CPC be? How much should you spend? 

Let's go Inside Google Ads to answer your burning questions with one simple answer – Keyword Planner. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales, bringing you more than a decade of Google Ads experience. I worked at Google for six years and now I'm a marketing coach, consultant, teacher, content creator, speaker, author and podcast host. I've worked with more than 10,000 Google Ads accounts, showing business owners and marketers how to make more money from paid ads, and now I'm here to do the same for you every week for free.

The way each episode works is this. I pick three of your burning questions to answer in detail from the hundreds of comments I receive on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads. You can find all those links in the show description, and if you want a chance to get your problem solved in a future episode, drop a comment on any of my social media. Remember, my Inside Google Ads course members get to do this with me live every month on an exclusive one hour call.

And now, to our first Google Ads question that can be solved using Keyword Planner.

Zeeshan on Instagram asks, I want to start a new campaign in a new account, what will my CPC be?

First, you're going to want to use Keyword Planner, of course, but how are you going to use Keyword Planner? 

In Google Ads, when you go over to Tools, Planning, Keyword Planner, you can start with a website or start with keywords. If you're brand new to Google Ads and the concept of the keyword is new to you, start with your website. Just type in your website and see what keywords Google associates with your website.

Or if you do have an idea of what keywords you might want to use, start with those. You can see what those will cost and Google will suggest additional ones to you.

One tip with Keyword Planner is don't forget to set your Location Targeting. Before you get your results, the default is just going to be whatever country you're in, but maybe you're not going to target the whole country. Maybe you're a local business and you really just care about demand in your city, for example. Or maybe you're located in one country, but your client is in a different country and you're trying to do this for their business.

So, be sure to change that Location Targeting in Keyword Planner so you get accurate results. 

Now, when you get your results, Google Keyword Planner is not just going to say, here's your CPC.

Here's what it will cost. It'll give you a range of what it'll take to get to the top of the page.

And so, given that CPC range, I like to take an average. If it says the bottom of the range is $3 and top of the range is $7, what am I supposed to do with that? I'll just say, okay, $5. That's good. If in doubt then overestimate. It's better to have too much budget than not enough.

Now, not every keyword will give you a CPC range. Some might show you the demand or the trends, but there just won't be a CPC. So if that's the case, don't worry. That doesn't mean they're free, unfortunately. But just look at the range for similar keywords and assume it will be something similar.

One thing to keep in mind if you're starting a campaign in a new account is that new advertisers often have higher CPCs. This is not because Google Ads is penalizing you, specifically. It's because you don't have a Quality Score yet, and one of the key components of ad rank is Quality Score.

Google doesn't know what the quality of your ads are going to be yet, so anecdotally, your CPCs are going to be a bit higher when you get started. But as long as you have highly relevant ads, great messaging, and all those good foundational things in place, your CPCs should come right down once you start advertising.

If you're new to the Inside Google Ads podcast, you may not know that you can get the transcript of this episode and future episodes delivered to your inbox each week. You can go ahead and find the link in this episode description to sign up. It's completely free. 

The next question brings us to a topic that's always popular when I talk about it on social media and that's competitor targeting.

Motivation & Mindset on TikTok asks, can you please explain how you do competitors keyword research using their website and the Google Keywords tool.

With pleasure. This is one of my favorite little tricks. 

So in Keyword Planner, you're going to want to choose to start with a website, but don't type in your website. Type in your competitor’s website. Then you can see what keywords Google associates with your competitor. And then you can use those keywords in your Search campaign.

This is what I call indirect competitor targeting. You're not advertising on their brand name. I mean, you can do that, and it's called conquesting. 

Let's say I'm Nike and I want to show an ad for Nike when someone searches for Adidas. I can have Adidas as a keyword in my campaign. I can't use Adidas’ name in my ad text, because Adidas is trademarked, but I can have it as a keyword.

So, that's called conquesting, when one brand uses another brand's name as a keyword. And you can do that but it can get quite expensive and of course, the quality of your ad is not very high if someone is looking for Adidas and the ad that pops up is for Nike.

But what you can do instead is what I'm sharing here, indirect competitor targeting, to see what keywords Google associates with your competitor, therefore the kind of searches that will bring up your competitor’s website organically or with ads (if they're running ads), and then you run ads on those keywords, too, so people, perhaps, come to your website instead. 

It's going to bring you more relevant traffic. It's going to be way more affordable than trying to conquest. And it's also just a great way to get keyword ideas. If those keywords aren't coming up when you put your website into Keyword Planner, maybe you need to make some adjustments on your website and your SEO.

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Our final question comes from Young Wellz on Instagram. They say, am I tripping or did Keyword Planner remove the ability to see CTR?

Well, Young Wellz, you're tripping. 

CTR was never in Keyword Planner, but Keyword Planner is not the only planning tool out there. If you go to the Planning section under Tools in Google Ads, you will also see Performance Planner and Reach Planner.

This is a good time to explain what those are. They're all free, by the way. 

Keyword Planner is a keyword research and budgeting tool that tells you the average search volume and CPC ranges of certain keywords. It uses historical data to help you plan your keyword-based campaigns. 

Performance Planner is a bit newer, it came out a few years ago, and it will forecast how your campaigns will perform in the future, and it will show you anticipated metrics like how much you'll spend, conversions, conversion rate, conversion value and CPA or ROAS, depending on the goals of your campaign. 

Whereas Keyword Planner shows you historical data about what things have actually cost, Performance Planner uses your account data to forecast into the future of what your current campaigns will cost and the results they will get. It's a forecasting tool. 

And then third is Reach Planner, which is for planning video campaigns. You may need to request access from your Google Rep, if you have a Google Rep, in order to use it. Basically, it lets you plan out how much reach you'll get, given how much you spend, and lets you plan - I would call them intermediate YouTube campaigns. Not just run a basic Views campaign or a basic Drive Conversions, but if you want to have a real built-out YouTube strategy, Reach Planner would be great for that. You’re going to want to get access to it. 

Otherwise, don't confuse yourself. Personally, I actually don't use Performance Planner much either. I should. I know I should! I just, it's not part of my optimization schedule, and that's fine, but if you've never used it before, it'll only work if you're actively running campaigns because it forecasts the performance of current campaigns. Go ahead and check it out. It may be helpful to you. 

If you want to know what your CPCs will be, how much budget you need, or even how to affordably conquest your competitors, Keyword Planner is the place to be.

We are now eight episodes into the Inside Google Ads podcast, and we've discussed a whole range of foundational Google Ads topics.

Bidding, targeting, location settings, conversion tracking, Performance Max, lead gen, budgeting, and now Keyword Planner. If you're enjoying the discussion here but finding yourself a little bit lost on the fundamentals and some of the terminology I'm using, take a look at my newest course Google Ads for Beginners. I'll guide you through step by step, everything you need to know to successfully manage your Google Ads, explained with clear and simple language.

Stop wasting time on outdated info, confusing tutorials and mind-numbingly long documents and start learning Google Ads today, the easy way. The link for Google Ads for Beginners is, you guessed it, in the episode description. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next week Inside Google Ads.

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