Managing Keywords

Developing and Maintaining Keyword Lists

Creating a Keyword List

Keywords trigger ads, ads influence clicks, and clicks can earn traffic for your site, bringing you potential sales and leads. Since keywords start this advertising process, it's important that you choose keywords relevant to your business from the beginning.

Keyword creation involves a five-step process:

1. Build a keyword list: Create a list of terms that refer to your business, service, and products, and think of common phrases people may use to think of something similar. You can get additional keyword suggestions from the Keyword Tool within your account.
2. Group your keywords by theme: Grouping your ads and keywords together in their own ad groups by theme can help you get better performance from your ads.
3. Set appropriate match types for each keyword (Search Network): Picking the right variations of your keywords can help reduce costs, or increase traffic while balancing impressions with meaningful clickthroughs or leads. Review the rest of this lesson to understand how to use match types to their full advantage so your campaign is as effective as possible.
4. Remove unnecessary keywords: Refining your keyword list can help you save on unnecessary costs in the long run, and help you better target users. Removing irrelevant keywords means the users who are most likely to be interested in your business, service, or product will be more likely to see your ads, more often.
5. Test run the campaign: Keywords need a chance to run before you can really determine how well they're doing. Try to let them run for at least 30 days before evaluating their performance.

Be sure to regularly review and refine your keyword list. It's important to review your keyword performance regularly. This can help you fine-tune your campaign performance so it's as cost-efficient and effective as possible, saving you time and money.