Monday, May 18, 2009

Use New Google Search Options to Help Map Out Your Pay Per Click Ad Groups

Google has released a useful new search options panel on their search engine results pages. One option that can be utilized to build out your keyword list to more targeted keywords and help map out your pay per click ad groups is the "Wonder wheel". The wonder wheel works by taking your search term and displaying a group of similar phrases that people search. Each of these phrases can then be clicked on and another group of phrases related directly to that phrase is displayed. This process can be repeated an unlimited number of times, each retrieving more specific phrases.

To access the wonder wheel, as well as some other greatnew search options, perform a search in Google for a phrase you are interested in. On the search results page, click on the "Show options" link under the search bar on the top of the page and a panel will be displayed on the left side of the page. Within that panel, you will see a link for the "Wonder wheel".

In the example shown, the initial Google search was for "ten golden rules". In the image, several other phrases branch out from that phrase. By clicking on one of them, in this case "internet marketing consultant", we see that another set of phrases branch out related to internet marketing consultant, and so on.

This can be especially useful if you are trying to determine how you should separate your keyword phrases into ad groups in a pay per click campaign. It can give you an initial idea of how phrases can be grouped. Use this as a road map to help determine how your campaigns should be grouped.