Google Keyword Tool Adds Search Volume Statistics

Google Now Provides Search Volume Data in Keyword Tool

by Perry Marshall

I'm proud to call your attention to Google's keyword research tool and point out some useful things you can do with it that may not be obvious upon immediate inspection. I'd encourage you to take a few minutes play with the tool yourself.

You access this from the link that says "Keyword tool" near the top of your ad group keyword reports:

Where to access Google's keyword tool

When you click on the link you have an opportunity to enter new keywords, use existing ones, or scrape content from a web page:

Google's Keyword Tool

I cheated a little bit here: I clicked on the "Show/hide columns" menu and selected "Show all columns" - and I get a bunch of extra cool information.

Please note that Google will only report information for the countries you have chosen in your campaign settings.

For this example I chose a very competitive keyword - "futures trading" - and I set the maximum CPC bid on the left to $3.00 per click.

The table tells me estimated ad position, estimated cost per click, search volume for last month (June), and a graph showing season traffic fluctuations of the keyword.

Also notice "match type." This is giving the search volume for BROAD MATCH. (Don't overlook this important detail!) You're not seeing phrase match or exact match data. If you want to see that, go to the pulldown menu and change "Broad" to "Phrase":

Google's keyword tool - phrase match

I want you to notice that "futures trading" had a search volume of 165,000 for broad match and 110,00 for phrase match. Now I check exact match below, the number I get is 40,500 searches:

Google keyword tool exact match

Having worked with hundreds of people on their Google campaigns, my experience is that especially when people are shopping, exact match converts to sales better than broad or phrase match. So if you're doing market research with this tool, exact match may give you the numbers you really want.

Don't overlook Negative Keywords...

The part I want to explain next is easily overlooked and extremely useful: a negative keyword report.

Negative Kewyords - Google's tool

Take a look at the first line, -commodity. What this is telling you is:

There were 9,900 searches for "commodity futures trading" in June, so if you make commodity a negative keyword for "futures trading" you'll be seen 9,900 fewer times. Which means your CTR probably goes up and you save money. You can also infer this same data from the broad match report, but it's not quite as obvious.

Most people don't realize how important negative keywords actually are. One of my Roundtable members was spending $70,000 per month, spent three days carefully combing through his server logs, added eleven thousand (!) negative keywords, and cut his spend to $40,000 overnight. His advertising cost was slashed $30,000 per month (hey, that's a savings of almost $400,000 per year!) but his sales didn't go down at all.

Not everyone is as fortunate as that but this is definitely something to pay attention to, especially if you're in a market where there are multiple distinct niches within one category.

If you like updates like this, you might like our Mastermind Club where we discuss these things on a monthly conference call and do live de-construction / re-construction of members' Google campaigns, web sites and marketing strategies.

To Your Success,

Perry Marshall