OK, PPC Hero beat us to it, but we wanted to talk a little bit about how Google Insights, the latest Google tool, can be used for your PPC campaigns.
There are several ways, actually. But just to highlight some of the useful features of Google Insights, here’s a list of some of the cool things you can do:
- Compare search volume for your key terms
- Study keyword trends over a period of time
- Analyze regional interests for specific keywords and websites
- See which search terms are rising in popularity (or falling)
There’s plenty more, but I like the way PPC Hero has broken down the ways you can use these tools:
- Geo-targeting (very useful for local businesses)
- Budget planing (corresponds to our post yesterday)
- Research before your research (“pre-keyword-research-research”)
It’s true. You can use Google Insights for all of these uses, and a whole lot more. I’m particularly intrigued by the budget planning. As stated yesterday, wise advertisers create a budget and adjust it based on expected sales volume or revenues throughout the year – essentially, paying attention to your seasonal trends. Google Insights can help you identify those seasonal trends more easily, not only for sales, which you should have an idea of anyway, but for search terms, which is highly valuable.
Let’s say that you know your peak season is Christmas. For most retailers, that means between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. But what if you could find out that people start searching for Christmas gift ideas in August? If your gift shop’s keywords experience search spikes during your off season then you’d want to know that, right? Technically speaking, it’s more important to advertise during peak search times than during peak buying times. By the time consumers are ready to purchase, they’ve already done the research and if they are making their purchase online then they already know where they want to buy from. Since the majority of Internet users research their purchases online before actually making a purchase – whether they purchase from an online store or a brick and mortar store – it makes sense to find out when your keywords are most popular in the search engines. Google Insights can help you do that.
