Better Pay Per Click Advertising with Google Keywords and Excel

Better Pay Per Click Advertising with Google Keywords and Excel
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Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the many ways SEO’s use to drive traffic to a website. You pick Keywords or phrases such as “shopping” or “Green used car” and when the results come up, the ad will be displayed. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest PPC network operators as of 2007. PPC is often used to refer to keyword advertising on search engines and other websites. With PPC, search engines can give you instant traffic and allow you to test out new business models and ads in real time.

What I like about buying keywords on a PPC search engine is that it provides a trackable medium. Before you start any PPC advertising campaign, you will need to decide on which keywords to use. Make sure you localize your keywords. Not only do you have a greater chance to appear in the top SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), but you have an opportunity to do so much faster than if you were targeting global customers. Two keyword tools such as the Google Keyword Tool, and MSN Ad Intelligence can help you organize your keyword list data via Excel export option (.csv for excel) or simple Excel plug-in available from Microsoft.

With the Google Keyword Tool, just enter a keyword into the tool box and the results will list keyword ideas, advertiser competition, and volume based on descriptive words/phrases or by Website content. These results can then be exported to excel. Once the keyword data is in the excel spreadsheet, you can manipulate (sort, merge, split) and analyze the data that will benefit your PPC campaign.

MSN Ad Intelligence plug-in (screenshot below) for Microsoft Excel 2007 also offers this feature as well as monitor performance and researching trends. Once the add-in has been added, tools such as Keyword suggestion, keyword extraction, keyword wizard lets you do just about anything you’d want to do in preparation for a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign. Microsoft offers this plug-in tool for free. There are scores of add on tools for Excel out there in the wild. Bright Hub’s writer, Mr. Excel, has numerous articles based on the Excel add-ons & ways to manipulate Excel.

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