Pay-per-click (PPC) for SMBs #7: How to find keywords

Finding Keywords via the adCenter Desktop Tool

First up, open your adCenter desktop tool (download here if you haven’t got it yet!) and hit the research tab, located top left…

Once in you’ve got four options which will help you with keyword generation; ‘Similar Keywords’, ‘Extracted Keywords’, ‘Category Keywords’ and ‘Frequent Keywords’

Similar Keywords

This does exactly what it says on the tin! Using our fictional business Shah’s Car’s as an example, I’ve entered the keyword ‘car’ (below) and the tool has returned me a list of similar and relevant keywords. Even more importantly it gives us the number of clicks, impressions, CTR and CPC for all 3 match types so you can see which terms are the ones for you!

Via the drop downs at the top you can set the tool to return you between 10 to 50 keywords and set results to be based upon the last 1 to 30 days depending on your preference. By hitting the drop down bottom left you can use this tool to find negative keywords as well but that’s a whole different blog (soon to be published right here)!

Extracted Keywords

This one generates keywords by extracting terms from a specified webpage. As we’re selling 2nd hand cars we could put in popular second hand car sales sites and see what key terms are extracted from their sites to give us inspiration for our list!

Frequent Keywords

Gives you a list of the most popular keywords searched for on Bing. As soon as you click on it, it auto-populates and away you go. Easy, peasy!

Category Keywords

This one generates keywords based upon a business category you select. There’s a wide variety of categories from Travel to Video Games to Vehicles & Transportation which is perfect for Shah’s Cars!

So now you’ve got the keywords you want, how do you get them in the account? All you have to do is tick the ones you want and hit ‘Add’. The below box appears, you select the Campaign and Ad Group you want, hit OK and they fly straight in.

Finding Keywords via the AdCenter UI

Another way to find keywords is to use the adCenter user interface (UI). Once in, hit the ‘Tools’ tab, then, click ‘Research Keywords’ (under the ‘Research and Optimization Tools’ heading).

This tool functions much like the ‘Similar Keywords’ and ‘Extracting Keywords’ adCenter Desktop tools, however with this one you can specify language and market, gender, age group and business category. It also generates as many keywords as it can find, there’s no limitation! I’ve used the car example to highlight this below:

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The other difference is that once you’d decided which keywords you would like the tool helps you decide the most appropriate bid. Simply enter the bid you have in mind and it tells you the associated impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, average position and total cost! There’s even a graph to highlight the variance between bids...

Once you’ve finished playing with the graphs and chosen your bid, all you have to do is select the Campaign and Ad Group you want the keyword to go in and you’re done. Sit down and have a cup of tea…

Finding Keywords via the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool (MAI)

The final way to generate keywords is via MAI which is a keyword research and generation tool that plugs into Microsoft Excel. You can download MAI here and read about how to use it in Kats blog PPC for SMBs #5: The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool

I hope you’ve found this useful and thank you for reading! Please feel free to leave us your comments and share with your colleagues and friends!

Sam O’Brien

Other blog posts in this series:

PPC for SMBs #1: Paid and organic search

PPC for SMBs #2: An introduction to Bing

PPC for SMBs #3: An introduction to Microsoft adCenter

PPC for SMBs # 4: An introduction to Microsoft adCenter Desktop

PPC for SMBs #5: The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool

PPC for SMBs #6: Setting up a new adCenter account