Keyword Planner Now Shows Ranges

A range where the number used to be

Open Keyword Planner in a small AdWords account this month and the column of average monthly searches may no longer hold numbers. It holds ranges instead: 100 to 1K, 1K to 10K, 10K to 100K.

Google says accounts with a lower monthly spend may see this limited view. It has not said where the line sits.

Each range spans a factor of ten. Two phrases in the same range can differ tenfold, and the tool no longer says which is which.

What the exact figures were used for

• Choosing between wordings for the same service.
• Estimating a budget before the first click is paid for.
• Deciding which pages to write first on the website.
• Dropping phrases that almost nobody types.
• Comparing areas within the region you serve.

The first is the one the ranges damage most. Two wordings for the same service usually land in the same range, which is exactly when a number would have settled it.

Reading a range sensibly

A range is still information. It gives the order of size, and for many small campaigns the order of size is all a decision needs.

Narrow the planner's location to the towns you work in before reading anything. A national range for a local service says almost nothing about your customers.

Plan around the low end of each range, not the high end. The low end is the figure you can count on.

And treat phrases in the same range as equal until your own data separates them. Any order you impose inside a range is your guess, not Google's data.

The search terms report

If a campaign has run before, the best record of what people type is already in the account. The search terms report shows what people really typed when your ads appeared, and what each phrase cost you in clicks.

These are real phrases, typed by real people in the area you target. No ranges anywhere.

Read it monthly. Phrases that bring useful clicks become keywords; phrases that never could become negative keywords, so they stop costing money.

A campaign that has run for one season holds better wording than any planning tool, because it records what your own customers typed.

Search Console for searches you already appear in

Search Console's Search Analytics report lists the searches your site appeared for in Google over the last 90 days, with impressions, clicks and position.

Impressions are not total searches. They count the times your site was shown: a floor, but one counted rather than estimated.

Filter to Canada, sort by impressions and look for wordings you never thought of. Plenty of impressions with almost no clicks usually means a page that ranks too low or describes the wrong thing.

The words customers use out loud

The phone and the inbox hold a keyword list nobody exports. Customers describe what they want in their own words, and those are the words they type.

Keep a sheet by the phone for a month. Write down how each caller described the job before anyone translated it into the trade's terms.

Google's own suggestions help too: the phrases offered as you type, and the related searches at the foot of a results page. No figures, but common wordings by definition.

A worked example

A two-truck auto transport company in the Fraser Valley moves cars for dealers, for families relocating between provinces and, each autumn, for retirees sending a car south for the winter.

Planning this year's autumn campaign, the owner opened Keyword Planner. Auto transport, car shipping, ship a car and vehicle transport all showed the same range: 1K to 10K.

With nothing to separate them, the obvious choice was auto transport, the trade's own term and the one painted on the trucks.

Last autumn's search terms report said otherwise. Hardly anyone had typed auto transport. People typed where the car was going, a city in another province or a state in the southern US, with ship or shipping in front.

The phone sheet agreed: callers asked what it cost to ship a car somewhere, never about transport.

So the campaign was organised by destination, with an ad group for each common route and ads that name the route. The ranges stayed as vague as ever. They had stopped mattering.

When you need a real size

Sometimes a size matters: for a budget, or to decide whether a service is worth advertising at all. A short test answers that better than the planner ever did.

Run the campaign for a few weeks at a modest daily budget, then add the search impression share column. Impressions divided by impression share gives a fair estimate of how many searches you were eligible to appear for.

Impression share lost to budget then shows how much more there was to buy, for your own area and your own keywords.

Google Trends adds the shape of the year, and can compare two wordings directly, as long as both are searched often enough to register.

Spending more to see the numbers

Accounts that spend more still see exact figures. Google has not said how much more, and it would be the wrong reason to raise a budget.

Spend where clicks pay for themselves. For everything else, the account's own reports and your own site's data are better evidence than any planning estimate.

The counter-case

For some decisions the ranges are a real loss. A business entering a new market, with no campaign history and little traffic, has nothing of its own to read yet.

The same goes for a brand new service. There, the planner's ranges and Trends are the starting point, and a small test campaign should come sooner rather than later.

And a business planning a larger campaign may simply spend enough to see the full figures.

For most small accounts, though, read ranges as rough sizes and take your wording from what customers actually typed and said.

Before the next campaign

1. Set the planner's location to your service area.
2. Read ranges as sizes, never as rankings.
3. Open the search terms report for last season.
4. Export Search Console queries for the last 90 days.
5. Keep a phone sheet of customers' own words.
6. Compare close wordings in Google Trends.
7. Add impression share to your campaign columns.

Step three is the one worth doing today. It costs nothing, it covers your own customers in your own area, and it already holds the wording the planner can no longer rank.

Another report in the same account that most small advertisers never open is covered in search partner sites in your AdWords campaign.

Frequently asked questions

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