How Google Trends Can Help You Plan Google Ads

Planning a PPC and knowing when to run the specific Google Ad campaigns can be pretty difficult. As marketers, We understand that users don’t always behave how we expect them to. If you think that dividing your marketing budget equally over the 12 months can do you any good, you are mistaken there!

While marketing, we need to analyze a lot of things. Special events, holidays, and weather are just some of the few things which can have a significant impact on marketing activities. While planning PPC campaigns for clients, it is always better to do it seasonally, and they also don’t like wasting budget.

You will need to plan ahead when it comes to your client’s budget. To do so, you will need to understand the trends. One tool that can help you with PPC planning is Google Trends. Why?

This tool, with abundant data, helps marketers in planning and enhancing good PPC campaigns.

Here we will learn how Google trends can be used effectively to plan PPC campaigns and how it can be leveraged to get maximum results! 

Google Trends and PPC  

Seasonality is an important factor while planning PPC campaigns, as mentioned earlier. If you run your campaign throughout the year, you are simply wasting the budget. Although Google Trends will not show you the search volume for a particular keyword, it allows you to view the user intent of a specific keyword over time. This is what will enable you to plan a successful PPC campaign.

You need to be thinking of staying ahead of the curve as many businesses advertise online and trends changing frequently. 

So, here we have compiled a few steps that will help you understand the process of using Google trends to plan your Google ads.

1. Getting started 

The tool has got great potential to understand what customers are searching for frequently, and so we will need to know the different steps involved to take full advantage of the tool. 

We can understand the whole process with an example. Let us consider an e-commerce business selling sports equipment and accessories. Initially, you will have to choose the region where you wish to see the keyword interest. To do that, you will need to choose the country before you start the search.

2. Go deep with your keyword

If you simply search for the term sports equipment at the top category level, it won’t do any good. But with this tool, you can look deeper into the search. You will be able to search for sub-categories for the main category. If you take sports equipment as the main category, you will see sub-categories that will include shoes, clothes, and types of equipment.

The search interest is a factor that ranges from 0 to 100. We will find people interested in the different sub-categories from the data available in Google trends. So, by understanding the level of interest for different categories will help us to plan which campaign needs to be considered “core” in your account! 

What we see here is that if a good sum of the clients’ annual budget can be utilized on the sub-categories with higher volume and less budget.

Users are most likely to act on during the peaks. So, if you can run a paid activity during the time, you will find the conversion rate ascending real quick! When the graph goes down, you can also initiate soft campaigns like email and social!

3. Related Queries

If you can look into the related queries, you can get a clear picture of what people are looking for and what are popular among users. If you look at sports equipment, take the category of “gym equipment,” you will find that size will be an essential variable in the related queries, such as “large” and “medium.” 

You can then make use of this information to generate a separate campaign based on size with a specific landing page for “large dumbells” and make the whole website more relevant to the user queries and consequently increase conversion on the site.

4. Use data to compare and plan for PPC budget

You will be able to compare up to five keywords on Google Trends. Choose about five to six that have the potential to drive traffic and sales. After that, You need to allocate the monthly PPC budget. Download the data into a .csv sheet from above the Google trend graph.

In the sheet, you will notice the table that breaks down value for interest (0-100) per week for each keyword. Make a few modifications to the table and plan your PPC budget per month rather than per week. You can start by adding a column for the month. Then, add up the totals of search interest across every keyword.

What you need to next is create a pivot table that will highlight the totals of each month. Always make sure to keep the value field settings to “Average” and not “sum” as some months may have four weeks of data while some have five, complicating the data.

After you have prepared your pivot table, copy-paste the values from the table to a different field and convert the level of interest into an index. After the index of the values is created, apply the monthly budget for all the twelve months. 

Create a “Monthly Budget” column next to “Index” and take the total sum of the annual PPC budget in the “Total” row. Your final table will have the PPC budget allocated to each month using the data provided by Google Trends. This way, you can plan your monthly budget.

Wrapping Up!

A lot of PPC managers should consider leveraging Google Trends to plan their campaigns in the future by acquiring insights on how you must be planning your client’s budget. Living in a user-centric world, Google Trends lets us put the user first when it comes to planning. The tools also allow us to see the level of user interest for each keyword.

With trends varying, make sure to recalculate and redistribute budgets accordingly.

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