Product Review : Ad Word Analyzer

As with any form of advertising, in order to be effective with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you have to know what people are searching for, and what your competition is doing. That is exactly what Ad Word Analyzer is designed to do.

What really puts PPC into overdrive is being able to bid on a large number of keywords and phrases that people actually use to search for the product or service you're offering. Ideally, you want to find search terms that have good search volume, but relatively little competition.

Ad Word Analyzer is designed to help you do just that. This nifty little utility prompts you to enter a keyword or keyword phrase, and then it queries Overture (the biggest PPC search engine) to determine not only how many searches were made for that term, but also how many web site pages are relevant to that term, and how many bidders there are for that particular term. It also reports how many Google Ad Words campaigns are ongoing for your search term.

Armed with that information, you can then log onto your account and go through the bidding process for the various phrases you've identified as having decent search traffic, but relatively fewer competing advertisers. If you've run Ad Word Analyzer, then you have in hand the statistics you need to zero in on those less competitive (and less expensive!) phrases.

The real value of Ad Word Analyzer, however, is the fact that it then goes on to hunt down and report on numerous variations on your keyword or phrase (i.e., longer search phrases that include the keyword or phrase that you've specified). The first time I used this tool, I found half a dozen or more variations related to my selected keyword that I'm sure I would never have thought of on my own, allowing me to place bids on all those additional terms, several of which had significant search volume, and either a low number of relevant sites, or a low number of competing ad campaigns.

Could I do the same thing by hand? Well ... yes ... and no. I could easily go to the Overture Search Suggestion Tool and generate the list of keyword phrases, and even see the number of searches Overture reports for a given phrase. What I could not do without the software is see at a glance how many bidders there are for each term. That would require me to import my entire list into my Overture account, and then go through them one by one, checking out the number of bids. I'd probably end up copying down a lot of that information by hand, or typing it into a spreadsheet. Tedious. Boring. Where's my copy of Ad Word Analyzer?

Ad Word Analyzer is easy enough to use, and I had it up and running within a few minutes of downloading it. The interface is "plain jane" rather than fancy, but for me, that was not a drawback. I don't care all that much what it looks like, as long as it's doing its job. It allows you to sort the results much like a spreadsheet would, so you can sort by number of searches, number of web pages, "results to search ratio", and number of advertising campaigns, and you can also save your results as either a text file or an ascii file readable by a spreadsheet program.

By saving my results to a spreadsheet file, weeding out the terms I wasn't interested in, and then again saving to a text file, I was able to generate a list of key words that I could directly cut and paste into my advertising accounts at the several PPC vendors that I use. That alone was a significant time saver, not to mention the fact I was able to keep my list of terms uniform across the several vendors, instead of having to remember and then type it all in by hand.

In addition to its intended use, I've found Ad Word Analyzer useful when I'm designing a web page. I type in the primary "theme" for the page, run the program, and then I can pick the variation on my key word phrase that has the lowest results to search ratio to use as my page title and the target phrase for my page. In the same way that I'd rather bid on less competitive phrases when doing pay per click advertising, I'd rather target a less competitive phrase for my page key words when designing a page.

My conclusion? Ad Word Analyzer is an invaluable tool that should pay for itself quickly. In my case, it already has.

Highly Recommended !

Learn more about Ad Word Analyzer here.