Sinead studied Psychology at IADT, with a special interest in Online Advertising and Human Computer Interaction. She is really passionate about communication and the user experience. As well as managing the day to day workings of RedFly, Sinead is digital marketing strategist, client liaison and project manager.Quickly Create Keyword Lists with the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool
You should follow Sinead on Twitter November 5th, 2013 Posted in: Digital Marketing Tools 3 CommentsThe most time intensive and tedious task when using Google AdWords is creating your keyword lists for new ad campaigns. Not only can it take hours putting together your keywords lists, on top of that you have to make sure to include as many variations and misspellings of each word that you can think of and at the same time make sure not to have duplicate keywords or characters.
With problems such as this in mind we came up with a practical and simple solution – the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool, a tool we use every day that is so useful that we thought we would share it and hope others would benefit from it too. It’s completely free so download it now and play around.
Use Case: Setting Up a Google AdWords Ad Group
To demonstrate how we use this tool lets us consider a real world example of setting up a new ad group in Google AdWords.
If I wanted to run ads for the Apple iPhone 4 and quickly needed keyword ideas I could use the Amazon.com listing for this product combined with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to produce a list of 300 keywords.
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool extracts information from the content of the webpage that you input and gives you back related terms that people actually search for. There are various geographical, language and category adjustments you can make to this tool which means that it produces slightly different results based on these, so make sure to choose the settings that apply to your own AdWords campaign. This tool can produce up to 800 suggested keywords at a time, but if you’re not logged into AdWords you will only get 100.
Armed with your list of keywords the next step is to figure out which keywords you want to rule out. Working with a list of a possible 800 keywords this could be a daunting task, but using the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool makes this task that much easier.
The first step is getting your suggested keywords into our tool so you can manipulate that list in an efficient manner.
Download all of the keyword ideas from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Open this Excel file and then copy the first column (all of your suggested keywords) into the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool by clicking + Add under the Create List menu. The Add Keywords dialogue box will ask you to input the keywords one entry per line, but copying direct from the Excel file will allow you to do this simply by copying and pasting directly into the input box and clicking ok. You can also import a keyword list from a text file by clicking Import on the Create List menu.
Once you have your keywords list added to the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool you can then begin removing the unsuitable keywords. In our example we want to advertise the iPhone 4, so it’s necessary for us to remove any keywords relating to the older models of the iPhone. Though it’s tempting to keep all of these keywords intact because some might yield a significant number of monthly searches, don’t forget that the more targeted your keywords and ad text the better it is for your quality score.
Without the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool you would need to sift through this long list of keywords and delete the unsuitable ones manually, instead it’s simply a matter of batch modifying or cleaning the keywords. By clicking on Clean under the Change menu and selecting Unwanted Terms we can remove all instances of the term “3G” and “3Gs” from any keywords in our list. This does not delete keywords containing the terms we select, it deletes the term from the keyword. So, for example the keyword “16gb iPhone 3G” now becomes “16gb iPhone”.
However, we may already have the keyword “16gb iPhone” somewhere in our keyword list, so the next step is to make sure we have no duplicate keywords. By clicking on Delete under the Create menu we can choose Duplicate Entries, which will automatically remove any keywords which were exactly the same. In this example we were able to remove 32 duplicate entries quickly and easily. Here we would also want to remove any instances of the words “refurbished” and “used”, and again we use the Unwanted Terms option.
We might also want to highlight certain keywords in order to decide whether to modify or delete them from our list. In our example we might want to search for keywords containing the words “generation”, “1st”, “2nd” etc. as this relates to the language used to describe the various versions of the Apple iPhone. By clicking on Highlight under the Handle Output menu, and choosing Entries That Contain and Word Anywhere, we can easily view any keywords that have these words in them and then delete or modify them accordingly.
When you are happy with your cleaned up keyword list we recommend you export this keyword list and save it to a text file. Under the Handle Output menu choose Export, and All To Text File to permanently save your keyword list. Once this is saved you will then have the freedom to create additional keyword lists, so if you make a mistake you can go back to the original set of keywords and experiment with the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool freely.
For example you may wish to massively increase your keyword list by adding misspellings. You can add misspelling by choosing Multiply under the Change menu and selecting Add Misspelled Words. You have a variety of options here, the more boxes you tick the bigger your keyword list will be expanded. In this example we select all of the options and turn our 200+ keyword list up to a massive 24,000+ at the touch of a button, covering all your bases for this particular product.
You can also use the additional tabs to experiment with the various other options the tool offers. Under the Handle Output menu, selecting Export and All To Another List allows you to replicate your primary (List A) keyword list into the other tabs. Or you can choose to Export only the highlighted keywords.
When you’re happy with any of the results of these other keyword lists you can then use Export option to add them to your primary (List A) keyword list. If you make any changes to your primary keyword list that you are happy with, make sure to save it to a text file or you will lose all your work when you close the tool. Using the additional tabs and saving as a text file is a great way to ensure you can build your list without losing any of your work.
In our example, the 24,000+ keyword list we created is actually too large for this particular campaign and a large keyword list such as this probably isn’t suitable for everyone. What we recommend is that instead of creating misspellings of your entire keyword list that you use the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool to create misspellings of specific keywords in the additional tabs space and then add them into your primary (List A) list. If we wanted to add some misspellings of just the word “iPhone” we could use the List B tab to create these and then use then Export them into List A.
Or we could use the Replace Words and Duplicate option found under the Multiply menu, which would allow us to replace specific words while also retaining the original keywords. So all our keywords that contain the word “iPhone” would remain, and would be duplicated, but with the word “iPhone” spelt “iFone”, effectively doubling the keyword list.
Overall, the best feature of the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool is its ability to batch modify keywords, such as adding misspellings, removing unsuitable terms from keywords and more. You can also add words to the beginning or end of all your keywords. This could come in handy when you have multiple campaigns targeting different locations and you want to include the location name at the end of each keyword in each ad group. You can also use this tool to turn your keyword lists into keyword tags for SEO, using the handy Export all to Clipboard (Comma Separated) option.
There are quite a few other features which are outlined on its official page (this post would be three times as long if I was to cover each and every one) and you will also find the installation details there too.
Share This Tool
Like any of our free tools we love to hear feedback about it, so if you download it and find the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool useful to you, please do let us know.
We work hard to maintain all of our free tools, and in exchange all we ask is that you help us spread the word about them. Any retweet, stumble or Facebook share or share to any social network at all would make us very happy and motivate us to add to our growing list of internet marketing tools.
November 23rd, 2012 at 11:43 am
Really useful tool for large Keyword lists in AdWords.
Many thanks for sharing.
December 6th, 2012 at 6:31 am
Wow!! Thanks Sinead for this kickass keyword tool
December 21st, 2012 at 7:42 am
What a great blog, I have learned so much from your series of tutorials and this blog. I really like the Redfly keyword Manager Tool and how it can work with Google AdWords Keyword Tool, cannot thank you enough.