Understanding The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool So You Can Conquer Affiliate Sales

I have been reading about this topic for too long and as hard as it is to admit, my first attempt was a failure. After reading Cloud Living by Greg Allsopp, I was really excited to put my ideas to practice. I joined ClickBank in haste, chose a product that I thought I was interested in (in retrospect, the product is a bit scammish anyway, and that’s not how I intend to make my money). I picked out two to three keywords, wrote a few articles for those free article directories, and then….*wait for the crickets* nothing. My keywords, despite Glen’s advice in Cloud Living, were not properly researched.

After playing with the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, I have become a little more comfortable with it. Here, I will do my best to explain some of the columns and how to use this tool. Let us start with the basics.

The Basics

There are a lot of companies out there willing to pay you a really nice chunk of their sales if you help them sell their product. This is not a gimmick but it is not as easy as it seems either. You can’t just select a product, put up a one page website and wait for the sales to come. You first need to find a hungry market to whom you can advertise using Google Adwords.

I have three affiliate products that I am planning on testing, but only one of them has a payout of a $100 per sale. Naturally, I’m attracted to this produce more so. I can’t even imagine if I made 2-3 sales per week. We are talking about 2 (sales) * 4 (weeks) = 8 sales in a month. Now 8 sales * $100 payout = $800. If it sells more, what the hell. It’s easy to get lost in this kind of hype, so let’s actually walk through an example.

Understanding the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

If you head on over to the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, we can do a bit of testing together. For now, spot where it says “Results are tailored to English, United States”. If you click on “Edit”, you can actually tailor your keyword research to any language or multiple languages and multiple countries. For this example, we will leave it simple. For “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?”, select “Descriptive words or phrases”. Let’s have some fun now.

In the keyword box, enter “clothes” and click on the button. Whoa, what do we have here? You will see a list of words, including your keyword with all these other columns that show you numbers and stats. See that green bar? That shows you the advertiser competition. If you hover over the bar for “clothes”, it will say “Very high advertisement competition.”

Next, you will have the local search volume for the previous month and the global search volume. If you hover over the questions marks for both, you will see an explanation for both columns. What I have inferred from the local search volume is that that is the number of queries matching your keyword for the most recent month Google can provide data for. This number is specific to what we have selected (English, United States) along with the Match Type (which we will go over in a moment). The global search volume is a number representative of queries matching our term from all over the world over a 12 month period. If you want to be somewhat successful, it is best to aim for much smaller. Keyword “clothes” resulted in 20,400,000 searches, “locally” in October. We can’t compete with that. Let’s get more specific here.

Try “designer clothes”. Hm, 246,000, too broad for us. Scan down the list though. I see “designer clothes on sale” at 3,600 “Broad” match type queries. Move over to match type and select “exact”. Exact “Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase”; broad “Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations” and Phrase “Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase” (source: “http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6100“). We will from now on, focus on exact so that our numbers are exact and not reliant on variations, etc.

See where it says “Choose Columns to Display”? Let’s select “Show estimated ad position” as well as “Show estimated avg cpc” (cpc meaning cost per click). Here is what it looks like for me:

Using Google Keyword Suggestion Tool: Experiment by entering money amount into CPC bid; this will help you see what position range your ad could fall in.

Now that we are viewing the whole picture, we can estimate how much money it will cost us to display these ads and have people click on them. Where it says “calculate estimates using a different maximum CPC bid: “, let’s try $0.20. By doing this, the tools helps you analyze what position you might end up in if you are willing to pay $.20 for the currently displayed keywords.

So with this, I leave it to you to experiment away. Even after all these factors, you have to be careful. I happen to think $0.20 per click is a bit expensive. If I had an Adwords campaign running for up to $30.00 a day, that means for every $1.00, we will get about 5 clicks, so 30*5 = 150 clicks. That means to break even, you better have sold $30 worth of items; and that is okay. With testing, you will either lose a bit of money, make a little, or who knows, hit it big. Personally, I have not done this yet, but I will be very soon. If the campaign doesn’t go well, change a few factors and try again.

If you are interested in more information about split testing, please check out Pat Flynn’s article How to Run Free Split Tests Using Google Optimizer for Better Results.

Have you done any affiliate testing? Share any tips and results.

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