How to find good product keywords in Google Ads

Users search for products in many ways. It may be challenging to find the correct keywords. Here are some smart approaches for a better Google Ads performance.

In this post, we want to share some ideas to solve the challenges when you want to add high quality keywords for your products. Let’s start with the common issues and quick solutions.

• One of the common issues is having thousands of products. It isn’t an option to do the work manually. You need to automate the process somehow to be scalable.
• Just concatenating columns in your product feed normally is a bad idea because most of the keywords will never get traffic. Product names in your master data isn’t the way the users make their searches. Keywords are getting too specific.
• If possible, use keywords where no brand identifier of the product is used. The competition will be very low on those search terms.
• Use modified broad matches in the shortest possible way that matches your product. This way you will avoid blowing up your account with redundant keywords.

If possible, use keywords where no brand identifier of the product is used. The competition will be very low on those search terms.

Build our own search engine

You can use the shopping feed to build your own search engine. Sounds complicated but after some hundred lines of code the results were already what we were looking for. The base concepts I’m using are:

• Frequencies on n-grams
• Stemming of words
• Mapping product IDs to n-grams

Now we are able to lookup whether a search query belongs to a unique product or not.
Important: Unique means in the scope of our product feed. It’s still possible that the query matches to a lot of other products in Google search.

Feed the search engine

Now it’s time to feed the search engine with user searches, for example from Google Shopping. The idea is very simple: The users know how to search for products in relevant ways. In a lot of cases this is different compared to the product title in your feed.

In our example project we had a very big search query list. Our workflow looks like this:

1. For every query, we first did entity extraction of the brand names of the product.
2. The remaining string is the interesting part for generating our high quality keywords.
3. Now we use this string in our search engine — if there is a unique matching product, we return its product ID.
4. Use all combinations of our input string and send them also to the search engine to find the shortest possible n-gram keywords.

The result of this process already looks great, but there are still some keywords that are not specific in the scope of Google search. The lean approach is to add the keywords and filter out the complete list with high impressions and bad CTRs after a while.

The users know how to search for products in relevant ways. In a lot of cases this is different compared to the product title in your feed.

Check relevancy

The third step is to add some checks to find out whether the keywords are specific and relevant. Again the user queries are great for testing our new keywords. Remember that the keywords are specific when it comes to matching within our product feed.

This is our first check:

1. Simulate matching of our new keyword set with all available search queries.
2. Extract brand entities and count brands in search queries.
3. If more than one brand appears the keyword isn’t specific when it comes to user searches. Then it’s not a valid keyword.

And there’s also another discovery:

Even when the keyword is specific in the product feed and out of the users search query perspective (for your business) you may still stand as generic in the Google world. Our approach for this is:

1. Send the keyword to Google’s autocomplete.
2. Run the entity recognition of brand names on autocomplete results.
3. If we are able to extract the same brand that our matched product belongs to, the keyword is relevant.

What if there is no user query list available?

This will be the case if you start with a new Google Ads account. A great free way to extract user searches is to send your product brand names to Google’s autocomplete and use the results in a recursive way to get the product long tail.

Key takeaways

???? If you have thousands of products, you can automate the process by building your own search engine.

???? You can feed your search engine with user searches, for example from Google Shopping.

???? User queries are also great for testing if the keywords are specific and relevant.