AdMoolah News and Views

Knowing what keywords pay a high price-per-click is very useful for AdSense publishers to know. As we saw in the last post, it may be impossible to determine the exact price that a click will pay. We can, however, get a general idea of which keywords are likely to pay more than others. This post will examine some ways in which we can do this.

Keyword Lists

There are several sources of keyword lists that can be obtained on the Internet for free or for sale. Keyword lists supply a large number of high-paying keywords and the maximum bid prices for these keywords. These lists can be a good place to start brainstorming for content ideas. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell how accurate these lists are because they rarely reveal their sources and are sometimes out of date.

Here are some free lists that are available:

http://www.keyword-list.com/ (Update: This site stopped updating in July)
http://www.keywordsense.com/
http://www.adsenseheaven.com/

Other Tools

Overture (which is now owned by Yahoo!) has a system that allows advertisers to bid on keywords in the same way that Google’s AdWords does. Luckily for publishers, Overture is not as selfish with their data as Google is. They have a tool which allows anyone to view the current maximum bids for any keyword. Bid prices in Overture’s system might not exactly match the bid prices in AdWords. Both Overture’s bidding system and AdWords are open marketplaces, so the relative value of one keyword compared to another should be similar. That is, if one keyword is more highly valued in Overture, it will usually also be more highly valued in AdWords. The tool is available at the following URL:

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/index.jhtml

Another pay-per-click bidding system that allows the public to view the current bids on keywords is 7search.com. This tool also has a useful feature that shows not only the maximum bids for the search term you are interested in, but also shows a list of related terms. For each of these terms, they list the top 5 bid prices and the number of searches that were done for that keyword in the previous month. This gives a good indication of the popularity of different keywords. The 7search.com tool is available at:

http://conversion.7search.com/scripts/advertisertools/keywordsuggestion.aspx

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Google’s AdWords program has a Traffic Estimator tool that can be used to estimate bid amounts. Unfortunately, this tool is only available if you sign up for an AdWords account, which currently costs $5.00 to join. The next section assumes that you have an AdWords account.

To use the Traffic Estimator tool to find maximum bid prices:

1. Log into your AdWords account and click the “create new AdWords campaign” link.
2. Enter in dummy data for the names of the campaign and ad group. Dummy data is used because the names do not influence the results we are interested in. Then select your desired target language and location. Hit continue.
3. Select your target country and click continue.
4. Create an ad with dummy data in it.
5. At this point you select your keywords. Enter the keywords you are curious about into the text area, one per line. Hit continue.
6. In the “Enter your own maximum CPC” text box enter “100.00″ (the maximum bid in AdWords) and click on “View Traffic Estimator”.

The tool will show the average CPC that position #1 would cost. This indicates what level the current bidding is on that keyword.

Comparing the Tools

I did a search for three different, but related terms using all of the above methods I have mentioned. Here are the results:

As you can see, the results for the various methods do vary. Overture’s prices are quite a bit below the results found from AdWord’s Traffic Estimator, and 7Search.com’s are even lower than Overture’s. The results from www.keyword-list.com do seem relatively accurate. One important thing to note is that all 4 of the sources had the prices in the same order, “house” is the lowest, “real estate” is in the middle and “las vegas real estate” is at the top.

Using a combination of methods can be the best way to use these tools. Keyword lists can be used to start brainstorming. Using 7search.com’s feature that shows related keywords is an excellent way to quickly explore a large variety of keywords in a subject area. After finding the top paying keywords in an area, more accurate results can be found using a keyword list or Google’s AdWords.

What’s Next

Now that we know how to identify high paying keywords, the next post in this series will discuss how to effectively apply this information to help increase your AdSense revenues.