Tools of the Trade of PPC Advertising

The foundation of search marketing is keyword research, and there are a number of tools that will both aid you in growing your keyword list, and in determining keyword volumes. Some are free and some are paid for. Many keyword volume tools have relied on Overture, and as Yahoo! is no longer supporting this tool, the information is not necessarily accurate. All these tools should be used as guidelines only. Test the data with your own campaigns to determine what works best for you.

Keyword volume tools:
www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com
www.yooter.com/keyword/overture.php
www.tools.seobook.com/general/keyword

Google Trends
Keyword suggestion tools:
www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
www.tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/generator.php

Google AdWords has an Ad Preview Tool, which allows you to see where your advert would appear on the page (without using the search engine and thus skewing data).

This can be accessed at www.adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Some paid services that aid with keyword research are:
www.wordtracker.com
www.keywordsecret.com
www.nichebot.com

Spreadsheets, such as Microsoft’s Excel, are useful to aid you in building your keyword lists. Getting to grips with functions such as concatenation will be useful.