The first step to good keyword organization is to identify your ad groups. Microsoft’s adLabs has a nice tool in helping to first determine your ad groups.

The Keyword Group Detector tool lets one input a keyword and then see the related items to that keyword.

It’s similar to the often forgotten Google Sets project.

This can be very useful for finding related keywords, or starting to group similar words together.

A search for a word like ‘marketing’ will bring back related words such as advertising, ads, etc. Words that are more likely to be adjectives than ad groups.

A search for a more commercial term such as ‘ipod’, brings back ‘ipod mini’, “i-pod shuffle”, “apple i pod”. These different terms are better served in their own ad group.

The tool works off of sorting data, so it doesn’t care about spellings. Some will like this as it’s the reality of searches. Other’s won’t like this as they don’t want to make ad groups from misspellings. Either way, be aware that some of the keywords will be either misspelled or jargon.

In the above example, “ipod” can be seen to be spelled as: i pod, ipod, and i-pod. It is important to understand those are the words being searched even if they don’t translate into being an ad group.

If you are just starting down the road of organizing keywords, this can be a useful tool to do some research.

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