Benefits of keyword monitoring

Keyword analysis and monitoring is the key to success for a PPC advertising campaign. Keyword tracking involves following the behaviour of a specific keyword over time, as opposed to working with a snapshot of data taken at just one point of time. This allows campaign managers to see trends and more accurately and predict the results of a campaign based on the previous data about a keyword. There's several aspects of a keyword behaviour that can be monitored over time.

Average CPC

The Cost per click of a keyword changes depending on the bids of all the interested websites that want their ads triggered by that keyword. Since that cost depends on external factors, out of the campaign manager control, using data that is only based on a single measurement can be misleading and lead to paying a higher CPC just because at that point of time the results were higher than average. Keyword tracking shows the CPC of a keyword over time, presenting a much more real valuation of the expected CPC.

Average Search volume

Search providers, such as Yahoo, MSN and Google, provide estimated values of the volume of queries for a specific keyword. This value can change widely from one day to the next, being affected by what is happening in the offline world. Keyword monitoring tools provide aggregated data and make possible to take decisions about a PPC campaign based on trends instead of just reacting to the specific situation of a keyword at a certain point of time.

Number of advertisers

Keyword tracking tools also monitor the average number of advertisers over time, allowing campaign managers to know how much competition exists for a certain keyword, and what kind of ads are they displaying. Since in many cases an advertiser won't have several of their ads displayed for the same keyword at the same time, a smaller number of advertisers means that a lower than average CPC bid may be enough to get enough impressions of a keyword and a better ROI. At the same time, having access to the ads that are triggered by a certain keyword is useful to write better copy for the campaign, based on what is working for other competitor's websites.

Affiliates

Along with the keyword data provided by search engines, keyword monitoring tools also track the existence of affiliate links for those keywords. This is crucial to find profitable niches for affiliate advertising campaigns, since a keyword's volume of searches directly affects the value of affiliate marketing websites and is a vital factor on deciding if that affiliate keyword is worth exploiting.

By gathering information about the performance of keywords over time, the decisions taken about the campaign are much more accurate and trends can be detected and used to forecast the performance of a specific campaign. This not only affects the ROI of a specific campaign, but it's necessary to be able to pitch future campaigns to potential advertisers that may not be comfortable with using data gathered at a specific point of time. For this reason, keyword monitoring is vital for the success of current and future campaigns and affiliate marketing initiatives.