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Much like a beehive or beaver dam, PPC account success almost always hinges on the structure of things. I remember back in the good ‘ol days when all you needed was a metric ton of keywords and half a brain to direct a firehouse of traffic to your website.

Those days, sadly, are long gone.

When you have to contend with Quality Scoring the tighter your keywords are grouped – the more your ads reflect the denotation and connotation of the keywords associated with them – the better.

So this begs the question – how do you decide upon a structure for your PPC accounts? What is too granular to scale – or too loose to score well on CTR and relevance?

WordStream’s Keyword Niche Finder Tool helps with making those determinations by uncovering keyword relationships associated with base – or “head” – keywords.  For example, if you sell computer hardware and are considering building a PPC account around the keyword “computer”, this tool spells out common keyword buckets for that vertical:

As you can see, this makes identifying both positive niches (“computer laptop”, “computer systems”) and potential negative keywords (“computer science”) a breeze.

The Best Bits

The depth of the data is pretty impressive, with keyword buckets containing anywhere between 50 and 200 keywords to dig into. Each of these keywords (or groups of keywords) I see as defining a potential Ad Group, and from this list it’s just a hop, skip and jump to a live, well-structured campaign.

Append some relevant modifiers (such as “buy”, “shopping” or “store”) and you’ll cover some transactional intent along the way. Not too bad for 30 minutes of work!

But is it problem-free?

The only nagging irritation I have with this tool is the export function – or lack there of. To get your keyword buckets into a spreadsheet you have to build an account and email them to yourself.

This is obviously an email gathering tactic (and a damn good one) but with so many other tools – like Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Tool, and even the Google Keyword Tool – you can simply export the keyword lists right to .CSV or Excel and never break from your work.

I don’t mind receiving WordStream’s email marketing – in fact they send a helpful 5 part series on how to use the tools. I just think that in this case the business objectives were possibly put above the user experience. I don’t like having to stop what I’m doing, check my email, save the file, etc. when this could all be done in the browser. Even if you’ve signed into an account you STILL have to email new lists to yourself. There’s just no reason for that.

In Summary

I think this tool is unique in that it groups keywords for you. That is half the battle with traditional PPC build-outs, and obviously something that you still have to watch when using this tool (“automation as guide, not panacea” I always say). But the speed with which you can get moving on a meaningful account structure coupled with a (slightly irritating) export process should be enough of a value proposition for any savvy Internet Marketer to integrate this tool into their portfolio.