Using Google Keyword Planner for ideas

I want to talk about another section of the Keyword Planner tool, and that's the metrics and forecast area. So I'm back here at the landing page for Keyword Planner, and I got here by selecting the tools icon in the upper right hand corner and selecting Keyword Planner from the drop-down menu. I'm going to select Get metrics and forecasts. And now we can enter our keywords, either one on each line or separated by commas, and we can add as many as we need here. I'll go ahead and enter in some of the terms that we saw earlier. Once you've added those keywords, select Get Started. What Google is going to do is forecast a plan for you. It's going to make some suggestions about an average cost-per-click, how much you'd likely spend per day, and how many clicks you'd get that day. Now, this is simply a forecast. It's not necessarily exactly what's going to happen. But what it does do is it helps you understand how you'd like to organize your campaigns and your ad groups. You may see, for example, that the bmw z4 price keyword has a much lower percentage of clicks than the bmw z4 keyword. We can also see that the average CPCs vary, as well as the average click-through rates. This is helpful as you begin to understand where you want to spend your money and whether certain keywords are worth going after. What you can do is adjust this forecast by selecting the drop-down arrow here in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Google then lets you select a metric, Clicks, Impressions, or Cost. Let's leave it on Clicks. And then what we can do is follow this chart. So here let's say I was interested in about 1,700 clicks a day. If I select that, Google's going to update my forecast and say I'll spend about £5.1 thousand and a £6 CPC for 1,700 clicks. So what I can do here is start to look at my plan and begin to identify if this makes sense. Can I convert the traffic in such a way that setting a £6 maximum CPC bid, which in this case yields a £2.93 average CPC, is that going to pan out for me? Will I see a return on investment? If so, then spending this money is likely a good idea. If I don't think I can return that type of investment, what I can do is instead choose the drop-down for Cost and identify the maximum CPC that does pencil out to a ROI for me. And from here, I can identify how much I'd likely spend and how many clicks I'd like to get. In this case, spending £1.4K would yield 1,100 clicks at an average cost of £1.28. If this feels doable, then this looks like a pretty good plan. Now, we'll spend some more time about selecting budgets and bids, but this is a great way to refine your keyword list, get a better idea of how it's going to perform, and understand just how much you might actually have to spend to get traffic to your website.