Contextual Targeting Can be more impressive!

Google’s new Contextual Targeting Tool however gives you an in-depth look at what types of terms Google thinks are semantically related to your core keywords and also shows you totally new branches of keywords that you might not have ever thought to look for on your own.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the tool allows you to see how Google thinks related terms should be grouped together to make successful content ad groups that they can ‘understand’ in order to place your ads on the right display network pages.

To use the tool, you select a geography and language, and then pop in a few sample keywords that are most closely related to whatever it is that you’re selling on Adwords.

The tool then returns a list of pre-made content ad groups and bid suggestions that you can add to your existing campaign, or use to create a new one:

By selecting any of the suggested ad groups, you can edit the keyword phrases Google comes up with: removing keywords that are too geo-specific, or not really relevant to the human eye, or add keywords of your own that you think would round out the ad group even further.

For instance, in the below highlighted ad group, you might choose to take out the references to specific states or just have one state mentioned per ad group:

They’ve come up with a number of great ways to expand on “cheap bike insurance” including terms like “budget”, “cheap insurance forum”, “cheap auto insurance quotes” and more.  This is MUCH easier than trying plucking these out of the standard Google keyword tool.

The Contextual Targeting Tool even shows you where, based on these new ad groups, your ads might show up, right down to the exact URL:

Seeing this in advance is equivalent to getting a sneak peek at your Campaign Placement Report before you put the campaign or ad groups live.  What’s the value of this?  Well, first off you get to see what sites your ads could show on that are NOT appropriate, and should be added as campaign-wide negative site exclusions before these new ad groups are launched.  You may also notice some negative keywords creep in that could be added immediately as campaign-level negative keywords.

Given that we’re looking at car insurance-related ad groups you can likely spot a few sites here that don’t exactly match up to that theme:

So now we’ve got a list of nicely expanded ad groups that can be exported directly from here into Adwords Editor where you can add text or image ads etc…