Keyword Planning

Important: All requests to Keyword Planning services for both standard and basic access are rate limited. Fewer requests are allowed per minute when compared to other services. Our recommendation is to cache or store results as you will receive the same response over a long time span. For example, if you request a set of existing keywords, the response is not going to change over a period of hours or days. In the case of historical metrics, the statistics refresh monthly.

Keyword Planning is a process for getting keyword metrics and forecasts as well as searching for new keywords to add to campaigns.

You create Keyword Plans that can be accessed and modified at a later time. A Keyword Plan is structured similarly to a standard serving campaign: KeywordPlan contains a KeywordPlanCampaign which contains several KeywordPlanAdGroup which contains many KeywordPlanCampaignKeyword or KeywordPlanAdGroupKeyword. The full set of Keyword Plan entities needs to be created in order to get Forecasted Metrics or Historical Metrics (search volume data).

Workflow

Here's a common workflow when using Keyword Planning.

1. Create a manageable list of ideas. You can use historical search volume and CPC to reduce the list of keywords to be included in forecasts.
2. Generate forecast metrics for keywords in order to get traffic for keywords in the plan.
3. Create a new campaign with the new keywords.
4. Adjust the keywords and estimation parameters to find a setup which delivers your marketing goals using the keywords and CPC bids which you selected above.
5. Leave the campaign for the duration of the KeywordPlan.forecastPeriod attribute. Our forecasts are based on your campaign running unmodified for the duration of the forecast period. Changing the campaign including the bids and targeting prior to then will change performance because we take daily and seasonal trends into consideration.

Keyword Planning in the API can:

• Generate keyword ideas
• Generate ad group themes
• Generate historical metrics
• Generate forecast metrics