Keyword planning

Page Summary

• Keyword Planning services are rate limited, allowing fewer requests per minute compared to other services.

• It is recommended to cache or store results from Keyword Planning as responses do not change frequently, though historical metrics refresh monthly.

• Keyword Planning involves getting keyword metrics and forecasts, as well as searching for new keywords for campaigns.

• A common workflow includes generating keyword ideas, generating forecast metrics, creating a new campaign, adjusting settings, and leaving the campaign unmodified for the forecast period.

• The API for Keyword Planning can generate keyword ideas, ad group themes, historical metrics, and forecast metrics.

Keyword planning lets you get keyword metrics and forecasts and search for keywords to add to campaigns.

Using KeywordPlanIdeaService in the Google Ads API, you can perform four core planning operations without creating persistent KeywordPlan resources:

• Generate keyword ideas: Discover keyword suggestions from seed keywords, URLs, or sites, returned alongside historical search metrics and concept annotations.
• Generate ad group themes: Automatically group keywords into themes aligned with your existing ad groups, complete with suggested match types.
• Generate historical metrics: Retrieve historical search volume, competition, and top-of-page bid metrics for an existing list of up to 10,000 keywords.
• Generate forecast metrics: Estimate future clicks, cost, or conversions for an inline CampaignToForecast configuration over a future date range.

Important: Requests to KeywordPlanIdeaService for both standard and basic access enforce stricter rate limits than other Google Ads API services, permitting fewer requests per minute. See the API quotas and limits guide for details.

Cache or store results locally because responses for a given set of keywords remain consistent over hours or days, and historical search volume metrics refresh monthly.

Workflow

The following steps outline a typical end-to-end implementation workflow for keyword planning:

1. Create a manageable list of candidate keywords. Discover suggestions with keyword ideas (which already include historical metrics for each idea) or evaluate an existing keyword list with historical metrics to filter keywords by search volume, competition, and cost-per-click (CPC).
2. Optionally group your filtered keywords into themed ad groups using ad group themes, or define your own ForecastAdGroup structure based on product categories or creative relevance.
3. Generate forecast metrics using an inline CampaignToForecast and a forecast_period (starting in the future and up to one year from today) to estimate potential traffic for the selected keywords. (Note that CampaignToForecast fields and returned forecast metrics differ between v24 and later and v23 and earlier.)
4. Adjust your selected keywords, match types, daily budget, and bidding strategy parameters to find a configuration that meets your marketing goals, and then apply the finalized keywords to your serving campaigns and ad groups.
5. Leave the campaign settings, bids, and targeting unmodified for the duration of the forecast_period. Forecast models assume consistent settings across the forecast window while accounting for daily and seasonal trends.