Recently I was doing some research and coming up with some creative promotion ideas for a client and I came across some great articles by people for promoting stuff offline. As I was looking at these long, involved tasks that were going cost an arm and a leg, I realized that those of us who do marketing online sometimes forget how good we have it.

Even the dinkiest mom and pop store can move online and create a presence; for the most part, the promotion they would do for their company doesn’t cost them more than their time and labor. The wealth of resources is numerous for someone serious about conducting an online marketing campaign.

We take the fact that we can build buzz, promote new products, make new connections and have access to limitless amounts of free information for granted. And all from our own home or office. In today’s suffering economy with gas prices continuing to rise, this flexibility is more important than ever.

So, take a moment and remember how good we have it online.

Google Adwords has pumped up the volume by adding a new feature to the external keyword tool that now shows aapproximate search volumes and approximate average search volumes for keywords in numbers instead of those annoyingly vague little bar graphs.

We’ve been waiting for this.

When you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list for your PPC campaigns (or like I use it for, just good feedback on search terms and competition for those terms in general), you’ll see the approximate number of searches matching your keywords that were performed on Google.

Even as approximations, these numbers completely up the value of the keyword tool. Imho its going to be tremendous and we’re going to see a huge shift in the way people create campaigns and which keywords start to cost more and less.

Here’s the screenshot I took when I searched for “social media:”

Needless to say, this is HUGE.

The official announcement says that new data will help with some major things for PPC, including:

• Your account structure
• Budget planning
• Keyword choice

I say this will apply to any account, budget planning or Keyword choices that are made in internet marketing campaigns across the board. Especially since Yahoo shut down Overture, this new feature will make the Google Keyword tool THE place to go to get an idea, in numbers, of the direction you will take a campaign.

Google has kept the lid on this little gem for a long time; back in March Barry Schwartz did a brief post for SearchEngine Land questioning whether this was in truly in development.

If you test out the broad and phrase matches, as well as the exact and negative data, you’ll see that numbers vary according to each and they’re all different and specific.

Thus people can get a broad idea of how much a term is searched for in various combinations (Broad match type):

They can also get specific numbers just for that search phrase (Phrase match type, involving no other words in the search other than the exact phrase in parentheses):

One thing Google hasn’t updated with this new tool is the CPC problems with accuracy. I know what several keywords cost, and the CPC price is way off. Once they fix that, I think Google Keyword Tool will further enhance a great tool.

Hehe.

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