The Google Adwords Keywords Tool can be used to Research New Affiliate Products

The free-to-use Google AdWords Keywords Tool (GAKT) can be exploited by the affiliate in two important ways. The first is to conduct market research, the second is to select keywords for keyword campaigns. While the latter is its intended use and the main utility of the tool, the former is very useful to the affiliate. To illustrate how the Google AdWords Keywords Tool can be used for market research, let us imagine that you are considering promoting several different van insurance companies as an affiliate. For simplicity we will restrict it to a comparison of two companies although in practice it would be many more. We will call the rival insurance providers 'company X' and 'company Y'. You enter 'company x van insurance' into the GAKT keyword field and Google will tell you how many searches a month are undertaken for this and other related keywords. You can repeat the process for 'company y van insurance'. If there are far more searches for X's van insurance than Y's, then even if you decide to promote both on your website, you would be wise to give X a more prominent listing unless you believe that you can promote Y van insurance more effectively via your own content. In this way, the GAKT search popularity will assist you to determine which brands to promote and which are harder to sell and best avoided. Basically, the more people that are searching for a particular brand, the more likely that brand is to prove successful on your affiliate website. One practical aspect of this is that you may choose to promote products that pay lower commissions in the expectation that they will make you more money given their relative search popularity. This is because their conversion rate (frequency of completed sales) is likely to be higher than with the less popular products. Note that the point of this exercise is not to identify which keywords to use in your campaigns but to determine which products are likely to sell well if you promote them. Indeed, the affiliate is generally not permitted to bid on brand names as part of the terms and conditons of the affiliate program provided by the insurance brand. Few affiliates use the Google AdWords Keywords Tool in this way to conduct market research. However, it has much to recommend it. It's free; it's exceptionally quick and easy; it is a reliable proxy for likely conversion success; it is a superb sample size for research purposes; and it is representative of the people you will aim to attract to your website, given that they are all seeking van insurance online. This model, of course, can be applied to any market sector. The only challenge to the validity of this methodology is that you are making assumptions about the surfers that are looking for van insurance in general (who may visit your site) based on data relating to those who have already determined their brand choice (and who won't visit your site as you cannot use brand bidding). However, in view of a commonality of brand awareness and popularity across the general population, it is reasonable to assume that your cohort will have similar brand preferences. In practice, this is invariably born out by the effectiveness of Google AdWords Keywords Tool-assisted brand choices. The above approach can recommended for routine use. It can be, in fact, one of the most reliable predictors of campagin success and may, therefore, save the affiliate much trial and error when developing new campaigns in new market sectors. It's not often that such an easy to use tool, that's also free, is a sensitive and specific predictor in the uncertain world of ecommerce, but in my experience, that's exactly what it is. A good test of its effacacy is to test your currently promoted brands, given that you will already be aware of their relative effectiveness, and see if their hit ratios have a close relationship to your current success rates.