The Google Ads Advisor combines our insights into your competitors' strongest advertising history with a review of your current ads. Using information like that from both sides lets us make our best recommendations for your Google Ads campaign.

In short, these are the most powerful keywords you're not already buying.

With our options for negative match keywords, this ad campaign advisor also points out suggested areas to cut waste.

Let's have a look around to show you how to use it.

If you prefer to watch a video on it, try our Google Ads Advisor tutorials for starting with a domain and starting with a keyword.

We suggest that you start with your domain (or one that you manage).

Type it into the main search bar, and give the system just a moment to turn out keyword suggestions specific to that site.

We find the 5 closest competitors for this domain. Then, we look at the entire set of keywords that they buy, giving special attention to keywords that many of these competitors buy. Those get bumped up to the top of the list.

This is the starting point for our recommendations.

The keywords that you see for Buy Recommendations are sorted in order of our strongest recommendations.

We give weight to keywords that:

Each keyword comes with a rating. They stretch from our strongest ratings of "Great Buy" and taper off down to "Consider." Anything on the list is worth considering for your campaign (based on the above criteria), but all signs point to the search terms listed first. Prioritize the "Great Buy" and "Good Buy" terms.

Note: It's not as important to memorize the rating names. The indicator chart helps you see which recommendations are stronger than others.

Each suggested keyword in the list is one you could add to your Google Ads campaign. We always recommend testing your keywords and ad copy, but these come with a higher level of confidence.

We include individual keyword metrics alongside the ratings for two reasons:

A Look at the Metrics We Use

Impressions/Mo: Tied to search volume, a high impression count helps ensure that your ad will be seen, if not clicked.

Cost/Click, Cost/Month: The actual cost will depend on your quality score, but this estimates can help you see how this keyword might fit within your budget.

Remember that some keywords pay for themselves. Don't rule out a potentially high-converting search term for its perceived cost alone.

Potential Clicks/Mo: We look at the number of clicks that go to ads on the page to help you get a sense of how many you might get from advertising on this term.

Competitors who Bought

The more "agreement" on a keyword, the more likely we are to recommend it. Each circle represents one of the 5 competitors we found for this domain. (You can change these competitors. More on that in the next section.)

Some of these keywords have all 5 competitors advertising on them. Some have 3 or 4. We fill the circles to show you which of the competitors bought that particular keyword, and hovering over them tells you which domains they are.

(The purple circle is "open," meaning that the corresponding advertiser does not buy this keyword.)

When you start the report with a keyword search (Google Ads Advisor for a Keyword), instead of a domain, we find the top 5 advertisers on the keyword and call them "competitors" here.

Competitors Button

There are options at the top of the page that help taper your results to a tighter list or change your results altogether.

You can change the competitors from the ones that we found using the "Competitors" button at the top of the results. Updating the competitors will likely update your list of recommendations.

If you prefer niche-focused suggestions, enter a few keywords into that same "Competitors" section, and we'll share new recommendations with you.

Buy Recommendations/Negative Recommendations Toggle

Our advisor works two ways. It offers suggestions of keywords to add to your Google Ads campaign, and it offers suggestions of keywords to consider dropping. We refer to these savings opportunities as "Negative Recommendations." and you can switch to that option using this dropdown.

These are keywords that your domain advertises on, but no other competitors do. Unless these are branded (and protected) keywords, or they match specific products you sell, these could be wasteful ads.

It's up to you to determine if they are worth buying. Look at your conversions or the actions on your ads.

What do you do with negative recommendations?

Some of these keywords might be intentionally in your Google Ads campaign, and you can drop or remove them. Some of them might be unintentional matches. Those will require some negative match settings in your Google Ads manager.

More Options

Filter: This is an include/exclude filter that can help you find terms that match a word or phrase you type. This comes in handy when you want to exclude your branded terms from a negative match report. Or you might include a topic to see keywords that match it.

Add Button: This button does not add keywords to your Google Ads campaign. It adds keywords to the built-in SpyFu project manager (occasionally called "MySpyFu"). That project manager organizes keywords from multiple projects and tracks your domain's performance on them.

Export: This is the best option to take keywords to your Google Ads campaign. You have a few different formatting options depending on what you'd like to do with these suggestions.

Remember that you have unlimited searches and updates that you can make to our Google Ads Advisor. Start small. Work with the options to find keyword suggestions that you can test with relevant ad copy.