It’s a neat little example of a VSTO Office add-in that is both useful and appropriate.

After install (it’s a simple ClickOnce app) a new toolbar will appear in Excel (that’s it over on the right in the screen shot below).

You’ll need an AdCenter account set up to use it.

Start with the Keyword Wizard and seed it with a keyword term (I used ‘microsoft dynamics’ in the example below).

I’ve opted to include all the options for Campaign association and keyword term inclusion. (I limited the keyword suggestions to 10 for the sake of brevity in the example). I included monetization as well as search volume details.

As you can see, the returned data (based on Bing search engine usage and adCenter analytics is pretty comprehensive. The searches are based on historical as well as future forecasts. The clicks an impressions are based on adCenter usage.

Benefits

The benefit of using a tool like this is that it can highlight areas to target.

For example, if you are a Microsoft Dynamics consulting company you may have neglected to include Great Plains related keywords in your advertising and site page titles, but the above will show that they are relevant.

Likewise, it’s useful knowing that people are searching on the full term ‘microsoft dynamics ax 2009’ – by targeting the full version (and not just leaving it at ‘microsoft dynamics ax’) you open yourself to not only more searchers, but also more specific searches – and conversions are more often made on specific terms.

Try It

You can download and try the Add-in from here. They also have a bunch of useful video tutorials.

And this is true especially for SEO and SEM efforts. Too often though, SEO is an after thought, or your Google AdWords campaigns get delegated to the junior developer to take care of. Consider you company. How often have you off-loaded proper Page Title tag construction to a developer, instead of a marketer. Or perhaps it’s worse. You have an automated Title tag generated from the first paragraph of content. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Or consider your AdWords campaigns. Take a look at your campaigns now. Pick and Ad group and check how many different ads you are running (and thus testing with). If it is only one ad then you are making the classic AdWords newbie mistake. Instead you should be testing multiple ads, and always improving the CTR. It’s an ongoing process, and not one you can simply set and forget.

The good news? A huge number of AdWords advertisers are in this newbie category, wasting money daily and making Google one of the most profitable internet companies on the planet. Don’t fall into this trap. Take your AdWords campaigns seriously and get working to turn them into profit generating strategies.