Original Summary

We were building the first Google Ads plan for a B2B SaaS founder. He'd never run paid search before, so we asked ChatGPT to seed the keyword list, like most people do. Turned out the AI had invented almost everything. I ran the same keywords through Google's Keyword Planner and found that 38 out of 40 had either zero searches or so few that they'd take months to gather data. The two that actually had volume were barely enough to build a campaign around. This happens because ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini don't have access to Google's search history. They're guessing based on what sounds reasonable. That's fine for copy. It's a disaster for keywords. So we started over. This time I went straight to Keyword Planner and built the seed list from real search volume. Added the strategist's angle (what problems the buyer actually searches for, not what the company thinks they should search for). Built the groups by theme, wrote the ads to match each theme, set the negatives that would kill the budget drains. Took the monthly budget and divided it by search volume per group, not by gut. The plan landed with 12 campaigns, 47 groups, 180 keywords with real volume, and a budget split that made sense. Each decision had the number behind it: why this keyword goes in this group, why this group gets this much verba, why these three negatives stop right here. Then we handed it to the founder to execute in the account. The plan wasn't the campaign yet. The plan was the argument he could show the board or himself every week without us in the room: "This is why we're spending this way." The founder said later that having the numbers made it easier to stick to the plan when results were uneven in week one. He didn't panic and kill something that just needed to warm up. That's what I keep seeing: the missing piece isn't the ads or the account setup. It's the document that explains every choice before anyone touches the Google Ads interface. How do you build your keyword list when you start a search campaign from zero?   submitted by   /u/NecessaryOdd1971 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/27 10:28:00