Find Profitable Keywords: E-Commerce Google Ads Guide

Most advice on finding keywords for e-commerce is rubbish. It usually starts and ends with firing up Google's Keyword Planner, finding a few high-volume terms, and chucking them into a campaign. This is the fastest way to burn through your budget with nothing to show for it but a massive bill and a bunch of window shoppers who never had any intention of buying.

The truth is, the most profitable keywords aren't the ones with tens of thousands of monthly searches. They're the ones typed in by someone with a specific, urgent problem that your product solves. They're not searching for "running shoes"; they're searching for "best running shoes for marathon training with flat feet". The first is research, the second is a cry for help from a buyer. Your job isn't to find keywords; it's to find the pain. If you can get this right, you can build a hugely profitable ad account, even in a competitive market.

So why is the old way so wrong?

Relying solely on tools like Google Keyword Planner is a trap. The tool is designed to get you to spend more money with Google, not necessarily to make you more money. It pushes you towards broad, high-volume keywords because that's where the most traffic is. But traffic doesn't pay the bills. Sales do.

Think about it. A keyword like "organic dog food" gets thousands of searches a month. But what's the intent behind it? It could be a student writing a paper, someone curious about what it is, or a person just starting their research. They are miles away from making a purchase. You'll pay for every one of those clicks, and very few will convert.

Now consider a keyword like "buy grain-free puppy food for sensitive stomach UK". The volume is tiny in comparison, maybe only 50 searches a month. But the person searching this knows *exactly* what they want. They've identified a problem (sensitive stomach), a solution (grain-free puppy food), and they've added a purchase modifier ("buy") and a location ("UK"). This is a customer, not a researcher. These are the keywords that build profitable businesses. It's often difficult to avoid wasting money on the wrong keywords, but understanding this distinction is the first step.

Introducing the Pain Matrix: How to Map Keywords to Buying Intent

To stop wasting money, you need a framework for thinking about keywords. I call it the Pain Matrix. It plots keywords on two axes: Problem Awareness and Purchase Intent. Your goal is to focus your budget on the keywords where both are high.

Let's visualise it. Imagine a simple grid. The bottom-left is low awareness and low intent. The top-right is high awareness and high intent. This is where the gold is.

Most beginners spend 90% of their budget in the top-left quadrant (ToFu), wondering why nobody buys. Your goal should be to flip this. Spend 90% of your budget on the bottom-right quadrants (BoFu and Brand). These are your money-making keywords. For a more detailed breakdown of this approach, you might want to look at this guide on finding profitable keywords using this pain-based framework.

How do you find these magical BoFu keywords?

This is where the real work begins, and it doesn't start with a keyword tool. It starts with your brain and your customers.

1. Start with Modifiers
Think about the words people use when they're ready to buy. These are your "buying intent" modifiers. Make a list.

• -> Buy Modifiers: buy, purchase, order, shop for, discount, coupon, sale, deal, cheap, affordable.
• -> Urgency Modifiers: fast shipping, next day delivery, free shipping.
• -> Location Modifiers: UK, London, near me.
• -> Specifics: [your product name], [competitor name] alternative, [product model number], [product size/colour].

2. Spy on Your Competitors (Properly)
Don't just look at what keywords your competitors are bidding on. Look at the *ads they are running* for those keywords. This tells you what they believe is the most compelling message for that search term. If they're running a "20% Off Sale" ad for the keyword "buy hiking boots", that's a strong signal that price is a major factor for that audience. If their ad focuses on "Free Next Day Delivery", they're targeting buyers who need it now. Use this intelligence to inform your own ad copy and landing page offers.

3. Mine Your Search Terms Report
This is the most important report in your entire Google Ads account. It shows you the *exact* queries people typed before clicking your ad. It's a goldmine. Every week, you should be doing two things here:

• -> Finding new, high-intent keywords to add to your campaigns. You'll often discover long, specific phrases you never would have thought of.
• -> Finding irrelevant queries to add as negative keywords. If you sell premium hiking boots and see a click for "cheap kids wellies", you add "kids" and "wellies" and "cheap" as negative keywords immediately. This is non-negotiable. It's how you stop the bleeding.

4. Talk to Your Customers (or Read Their Reviews)
How do your existing customers describe your product? What problems were they trying to solve before they found you? The language they use is the language you should be using in your ads and bidding on as keywords. If customers constantly say your dog food "stopped my puppy's itching", then "dog food for itchy puppy" is a keyword you need to own.

How much should a profitable keyword actually cost?

This is the million-dollar question, isn't it? The answer is: it depends entirely on your business maths. A keyword that's wildly unprofitable for one store could be a bargain for another. You need to know your numbers. Specifically, you need to know your Average Order Value (AOV), your Gross Margin, and your target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

Here's a simple visualisation of how CPCs can differ based on intent.

As you can see, you pay a premium for high intent. And you should be happy to. Paying £3 for a click that has a 10% chance of turning into a £150 sale is a much better deal than paying £0.50 for a click that has a 0.1% chance. To figure out your own numbers, I've built a simple calculator below. Play around with it to understand the relationship between your metrics and what you can afford to pay per click.

Understanding these numbers transforms your approach. You're no longer guessing. You're making data-driven decisions about which keywords are worth your investment. This is the foundation of any profitable Google Ads strategy in the UK.

Structuring Your Campaigns Around Intent

Finding the right keywords is half the battle. The other half is organising them properly. A messy account structure is just as bad as bad keywords. You need to structure your campaigns and ad groups around user intent.

The best practice, especially for your most valuable keywords, is something called Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs), or at least very tightly themed groups. This means you have one ad group for "buy waterproof hiking boots", another for "Salomon hiking boots sale", and so on. Why go to this trouble?

• -> Hyper-Relevance: You can write an ad that speaks *directly* to the search query. If someone searches "buy Salomon Quest 4D boots", your ad headline can be "Buy Salomon Quest 4D Boots - Free UK Delivery". This level of relevance is impossible with a bloated ad group containing 50 different keywords.
• -> Higher Quality Score: Google rewards this relevance with a higher Quality Score. A higher Quality Score means you pay less per click than your competitors to get the same ad position. It's Google's way of rewarding advertisers who provide a good user experience.
• -> Better Data: It's much easier to see which specific search terms are performing well and which are not when they're isolated in their own ad group. You can make much smarter decisions about where to increase or decrease bids.

For many stores, true SKAGs can be a lot to manage. A good compromise is to group keywords by their core theme and modifiers. For example:

Notice the use of different match types. I'd typically use Phrase match for investigational terms to capture variations, and Exact match for my highest-intent, product-specific terms to maintain tight control. I would avoid Broad match almost entirely until the account has a lot of conversion data and you can trust Google's smart bidding to do its job. For a more complete overview, have a look at our guide on using Google Ads for e-commerce growth.

Don't Forget Shopping & Performance Max

While this guide has focused on keyword-based Search campaigns, for any e-commerce store, Google Shopping and Performance Max (PMax) are absolutely critical. These campaigns don't rely on keywords you bid on in the same way. Instead, they rely on the data in your product feed.

Your product feed *is* your keyword strategy for these campaigns.

Google scans your product titles and descriptions to decide which searches to show your products for. If your product title is just "Brown Boots", you're dead in the water. If your title is "Salomon Men's Quest 4D GTX Waterproof Leather Hiking Boots - Size 10 UK", you have a much better chance of showing up for highly specific, high-intent searches.

Optimising your product feed is a whole topic in itself, but the key takeaway is this: treat your product titles like you would treat your most important BoFu keywords. Be descriptive, be specific, and include the brand, product type, key features, gender, colour, and size. This is one of the biggest levers you can pull to improve performance, often even more so than tinkering with bids. E-commerce founders often struggle with scaling their ads, but getting the feed right is a huge part of the puzzle. We cover this in more depth in our troubleshooting guide for scaling paid ads.

Your Action Plan for Profitable Keywords

We've covered a lot of ground. It can feel overwhelming, so I've broken down the entire process into a simple, actionable table. Follow these steps, and you'll be lightyears ahead of most of your competition.

When to get some help

Finding profitable keywords is a skill. It takes time, patience, and a willingness to get your hands dirty with data. Following the steps I've outlined will put you on the right path, but it can be a full-time job in itself. You have a business to run, products to source, and customers to serve.

Sometimes, the most profitable move you can make is to bring in an expert who has already made the mistakes, learned the lessons, and knows the shortcuts. We've helped numerous e-commerce brands achieve significant growth by applying rigorous, intent-focused principles. For instance, one campaign we worked on for a women's apparel store generated a 691% return, and another for a cleaning products company saw a 633% return. The core of that success, regardless of the platform, was understanding the customer's journey and intent—just as we've discussed for Google Ads.

If you're finding yourself spending hours staring at your Google Ads account and still not seeing the results you want, it might be time for a chat. We offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can take a look at your account and give you some honest, actionable advice on where your biggest opportunities are. You've got nothing to lose but wasted ad spend.