Keyword Research for Ecommerce with Keyword Planner
A practical, Shopify-specific workflow for using Google's Keyword Planner to find and prioritize product-selling keywords.
Written by Mantas Jurgutis — Founder, Adsify — builds the Google & Meta automation merchants use daily
Editorially reviewed by Adsify Editorial on February 12, 2026 — Reviewed against Shopify, Google Ads and Meta official documentation.
Why keyword research still matters in a PMax era
Even if your main campaign is Performance Max, which doesn't use exact keyword targeting, Keyword Planner data still shapes decisions across your account: the search themes you feed PMax's asset groups, the exact-match terms in a supplementary Search campaign, and the product titles and descriptions in your Shopify catalog feed that Google Shopping matches against real queries. Keyword Planner, found under Tools and Settings > Planning > Keyword Planner in Google Ads, remains the only free source of Google's own search volume and competition data, which makes it the right starting point before writing a single ad or search theme.
Starting from your catalog, not your imagination
The most common mistake in ecommerce keyword research is guessing terms from memory instead of starting from actual product data. Export your Shopify product titles, types, and tags from Products > Export in the Shopify admin, and feed the most common nouns and modifiers — material, size, use case — into Keyword Planner's 'Discover new keywords' tool. This anchors your research in terms customers actually associate with your specific catalog rather than generic category language that may not match how your store is described in its own metafields and titles.
Reading the volume and competition columns correctly
Keyword Planner shows Avg. monthly searches as a range rather than an exact number for most accounts without significant spend history — Google explicitly documents this in support.google.com/google-ads. Don't over-index on the exact figure; use it directionally to compare terms against each other. The Competition column reflects ad auction competition, not organic difficulty, so a 'High' competition term simply means more advertisers are bidding on it, which correlates with commercial intent — often a signal it's worth testing rather than avoiding.
Segmenting by funnel stage
Group candidate keywords into three buckets: navigational/branded (your store or product line names), transactional (terms with 'buy', 'price', 'shipping', 'for sale', or a specific SKU/model), and informational (terms with 'how to', 'best', 'vs', 'review'). For a Shopify store running paid search, transactional terms should get the largest share of Search budget since they convert fastest, while informational terms are better suited to content or PMax's broader reach rather than dedicated Search spend, since they typically have lower immediate purchase intent.
Using Keyword Planner's forecast tool before committing budget
Beyond keyword discovery, the 'Get forecasts' tab lets you paste a candidate keyword list and see projected clicks, impressions, and cost at different bid levels, based on Google's historical auction data for those terms. Before allocating budget to a new Search campaign, run your shortlist through this forecast at a bid roughly matching your target CPA divided by your typical conversion rate. If the forecasted weekly click volume is too low to reach statistical significance in a month, that keyword cluster isn't worth a standalone ad group yet.
Long-tail terms and the ecommerce long tail effect
Ecommerce catalogs, especially those with variant-heavy products (size, color, material), generate a long tail of specific search queries that individually have low volume but collectively represent significant traffic. Keyword Planner's seed-based discovery undercounts this because it aggregates similar terms. To capture it, pull actual Search terms reports from any existing Search campaign (Keywords > Search terms) after a few weeks of running, and compare which unplanned queries are converting — these often reveal profitable long-tail patterns Keyword Planner's suggestions alone wouldn't have surfaced.
Seasonal and trend-driven keyword shifts
Keyword Planner's historical metrics can be viewed by month using the date range selector, which is useful for spotting seasonal spikes specific to your category — gift-related modifiers before December, or 'back to school' terms in August for relevant categories. Build a simple calendar of when each seasonal keyword cluster historically peaks, and pre-stage ad groups or search themes two to three weeks ahead of that peak so campaigns have time to exit the learning phase before demand actually arrives, rather than starting cold once search volume has already climbed.
Competitor and category-adjacent discovery
Enter a competitor's domain or a category-defining website URL into the 'Start with a website' option in Keyword Planner to surface keyword suggestions Google associates with that page's content. This is particularly useful for newer stores that don't yet have enough of their own search history to seed good suggestions. Cross-reference the resulting list against your actual catalog to filter out irrelevant suggestions — the tool surfaces broad thematic matches, not a guarantee that every suggested term fits your specific product assortment.
Translating keyword clusters into PMax search themes
Performance Max asset groups accept search themes, a signal (not a strict targeting mechanism) that tells Google's system what kinds of queries the asset group is meant to match, found under the asset group editor's 'Audience signals' section. Take your top transactional keyword clusters from Keyword Planner and add the 3-5 highest-volume, most specific phrases per asset group as search themes, matching one asset group per product category so the image and text assets shown stay relevant to the theme rather than mixing categories.
Avoiding keyword cannibalization within the account
Once you've built keyword clusters, check for overlap between candidate exact-match Search keywords and terms already covered by an active PMax campaign's search themes or Shopping listings. Since standard Search campaigns take priority in the auction over PMax for identical queries, adding a broad or loosely matched keyword can quietly redirect budget that PMax was already converting efficiently. Keep new Search keywords narrow — exact or phrase match — and reserve them for terms where you specifically want tighter control over ad copy or landing page than PMax provides.
Building negative keyword lists from the same research
Keyword Planner's 'Discover new keywords' results often surface adjacent terms that are relevant to the category but not to what you sell — a store selling running shoes might see suggestions for 'running shoe repair' or 'shoe rental,' neither of which converts for a retailer. Flag these during initial research and add them directly as negative keywords in any Search campaign, and as excluded search categories in PMax's Insights page where applicable, so budget isn't spent qualifying traffic you already know won't convert.
Keyword match types still matter for supplementary Search campaigns
For any keyword you do add to a manual Search campaign, match type materially changes reach and precision. Exact match now includes close variants (plurals, misspellings, and same-meaning phrasing) per Google's current matching documentation, so 'exact' is looser than it once was but still the tightest option. Phrase match captures the core meaning with more flexible word order and surrounding modifiers. For ecommerce transactional terms with clear buying intent, start with phrase match to balance reach and relevance, then tighten to exact match once search terms reports confirm which variants convert.
Refreshing keyword research on a schedule
Search behavior shifts as new products launch, competitors enter a category, or terminology changes (a 'phone case' search landscape looks different year over year as new device models release). Set a recurring quarterly review where you re-run Keyword Planner discovery against updated product catalog exports and compare the new suggestion list against your existing keyword and search theme sets, retiring terms that have gone stale and adding freshly surfaced ones before they become a missed opportunity.
How Adsify uses Keyword Planner data
Adsify grounds its AI-generated ad copy in actual Keyword Planner search volumes when building Performance Max and Shopping campaigns from a connected Shopify catalog, rather than generating generic descriptions. That means headlines and search themes are shaped around terms with real, measurable demand for each product category, which is the same discipline described throughout this guide — just applied automatically at the point a campaign is first launched from the app.
Turning research into a working keyword shortlist
By the end of a research pass, you should have three deliverables: a prioritized transactional keyword list ranked by forecasted clicks at your target CPA, a search-theme set organized by PMax asset group, and a negative keyword list covering irrelevant adjacent terms. Keep this as a living spreadsheet rather than a one-time document — link it to actual Search terms report exports so the next round of research starts from what customers really typed, not just what Keyword Planner predicted they might.