You're My Wonder Wheel
July 28, 2010 • Article by Nettie Wells
Today we’re going to talk about an underused but secretly powerful tool; the Google Wonder Wheel. Released in May 2009 – the wonder wheel shows a user search terms related to their current search query. This enables users to explore relevant search terms, some of which may be more useful than their original search query. Try it right now by searching on Google for “ice cream” click the ‘More search tools’ tab on the left hand menu and click on ‘Wonder Wheel’. You should get something that looks a little like this:
While all the search results appear as usual, you get this spider diagram suggesting alternative search queries as well. So if you were interested in ice cream ingredients you could then click on the relevant link and open up a whole new range of search options:
Now this might all seem a bit trivial. If you wanted to search for ice cream ingredients then that is what you would have searched for in the first place right? But where the wonder wheel can be really useful is in helping PPC advertisers find out which are the most searched for terms around the keywords they are bidding on. Working out what these terms are allows advertisers to adopt new bidding strategies and match types that will help to optimise their PPC campaigns.