Every so often I like to play with Google AdWords to see if I can make a couple of bucks (usually when I find a free coupon, that is). One thing that’s a pain is generating keyword lists from smaller lists.

I wrote a small CGI program, available at http://ertw.com/cgi-bin/kw.cgi , that takes lists of keywords and does a multiplication on them. ie, if you have two lists “a,b” and “c,d”, you’ll end up with “a c” “a d” “b c” and “b d”.

There are already a bunch out there that do this, but mine has the following features that I haven’t seen:

- Unlimited number of columns (well, I’ve limited it to 10), where most only offer 2
- Integration with AdWords power editing - if one of your keywords has the ** bid ** url tags in it (ie from the google interface which lets you assign bids/landing pages to a particular keyword combo), the tag will end up in the final keyword. ie, if you have

key1**http://example.com/key1

and

key2

for your columns, you’ll end up with

key1 key2**http://example.com/key1

- I don’t log the keywords you enter