what is your keyword strategy with in an ad group and how to have one

There are several different strategies to group keywords in a campaign and ad groups. There is no right or wrong way to do it. How so ever you do it, you will still see clicks and traffic.

As mentioned you can do this in several different ways: You could put all your keywords into one ad group. Or you can just have one keyword per ad group, which can work if they are popular keywords. Or you can group several of them into each ad group. But there are some reasons and advantages as to why you should pay attention to how the keywords are divided into ad groups.

  • Better Ads: Segmenting your set of keywords logically will allow you to create better targeted ads for those set of keywords.
  • Better Stats or Metrics: You will now be tracking your keywords better in a much more organized way. It helps you to find which ads are working better for which keywords.
  • Easier to Maintain: Dealing with a small number of keywords allow you to manage them better over time. Creating, deleting and updating keywords and ads are much easier as you campaigns evolve.

Having several different ad groups itself has many advantages. When you have several ad groups, you should have a definite strategy as to how you they are going to work with in the campaign. As I said earlier, there is really no one right way to do this. But I will go through some techniques that you can use. These have worked well for me, but that does not necessarily mean it will work the same way for you. Feel free to tweak and customize them to suit your campaign.

One Keyword per Ad Group

First step is to select a generic keyword that you want to advertise for. This does not mean that it has to be the most generic one word keyword that you can think of. You can also choose a long tail keyword as well.

As an example, let’s say that you are advertising different types of chocolates. You don’t have to choose the generic word chocolate as the keyword, but you may choose related long tail keywords such as milk chocolate or dark chocolate for an ad group. You can go even longer such as Dark European Chocolates.

Keyword Variations

The next step is to generate a small list of keywords that are variations of the keyword that you chose. The key here is that the keywords you generate should be a close variation of the main keyword. You can now add these keywords to the ad group. Now, when you create ads for this group, you can be sure that each of the ads will be relevant for each of the keywords in the list.

Continuing the the previous example, let’s say you chose dark chocolate as your main keyword. Now, your variations of it could include “best dark chocolate“, “cheap dark chocolate“, “dark cocoa” etc etc.

Depending on the what your keyword is, it might not always be easy to come up with variations. In that case, you can use just the main keyword in the ad group. There is nothing wrong with using just one keyword in a group.

Phrase/Exact Match Types

I suggest that you always use phrase or exact match type instead of broad match types in an ad group. Of course, this is not a rule set in stone but there are some advantages to this strategy. Using broad match will get you more impressions, so if your impressions are too low then you could use broad match.

Whatever your strategy is for choosing the right keywords for an ad group, stay with it long enough to make sure that is either working or not working. Having a way consistent of categorizing keywords will help you manage your campaigns better in the long run.