Hi all I am pretty new to adwords. Been using it for a few weeks. I see that some people say they have campaigns with 10,000+ keywords. I only have about 100. Is the benefit of more keywords just more impressions? or is there something else that I am missing.. Thanks!
The benefit lies in the fact you will know what people are searching for and which exact words convert. If you just bid on 'holiday' you won't know whether your site converts for 'skiing holiday france' or 'beach holiday spain'.
And of course, the more precise your keyword match, the better your ROI ... ... using T0PS3O's example, if you sell skiing holidays, you're going to see a ton of cash being wasted on beach holiday customers The more relevant keywords in your account the better, and the more non-relevant negative keywords in your account the better still. H (and you can *always* find more keywords ...)
I think it all depends on conversions. I used generic keywords like "adsense" it did bring traffic and some resulted in sales. You have to track the ad groups performance and use it in conjunction with analytics.
I'm also new to adwords, and in my experience, you first have to add a load of keywords with controlled budget, so you know which ones do better and then remove the ones that get too expensive or convert less.
In my experience large keyword lists aren't important. Probably 95% of the clicks/traffic in a niche come from 5% of the keywords, so that's where the money is. Focusing on thousands of long tail keywords just isn't worth it.
That's why I said you have to start with a large list then delete the worthless ones. Even if you get 1 click from a keyword in a month but that click does convert it has to be considered, only low converting clicks are negative for your campaigns.
Up front research. Makes perfect sense to me. I'd rather spend my time optimizing campaings for highly searched keywords, than finding obscure long phrases.
I agree with that approach and have better success with keeping the CPC down. I think the biggest danger however is too be too targeted and only seeing the search terms a few times a day. Do you use broad, phrase, or exact match? Christoph