Hi all, I'm new to PPC and need some help from the wise. I've taken over the management of my company's adwords account. I've paused a lot of the campaigns made by the person who ran it before and have created my own equivalent campaigns. This week I've been worried since my campaigns are simply under-performing. We're not selling using PPC but trying to get people to register with our competition sites. My first thought was that the quality score of my keywords was making the price of many too expensive (we've both used long cheap keyword lists). We're trying to get under 50 pence per conversion so we have to bid relatively cheap. Today I realised that i was not using some of his better performing keywords. So I copied those that he had active in his old campaigns and pasted them into my keyword list, for a given campaign. To my shock, many or most of these keywords were suddenly out of my price range (up towards 50 pence or more). Though his campaigns were paused or deleted, the keywords in question were labelled as active and at a MCPC of 6 pence. One they appeared in my campaign, the price rose and they were labelled inactive! What's going on? Many many thanks in advance Joe
I just spoke to google and they assure me that I have a quality score problem based on having far too many keywords. Both my old and new managers were/are of the opinion that google's suggestion of having less than 20 keywords is disingenuous. The campaigns of my current boss that are paused also had keyword lists up to 1000 units, and his were on the whole performing ok. I don't know who or what to believe or think, so I'm going to test it. Any feedback most appreciated. Joe
Your Quality Score is set at keyword level. There is an overall campaign QS which impacts your keyword QS's a bit, but not by a very great amount. I've got many campaigns with thousands of keywords, that have excellent QS's. And so do other people... Whoever told you that the number of keywords was your problem spoke in error. What I would suggest is that you've lost the history of the previous campaign. Past clickthrough rates do impact your QS, and when you create a new campaign, Google has to guess how it's likely to do, so you may suffer initially, at least. Persevere, and you should get the QS's you've dreamed of, as long as your clickthrough rates/landing pages/adverts are good. As a general rule, I've found that wherever possible, taking over an existing account is usually better than recreating it.
Thanks very much for the reply. Regarding click through rates. The way it seems to have always been is that the click through rates are quite low but the conversion rates/cost are ok. I think it's just the nature of using large keyword lists and aiming for lead generation over sales. I've set up a few test campaigns with multiple adgroups, so as to use under 20 highly targeted keywords per group, hoping for an improved quality score. From what I hear from the more experienced people in the industry, long keyword lists are ok, as you said. I'm just going to run a test to see if what google themselves recommend works well. The point of using large numbers of adgroups is so i can still use large keyword lists. Anymore feedback still very much appreciated. Joe
This idea google has that only a small number of keywords works is challenged by many people who are very experienced in the industry. The person from whom I took over this account did a very reasonable job with very long keyword lists. I am trying small highly focused lists as google suggest however. Joe
There is no penalty from Google if you have a long list. I suspect that a lot of people with long keyword lists don't group them and target their adverts properly, so there would be a correlation between the number of keywords that you have and your clickthrough rate. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have many keywords, it means that you should only have as many as you've got the time/will to manage.
Google's own published guides and the person I most recently spoke to at the helpcentre both insist that small targetted keyword groups of < 20 work best. I'm not being argumentative just quoting them. Joe
Absolutely agree. You want your keywords to be in small groups. That's not the same as saying you need a small number of keywords. You want a lot of groups - for your major keywords, one group each is often justified.
I've actually had some people who are pretty "high up" in the AdWords food chain at Google tell me the same thing. I told them they are wrong - I see evidence that validates my opinion every day. So while G' may say the number of keywords in an ad group has a direct effect on the QS I call BS I agree that for most a small, tightly themed group of keyword will "work better" but don't agree that the number of keywords has any direct impact on the QS.
My approach to the long tail backs you up. I often start with 10k+ keywords, and after a month, delete anything with 0 impressions - usually this leaves me with <200 keywords. I've never seen my campaign improve its quality as a result of this.