A key in this industry is getting highly targeted groupings of keywords. I had a couple campaigns for a certain subject a few years ago that were grouped very loosely in YSM. Those keywords produced a good amount of traffic and I basically had about 10K keywords grouped in 10 Adgroups. I only used 2 different "AD's" and 1 landing page. It worked pretty good. Here it is 2 years later and my campaign barely even gets impressions. My question to all the so experts out there. How tight should adgroups be? I know it really depends on the industry, but I am sure there is a rule of thumb. I took this same campaign and broke it down into about 25 different adgroups with about 150 Keywords per group. That did not work...same results. What is a good rule of thumb?
here there is a really good post about how to create adgroup, is a little bit time consuming but you get the idea http://www.cdfnetworks.com/anatomy-of-a-winning-ppc-to-affiliate-campaign/
Actually Just read that the other day. I guess what I am asking is that......is breaking down keywords into small (5-10 keyword) groups the best way to do this? I have about 50,000K words for this industry and that would take a long long time......
I think you answered your own question. It's just a matter of how much work you want to put into it. But if you build the campaign right, you will see results. I would reduce that keyword list by at least 50% first.
I would say that relevance of the keywords is more important than the number of them... In other words, an ad group with 500 keywords about dell laptop computers is better than an ad group with 50 keywords about computers. The number of keywords in an ad group is worth nothing, yes, but the most important thing is to make sure that all of the keywords are actually related.
This doesn't really answer your question, but I'd say there is a 99% chance that the reason it "isn't working" is probably because whatever niche you are in is way more saturated than it was two years ago. Personally, sometimes I have 1 keyword in an adgroup, sometimes I have 500... As Gtace mentioned, it depends how closely related they are.
I just realized that I had a big typo here - That should say "The number of keywords in an ad group is worth noting..." 'Nothing' really changes what I was trying to say, lol