I had a heated discussion regarding adding more high quality keywords with good matching ad copy and landing pages. Now...for a fixed campaign budget are you better off starting with a few keywords or a lot of keywords? In other words - for a $100/day campaign with 100 ad groups & 100 keywords or $100/day campaign with 20 ad groups & 20 keywords. What would you do and why?
it is always best to have a large amount of keywords, but this can be confusing and let me attempt to explain why. I love having campaigns with thousand, or even hundreds of thousand of keyword variations. However, these keyword variations are usually the spawn of maybe 20 - 100 rooted keywords. See you want to have as many keyword variations as possible. This will give you the maximum control over spend, especially if you have a tight budget of $100 a day and you want to spend it the most efficiently. Lets assume for example you have a root keyword. Now, a root keyword is a short tail keyword that defines a specific topic, industry or product. example furniture = untargeted root keyword office furniture = targeted root keyword now lets assume we are in the offic furniture business and creating a campaign with your settings. Do I just bid on office furniture? no I want to come up with every variation possible, plus place real time tracking that will give me insight to the broad traffic that is sent to my site. So my portfolio will now include the exact and broad variations of office furniture office furniture office furniture online cheap office furniture buy office furniture and the list goes on for every variation I can think of. This variation of keyword might end up to be thousands of keywords, but you want this extremely large keyword list so that you have absolute keyword bid management under control Reason why this is important? lets assume we just placed office furniture in an adgroup and set it to broad. The broad version will be mapped to cheap office furniture when searched within Google. But the problem is I set my bid for office furniture at $1. When someone searches for office furniture I show up in say, 5th place, but when someone searches for cheap office furniture I show up in 1st position. Now to keep costs low, lets say we target position 4th and 5th position, because its an optimal position for ROI and conversion volume. If I left the campaign with just 1 root keyword, I would be over spending greatly on many variations. So to control costs, especially in a limited budget enviroment I want to have absolute control over each possible searched for keyword variation of the root keyword within my keyword portfolio. Why? because now I can place office furniture in position 4th for $1 cheap office furniture in position 4th for $.50 Buy office furniture in position 4th for $.75 office furniture website in position 4th for $.25 see what I am saying? Spend per keyword is now under tight control, and my overall avg cpc will be dramatically less, and my $100 per day budget is going to yield about double or even triple the traffic of a small keyword portfolio. Hope this helps =)
For me i would start with few most targeted keywords and small adgroups to test and track. Ultimately what i am looking for is measuring the ROI, and adding more keywords and adgroups along the way and tweaking ad variations. But just to remind that, the daily budget in Adwords is not on daily basis, it's an average over a period of 30 days. So effectively, if you set $100/day, there's a potential of spending up to $3,000 per day! (correct me if i'm wrong) This is where some people lost a lot of money in adwords if the keywords that you bid suddenly experience a spike in volume.