I just went to a free seminar hosted by a search firm that shall remain nameless and I was shocked at some of the things they said. Now correct me if I'm wrong but does anybody see any problems with the following two pieces of advice? 1. With AdWords, Google does not penalize all words in an ad group if one or more of them have crappy CTRs, quality score, etc. I could have sworn that Google DID in fact penalize the whole ad group and this was one of the justifications for keeping your ad groups as small as possible (such as only including a single broad, phrase and exact term in each). 2. It doesn't make a difference whether your URLs with multiple words are broken up with hyphens or underscores as Google ignores them all. Ie. www.yoursite.com/cool-stuff-to-look-at is the same as www.yoursite.com/cool_stuff_to_look_at. Um...I thought that the best practice was to use hyphens to separate multiple words because then Google read them as a space versus the underscore which Google just discards and then groups all the words together. 3. There's no real need to keep your ad groups as small as I mentioned in #1, with just a single broad, phrase and exact term in each. Its perfectly fine to have a whole bunch of keywords in each ad group. Now, I could have sworn that this had a direct impact on your CPC...am I nuts here? Also wouldn't it affect how targeted your keywords could be to your ad copy? So unless I'm wrong on these three points, it kind of scares me that a search firm is giving this kind of advice out. Anybody care to back them up?
You do NOT (or should not; I guess I did as a noob) use spaces in URL's! The link will have that awful &%20 garbage in it between every word if you do that. Hyphens are best practice, as you said, both for users and engines; partial words can be indexed in URL's, but it seems hyphened phrases do better than run-on's, if only because there is a lower chance of unintentional groupings. Can't say about ad groups, but that's what I always thought, too. A quality rating affects the entire Adsense account, as I've understood it. Edit: oh, you are comparing underscores with hyphens rather than spaces. I misread. Still, hyphens are more human readable, there is no SEO difference.
In response to 1. No Google does not penalize keywords based on CTR of other keywords, however there is an adgroup quality score which is effected by the overall performance of all keywords and text ads. Yes it is perfectly fine to have many, if not hundreds of keywords in the same adgroup (although not wise for long term strategy), but you can get the most performance with really small adgroup clusters 2. For SEO this is important, for ADWORDS IT IS NOT. Google will see the url string the same not matter if its a hyphen or underscore. 3. This is true and false at the same time. There are proper methods of using large adgroup clustering of keywords. While it is fine and you can have a campaign run a long time using this method, a greater degree of performance can be obtained when clustered into very small groups or by using the 1-1 methodology. These search firms are giving out true facts, however it does not appear they are giving out the most highly performing methods. They are either naive, lazy, or simply don't want to tell you how to get a 200% or 300% increase in performance with the same keywords for about 20% less costs. However if they explained these methods in detail you would need much more time then a few hour seminar class to truly grasp these methods. For the experienced marketer, these practices would never be employed, but for the business man who wants to run his own campaign without devoting 24 hours a day to optimization, it is a viable solution. I hope this helps...
Very helpful! In regards to the AdGroup quality score, can you cite a source to confirm that? Not that I doubt you...I'd just like some "official" ammo when I share this with my company to back up my reasoning as I don't think they'd go with "well, everybody on DP says its this way." And I think you're right...you can get by with doing what they suggest and do decently w/ AdWords and such but these kind of 1-1 groupings are probably best left to people who only have a handful of campaigns they are running versus many massive campaigns with 10's of thousands of keywords.