How many keywords do you use?

[seedstotal]

I was just wondering how much it matters how many keywords you use in a campaign? As CTR will be calculated for each keyword and/or for your ad?
And wich one will be judged by the master google in order to like or dislike your ad?

 

[jason830]

i just put 4,5 keyword in one page.and it seems 5%-8% is good.

 

[Nancy123]

Its upto you how many keywords you want to highlight, i ever use my most top and searches keywords in google adwords but obvious the CTR/bid also goes high and i get best results also.

 

[Colin Parker]

I would always advise any new PPC advertiser who is running their own campaign to start their campaign this way:

1. identify your ideal customer for one particular product or service that you offer.

2. identify a maximum of 6 of the most relevant keywords that your ideal customer would use when searching - however if one keyword is searched for in volume by your ideal customer just use that one.

3. put the keyword/s into a group and bid on exact match only - this means you have total control over when your ads are shown.

4. write two ads which include the main keywords in the headline and wherever possible a USP feature and benefit and call to action in the text - keep split testing these ads to improve CTR.

5. design a website/page which is specifically designed and copywritten for the one particular product or service your are advertising and direct all traffic to that page.

6. implementing points 3,4,5 will positively impact on Quality Score which will lead to higher ad positions and lower CPC.

7. to improve Quality Score still further wherever possible bid high enough to get into the top 3 positions on the left above the organic listings - the biggest effect on your QS at the start of your campaign will be low CTR and the lower you bid, the lower your ad position, and this puts you on the back foot right from the off.

One of the main reasons for starting with one product or service with specific advertising is that it is far easier to test and improve website conversion.

Website conversion is THE KEY to an effective and profitable PPC campaign. 90% of advertisers make the mistake of trying to improve sales by spending more money driving more traffic to a poorly converting site.

That is the equivalent of trying to increase sales by giving more appointments to a lousy salesman. That is business suicide offline - and it is PPC suicide online.

When your site converts high you can afford to bid higher than your competitors (no matter who they are) because you are making more money than they are on those keywords. This is one of the huge advantages of PPC advertising and whenever I enter a market this my aim - to dominate the top positions on my selected keywords.

Once you have a site format that converts for your first selected product/service repeat the format and write specific copy for the next selected product/service ... and so on.

As your first campaign starts to convert you can then expand your keywords to phrase match options and broadmatch (but only when you fully understand how it works).

As soon as you start phrase or broadmatch, negative keywords become a massively important part of your campaign. Do a keyword search on Google's tool for broad, phrase, exact and negative and wherever you see words or phrases irrelevant to your campaign include them as negatives.

Success on PPC is all about using a method and then monitoring and applying continued umprovements to keywords, ads, bids and your website.

Colin Parker

 

[hevanapl]

3 to 5 is your best choice, not too many, not too less

 

[crossdaz]

I was just wondering how much it matters how many keywords you use in a campaign? As CTR will be calculated for each keyword and/or for your ad?
And wich one will be judged by the master google in order to like or dislike your ad?

There isn't a correct number.

Start with as many keywords as you can find and then progressively cull the ones that aren't getting results. You're aim is to have a set of exact keywords that that get results, it may be one or a hundred - you are not going to achieve this by saying you'll use x number of keywords and then doing nothing?

 

[Ali-v-8]

I was just wondering how much it matters how many keywords you use in a campaign? As CTR will be calculated for each keyword and/or for your ad?
And wich one will be judged by the master google in order to like or dislike your ad?

God i may sound like an Idiot now but what do you mean??
Everyone is saying 5-3 ?????????????

What for?

If your doing adwords then surely its all about Target, Traffic, Budget and Coverage (IMO) Eg you have 10k to spend in 1 month used cars takes 1k cars, takes 2k, car takes 500 etc. you work out your spend and what to target. More money more keyword.

If you are talking SEO I tend to concentrate on 20 terms.

 

[seedstotal]

God i may sound like an Idiot now but what do you mean??
Everyone is saying 5-3 ?????????????


Yeah , i know!
Silly innit!
for 1 thing u can have one for an other u might have to use 100 its true
OP was a bit stupid of me, but got the ball rolling
TA!

 

[OldWelshGuy]

God i may sound like an Idiot now but what do you mean??
Everyone is saying 5-3 ?????????????

What for?

If your doing adwords then surely its all about Target, Traffic, Budget and Coverage (IMO) Eg you have 10k to spend in 1 month used cars takes 1k cars, takes 2k, car takes 500 etc. you work out your spend and what to target. More money more keyword.

If you are talking SEO I tend to concentrate on 20 terms.

Ali the problem is that your ad position (and as a result the amount you pay per click in relation to that position), depends greatly on the phrase, group and even campaign performance. So mixing good and bad performers will drag you down, cost you more, affect ROI etc.

This is why PPC is horrendously time consuming in the early days, as it needs babysitting until you are enough of a way in to go to a sensible management timescale.

my advice is get your best performing phrases out of mixed groups and into groups, even campaigns of their own, put all your poor stuff in a group of their own etc.

I know there is lots more info that could be given, but for someone starting off I would say start small, refine, expand.

 

[Ali-v-8]

Ali the problem is that your ad position (and as a result the amount you pay per click in relation to that position), depends greatly on the phrase, group and even campaign performance. So mixing good and bad performers will drag you down, cost you more, affect ROI etc.

This is why PPC is horrendously time consuming in the early days, as it needs babysitting until you are enough of a way in to go to a sensible management timescale.

my advice is get your best performing phrases out of mixed groups and into groups, even campaigns of their own, put all your poor stuff in a group of their own etc.

I know there is lots more info that could be given, but for someone starting off I would say start small, refine, expand.

I think One of the biggest issues with ppc is budget planning.
Correct me if i am wrong (i look at it from an SEO view)
(i am simplifying )

1 you pick keyword
2 it recieves 10,000 imps in 1 week.
3 estimated click 1000 in a week.
4 cost per click £1
5 budget £500

Now heres the difference

If you leave budget open then every click you can get along the way you will get. BCS

If you budget to last the week then the ammount is averaged over the week
in this case around £72 a day.
But google has to guess (educated guess mind you) how and when your ad should be submitted.

Problem is that the person who wants your service may not see your advert.

Am i getting this wrong?????

 

[seedstotal]

ok first day: 1% CTR 30% conversion
just set up 2 different ads to split test
ta everyone especially Oneportfolio, i wish i could pay U for your advice, learnt a lot from your tips! This forum is amazing!!!!

 

[seedstotal]

got babysitting to do a lot OWG
got down to 9 keywords from 14 in 2 days
I think i gotta ask some PPC expert here to take a look in a week or so. (not for free of course) As a biggish project is ahead of me in the coming 6 months.
Steve, looks like U pulled a customer

 

[seo4rank]

at least 3 keywords per page should be targeted

 

[directmarketingadvice]

got babysitting to do a lot OWG
got down to 9 keywords from 14 in 2 days
I think i gotta ask some PPC expert here to take a look in a week or so. (not for free of course) As a biggish project is ahead of me in the coming 6 months.
Steve, looks like U pulled a customer

Coolio!

As for number of keywords, I want every keyword in each group selling the same benefit and being lingistically similar.

I'll use things like the "Search Query Report" to add longer tail phrase & exacts (and also more negatives).

So, ultimately, I don't really care about the number of keywords in the group, only that they're closely related.

Steve

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Website conversion is THE KEY to an effective and profitable PPC campaign. 90% of advertisers make the mistake of trying to improve sales by spending more money driving more traffic to a poorly converting site.

That is the equivalent of trying to increase sales by giving more appointments to a lousy salesman. That is business suicide offline - and it is PPC suicide online.

Very well said.

Steve

 

[Ali-v-8]

so it is PPC that we were on about.
Cool.
Steve was i right about the budget and the way google shows your advert?

The reason i ask is that certain companies will only do business between time.
If you had a budget of lets say £50 could you tell google to use this whole amount between 4pm-8pm

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Steve was i right about the budget and the way google shows your advert?

You mean this:

1 you pick keyword
2 it recieves 10,000 imps in 1 week.
3 estimated click 1000 in a week.
4 cost per click £1
5 budget £500

Now heres the difference

If you leave budget open then every click you can get along the way you will get. BCS

If you budget to last the week then the ammount is averaged over the week
in this case around £72 a day.
But google has to guess (educated guess mind you) how and when your ad should be submitted.

Problem is that the person who wants your service may not see your advert.

Well, it depends who you ask.

There's one "expert" (may be, might not be) who claims that Google will give you the worst of the impressions.

Whether he's right or wrong, you don't want to be using up your budget on a random (or Google-selected) 50% of the market.

Instead, you should take control by either optimising for time of day, geographic location etc, or lower your bids so that you're getting more impressions slightly lower down the page (but still on p1).

(actually, if the keyword is profitable, you should just try to find the other £500 to advertise 24/7)

Steve

PS That's assuming you have just one exact match keyword.

 

[joeboy]

theres some good websites out there where you can enter your url and it will scan for keywords etc, tells you which of your keywords are the most dense. i think the most dense word on my site was 3%

 

[jasonnoguchi]

I actually use about 200 keywords and aim for a long tail of cheap clickthroughs.

 

[rahulmagi]

It depends on your budget