Google, Bing and Yahoo all allow you to setup thousands of adverts and let you use as many as 5 million keywords in any campaign. However, shoving hundreds of keywords into each campaign is not the wisest strategy to win more business.
How many keywords should you use in each paid search campaign? Well that depends on a number of factors which I’ll be discussing in today’s article.
How big do you want to go?
Let’s assume you run a fitness center, all your customers are from the local area, you have a budget of $100 per week to use AdWords and Bing Ads and want to bring 5 new gym members a week.
Creating several ad campaigns with 200 or more keywords in each ad group will see your $100 weekly budget vanish in less than a day. The scenario above is of a small business with small goals, it would be wiser if you targeted only a handful of keywords within 1 or 2 campaigns than creating several complex ones.
On the flip side, if you manage a nationwide ecommerce store, offer shipping all over the United States and want to find 150 customers per week, chances are you’ll have a bigger marketing budget and audience. As a result, now it makes more sense to target a larger amount of keywords and run multiple ad campaigns.
Aligning your goals with your budget
Before you even select your keywords or run a PPC campaign, you’ll need to set sensible goals which can be tracked. Ask yourself the following:
Do I have measurable goals? For example, have you setup your AdWords or Bing account to track conversions over a specific period of time? What are you measuring, sales, opt-ins or phone calls received?
Are my goals realistic? If your goal is to generate 200 new leads per week, but your budget is $50 per week and the average cost per click is $2, you’re not being realistic.
Does my budget allow me to reach my goals? If you’re targeting vertical keywords words like “dentist, lawyer, insurance” on a small budget you may only receive 3-4 clicks before your budget is consumed for the day.
The size of your goals should directly correlate to the size of your marketing budget.
How much time can you commit to your PPC?
The more keywords you use, the more time you’ll need to invest managing your campaigns. Having 40 or more keywords in a single campaign can take hours out of your day figuring out which keywords are performing well and which are costing you money.
Moving forward you’ll have greater insights on the best keywords to use in the future. Whereas using a handful of keywords is much easier to monitor but provides you with less data going forward.
If you cannot commit too much time to PPC, keep your campaigns small. It’s better to start small then bite off more than you can chew and burn money.
Campaign budgets are reached daily
Once your daily ad budget has been reached, your ads will stop showing for that day. If you find your ads are being shut off on a daily basis within 7-12 hours, it’s probably because you’ve targeted too many keywords.
If you generate leads or sales after 5pm but your PPC campaigns are shut off at noon, you’re giving your competitors the chance to win your business. One option could be to increase your budget (which is not always viable), the other play is to reduce your bid per keyword but that could harm your competitive ad rank.
The more keywords you’re bidding for, the faster your budget will diminish.
Summary
Stuffing more keywords in your campaigns doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. The size of your audience, budget and the time you can allocate to PPC should all be factored in when choosing how many keywords and campaigns to run.
I always suggest to start small with only a handful of keywords and campaigns. Nurture your campaigns slowly and expand when you start to see positive results. It’s better to start slow and build than to press the nitro button on your account and run 20 campaigns that you just don’t have time to manage.
Nick Bridges
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