Why does my AdWords account contain lots of small ad groups?
Posted by clairejarrett | Posted in Adwords, troubleshooting | Posted on 01-09-2010
Tags: Adwords, google adwords, Keywords, ROI, troubleshooting
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I’ve been asked this question a few times now by our monthly AdWords clients, so have decided to answer it in a blog post.
In an AdWords account, one of the most important factors is quality score. Quality score makes a difference as to how high your ads appear, and also the Cost Per Click you pay for. Ideally quality score should be at 7 or above – see the effect on Cost Per Click in the image below, courtesy of Click Equations.
The easiest way to get quality score up is to make sure the exact keywords appear in the advert heading. This is the way that Google prefers. It has the added benefit of often increasing conversion rate. Having the exact keywords in the advert heading is usually impossible if there are a large number of keywords in a single ad group.
Therefore an account will usually be optimised over time to break it in small ad groups. In each of these ad groups there will be only a handful of keywords, as the adverts for this group need to reflect these keywords extremely closely.
With large accounts, this can result in a very large account with many hundreds of ad groups. This can appear unwieldy to the client, but it is usually the ideal way to manage a large account.
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Brief and to the point. Although why any marketer would use keywords with a quality score below 5 is beyond me.
As someone who’s had the misfortune of speaking to Google’s helpdesk, I have had the dubious pleasure of being told I had too many keywords, too many long tail keywords [4 words], and, too many exact match negative keywords.
Grr.
Thanks for the comment Ade! I’ve had the same experience – I do feel Google would prefer us to use many more broad match keywords. The new broad match modifier makes this a little more “doable”- have you tried it?