One Ad Group Holding Every Keyword

Built in an afternoon

A landscaping company's AdWords account was set up in one afternoon, the week before spring. It has one campaign, one ad group and two hundred keywords, from lawn care and hedge trimming to retaining walls and snow removal.

All of them share one ad: a headline with the company name, a line about quality landscaping, and a link to the home page.

The account runs, and it spends. But the person searching for retaining wall contractors and the one searching for weekly lawn mowing see the same words and land on the same page.

What an ad group is for

AdWords is arranged in layers. A campaign holds the budget, the locations and the schedule. Inside it, each ad group holds a set of keywords and the ads written for them.

Any ad in a group can show for any keyword in that group. That is the point of the layer: it ties what people search for to what they read in reply.

A group that holds every keyword ties nothing to anything. The ad has to be written for all of them, which means it is written for none in particular.

Why one ad cannot fit two hundred searches

A single ad serving every keyword falls short in several ways at once:

• The headline cannot name what each person typed.
• The bold words Google shows where an ad matches the search rarely appear.
• The offer has to stay vague enough to suit every service.
• The landing page is the home page for everyone.
• The reports lump every service into a single line.

The searcher notices the first three in the second it takes to scan the ads. The owner notices the last two only when trying to work out which services the spending is buying.

How relevance reaches the price

AdWords gives every keyword a Quality Score from one to ten. It reflects how often Google expects the ad to be clicked, how closely the ad matches the search, and how useful the landing page looks.

A generic ad scores lower on all three for most keywords. An ad's position depends on both the bid and that quality, so a weaker score needs a higher bid to win the same place.

So the vague ad costs twice: fewer people click it, and each click that does come costs more.

Splitting keywords into themes

A theme is a set of keywords that one headline could honestly answer. Lawn mowing, lawn care service and weekly grass cutting belong together. Retaining walls belong somewhere else.

Each service the business sells usually becomes at least one theme, and a busy service may become several. The test for each group is simple: one headline should be able to name every keyword in it.

Where the answer is no, split the group again. Small groups are no extra work for AdWords, only for the person writing the ads.

A worked example

A rubber stamp maker in an industrial unit in Burnaby makes custom stamps, self-inking address stamps, logo stamps, date stamps and embossers for company seals, and ships orders across Canada.

Its account had one ad group with about a hundred and fifty keywords, and one ad promising custom rubber stamps made in BC. Every click went to the home page.

The search terms report showed what people had actually typed: self inking address stamp, embosser for a company seal, teacher stamps, date stamp for an office. All of them met the same ad about custom stamps.

The keywords were split into six groups: address stamps, logo stamps, date and office stamps, embossers and seals, teacher and craft stamps, and custom orders. Each group got two ads naming its product.

Each group now points to that product's page, and searches for wax seals and stamp collecting became negative keywords. Someone searching for an embosser now sees embossers named, and lands on the page that shows them.

An ad for each theme

Write at least two ads for each group, both naming the theme in the headline. A headline has 25 characters, so the theme's name usually is the headline, or most of it.

Use the two description lines for what matters in that theme: sizes and ink colours for address stamps, turnaround for logo stamps, the seal styles for embossers.

The display address can end in the theme's name as well, which tells the searcher before the click that the page is about what they asked for.

Where each theme should send people

Each ad group should lead to the page about its theme, not the home page. A searcher who asked for embossers should arrive among embossers, with prices and a way to order.

Where no such page exists, it is worth building one. A landing page that matches the search is one of the three things Quality Score weighs, and it is the thing visitors judge first.

Reading what people actually typed

The search terms report lists the searches that triggered your ads, as people typed them. It shows which themes exist and which searches do not belong.

Read it weekly at first. Add what you do not sell as negative keywords, and move good searches you had not thought of into the theme they fit.

From late September, exact and phrase match keywords will also match close variants such as plurals and misspellings, with no option to turn that off. Tight themes keep those variants landing in the right group.

The counter-case

A business that sells one service in one town, with a dozen keywords that all mean the same thing, may need only one or two ad groups. Splitting further adds work without changing the ad.

A very small budget also limits how many groups can gather enough clicks to learn from. Fewer, well-chosen themes can be the sensible start.

But two hundred keywords covering a dozen services are well past that point, and the headline test is the same at any size.

Rebuilding the account by theme

1. Export the keywords to a spreadsheet.
2. Sort them into themes one headline could answer.
3. Create an ad group for each theme.
4. Write two ads per group that name the theme.
5. Point each group at the page for that theme.
6. Add negative keywords for what you do not sell.
7. Read the search terms report every week.

Step two is where the account is really rebuilt. Everything after it follows from the themes, and a theme that one headline cannot answer shows up later as a weak ad.

Once each group has two ads, making sure both run long enough to compare is the job of the rotation setting covered in two test ads and one that never showed.

Frequently asked questions

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