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Optimizing ads with tons of keywords

Learn about optimizing ads with tons of keywords.

Updated over 4 months ago

A campaign with import rules may accumulate massive lists of keywords over time.

Having tons of keywords in the same ad can have some undesirable impacts:

  • The campaign budget may not be sufficient to drive traffic to all the keywords.

  • High-volume keywords can take traffic away from low-volume keywords, resulting in missed opportunities.

  • It takes longer to optimize ads because only a subset of keywords get traffic.

  • It becomes harder to split the advertising budget between keywords.

X-keywords per campaign structure

  • You can reduce the problem by creating multiple campaigns with a limited number of keywords (Etc. 10 keywords per campaign).

  • Such a structure gives more control but means more work, as you now have to do the following:

    • Aggregate and analyze search terms across all the campaigns.

    • Identify good search terms, and find if the keywords exist in any campaigns.

    • Add keywords to an existing campaign, or create additional campaigns to hold these new keywords.

    • Set up automation for these new campaigns.

N-tier campaign graduation funnel

  • A more automated approach is a performance-based graduation funnel.

  • Set up structures where keywords graduate progressively from one campaign structure to another based on performance.

  • For example, Mass Campaign > Fully Managed Campaign uses such a structure.

    • The Discovery campaign imports search terms with >= 2 orders.

    • The Sales campaign imports search terms with >= 5 orders and >= 15% conversion.

  • If you drive a significant traffic volume, consider creating even more campaigns with increasingly stringent criteria to funnel keywords into their campaign performance group and negating graduated keywords from lower-tier campaigns.

  • This graduation and negation approach reduces competing keywords and the number of "effective" keywords in each campaign.

  • You can automate the graduation and negation process for the N-tier funnel by referring to the Discovery and Sales strategic objective.

  • While X-keywords per campaign structure gives more granularity and control, N-tier campaign graduation funnel is helpful if the eventual goal is to uncover potentially rankable keywords to create a single keyword campaign structure for them.

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