Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 45 - Structure
One of the most common misconceptions when you're getting started with Google Ads is that you need to pick a lot of keywords.
More is better, right?
If we're talking about tinsel on a Christmas tree, then yes, more is more. But keywords in a Google Ads campaign, less is more.
On one recent coaching call, I took a client who had seven different Search campaigns and cut it all down to a single campaign with one ad group and five keywords.
On another recent call, I advised the client to cut 30 keywords down to just two. Consolidation for the win!
But how many keywords should you put in your ad groups? And how do you know when to split into multiple ad groups or campaigns or leave things consolidated?
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 45: Structure.
Our first question comes from Sakthi on TikTok and they ask, how many keywords can I put in one ad group? Can I keep the mix of all keyword match types in a single ad?
My general rule of thumb is that you want about 5 to 15 keywords per ad group – 4 isn't bad, 20 isn't bad. Some ad groups may have just 1 or 2 keywords, but that's my general guidance for you.
The key is intent. Would the same person be searching for these things? If so, they can go into the same ad group, whereas if not, you probably want different ones.
For example, headphones. Bluetooth headphones, wireless headphones, those could probably go in the same ad group. But noise canceling headphones, probably a different one because that's different intent.
When in doubt, I like to start more consolidated and then expand out so you can learn based on actual search behavior how things should be structured.
Then, can you mix match types in an ad group?
My thinking on this is sort of evolving right now, so bear with me.
You don't need to duplicate the same keywords across match types. That won't actually do you any favors. Like if you have Bluetooth headphones in Phrase Match, you don't need to also have Bluetooth headphones in Exact Match. Choose one, the Exact or the Phrase.
Within the same ad group, a broader match type will pick up more searches. For example, Bluetooth headphones in Broad Match or even Phrase Match would probably match to searches for “Wireless Headphones”. So if you put Bluetooth headphones in Broad and wireless headphones in Exact, and someone searches “Wireless Headphones”, it could actually match to the Broad Match Bluetooth headphones and your Exact Match wireless headphones may never get a chance to play.
Or, maybe that Exact Match search for “Wireless Headphones” would match to your Exact Match keyword. But if someone searched for “Best Wireless Headphones”, it would match to the Broad Match, or it would match to both depending on ad rank.
It can get really messy.
It's actually more of a budgeting issue. If you put Exact Match keywords into the same campaign as Phrase or Broad, because Phrase or Broad can match to so many more queries than Exact can, they're going to get a lot more play and your Exact Match keywords may never get a chance to get off the ground, even if theoretically, they would convert better.
I’m leaning away from Phrase Match these days. It used to be my Goldilocks solution. Now it's my good for nothing solution. So I go either Broad or Exact. And I will keep those generally in separate campaigns since Exact Match keywords won't get to see the light of day if they're running under the same budget as Broad Match keywords. But importantly, I won't duplicate the exact same keywords in Exact and Broad. I may use Exact for certain things and Broad for others, or just Broad, or just Exact, depending on the client situation.
In terms of number of keywords, my approach these days with smaller businesses is usually about 3 to 15 keywords total in Exact Match, just one or two campaigns depending on the business, and then see what we get and expand out from there. Whereas if I'm working with a business that's spending five, six, seven figures a month, we usually start with Broad Match keywords and let Smart Bidding do its thing.
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Our second question today comes from Aizen on YouTube and they say, I'm running Shopping ads for e-commerce selling snacks, chips, candy, et cetera. Should I put one product per ad group or one product brand per ad group? If something else, I hope you tell me how, thanks in advance. So what structure should I use in my case so I can sell all of my product types?
First thing’s first, you probably don't want just one product per ad group. There's no point in that.
The first decision is whether you want to advertise all of your products or not. Just because you have a ton of products, doesn't mean you need to put ad dollars behind all of them. And there's actually a great case study I shared about this in special Episode 40, all about how to decide which products to advertise. So once you've decided that, you can just keep everything together in one ad group in one campaign, that's fine.
The reasons to split your products into different ad groups within a campaign would be if you're manually bidding and you want to set different ad group level bids. If you want to apply audience targeting to certain products but not all of them. Remember, you can't exclude audiences in the Shopping campaign, you can only Target or Observe audiences. If there are keywords you want to apply as negatives for certain products but not all products, you could apply them as ad group level negatives in your Shopping campaign. Or maybe just for organization and reporting purposes, you do want to put different brands in different ad groups, or different product categories in different ad groups, but you don't need to do that. You could also achieve this with labels or just sorting by brand or category after the fact.
It's more common to split your Shopping into multiple campaigns rather than multiple ad groups because you want to allocate a different budget or different bid strategy. For example, maybe you want to ensure that your most profitable products have a really large budget and your less profitable products have a smaller budget. Or maybe for products that are generally less profitable, you want to set a higher ROAS target. Whereas, for your few most important products, you want to just go on Max Clicks. So those tend to be the reasons to split Shopping into multiple campaigns. There is not as much justification or as many reasons to need to split into multiple ad groups.
Should you run a Shopping campaign or a Search campaign? How do you pick the right keywords? My Google Ads for Beginners course will give you the foundations you need to get ready to start using Google Ads effectively. You can learn more about Google Ads for Beginners on my website, learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, or follow the link in the episode description.
Our final question today comes from loukozdigitalmarketer on YouTube. And they say, With the lawyer (I had shared an example from a lawyer client), can you explain more about why you set up two different campaigns for them? For me, one goal equals one campaign. So if the only goal is leads, I usually make one campaign for that, then differentiate services on the ad group level. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, Jyll. Your clients are so lucky to have someone with an honest and caring attitude.
Thank you, Lou!
So in this example, for this client, we set up two different campaigns. Why did we do that?
Because there were two very different kinds of clients. The bid strategy and the budget are set at the campaign level, and we anticipate that people seeking one type of legal service may behave very differently than people seeking the other kind of service this lawyer offers. I won't say what the services are, so for example, maybe they do real estate law and international law. Two very different disciplines that two very different people would search for. Keeping them in separate campaigns means we can split the budget accordingly and scale up or down our target CPA, once we have enough data to do so, to set different targets.
We could have put it in one campaign with just two different ad groups, but what if one performed really well and one didn't perform as well? We wouldn't have as many levers to control that.
We also had $80 a day in total budget to work with. So even if we divide that budget evenly, $40 a day and $40 a day, that would still be sufficient.
If this lawyer was only looking to spend $50 a day, then I probably would have kept it consolidated since $25 a day per campaign would probably not have been sufficient. CPCs ain't cheap when you're a lawyer.
Your guiding principle when figuring out the right structure for your Google Ads campaigns is to think, is there a different budget or bid strategy reason this needs to be in a different campaign? There are other reasons, too, location targeting, et cetera, but generally it comes down to goal, budget and bid.
And then within that, reasons to put things into different ad groups would be if a different kind of person would be searching for that or looking for that, even if it falls under the same objective.
Today's Insider Challenge is this. You're auditing an account that has 100 Broad Match keywords in one campaign and the campaign is limited by budget. However, it's also meeting its performance goal, which is an $80 CPA. Do you make changes? If so, what? Or do you leave it alone?
The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving.
We had a Special Episode last week where I introduced my new weekly Google Ads newsletter, The Insider. So, the previous Episode's Challenge, Episode 43, was this. Let's say you decide to outsource your Google Ads management. You are a lead gen business and you're looking to spend $10,000/month on ads. These are the rates that various agencies and freelancers give you. If you were just deciding based on price and nothing else, which of these options would you choose?
Option A, freelancer, $2,000/month flat management fee plus a $4,000 first month setup fee.
Option B, agency, 15% of spend.
Or option C, freelancer, 20% of sales.
Which would you choose?
For me, I would choose option A, flat fee freelancer, any day.
I don't like percentage of spend because there's misaligned incentives. If I am asked to spend more, is it because there's an opportunity there or because the agency wants to make more money?
And I wouldn't do percent of sales because honestly, I wouldn't trust someone who's willing to work on that model. Whether or not I, as a business, make sales has so much more to do with me, my website, my offer, my sales expertise, and my customer service, rather than the ads themselves.
So yeah, if a model like that sounds too good to be true, it usually is too good to be true, in my opinion.
What about you? Would you choose a flat fee, percent of spend or percent of sales?
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.