Let’s clear the air around PPC once and for all.
More keywords in your ad-groups doesn’t automatically mean more money in your pocket.
Quite often it’s the opposite.
Too many keywords is almost always an invitation for trouble.
How?
Let’s say you’ve 50 to 100 keywords in a single ad-group. I can’t emphasize enough how epically screwed up you’re if that’s your account.
Those 50 keywords are all competing against each other vying to be the ONE that becomes relevant to the search term. And it isn’t always a fair game.
All these keywords make PPC a game of chance.
Let that reality sink in for a minute.
What happens as a result is—your ads start propping up for irrelevant search terms.
Here’s an example.
See what came up when I searched for ‘business strategy’.
Yes, sales growth is part of my long-term goal but my immediate concern is landing a strategy.
I won’t click on that ad. It doesn’t make sense to me.
See the problem? No wonder you’re lamenting that PPC isn’t working for you.
So how do you solve this?
Enter SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups).
You might have heard the maxim: One page one purpose.
SKAGs are helluva similar: One ad-group one keyword.
They’re wonderful in the sense that they transform a game of chance to a game of relevance.
SKAGs have only one keyword in the ad-group. Kinda makes the idea of a group sound obsolete. But stay with me. It’ll start making sense in a bit.
With SKAGs every keyword is placed within one ad-group. Though we generally place one keyword, we can and should place the broad and exact match identifiers for these keywords.
We advertise this way to tie keywords to search terms. With each ad keyword sitting comfy in their ad groups we ensure that the ad shows up for the most relevant search terms.
This makes your AdWords strategy… what’s the word, yes well-rounded.
Result? More money in the bank for lower spend.
Here are a few key benefits of using Single Keyword Ad groups.
a.) Control
SKAGs give you more control in two chief forms.
- Control over ad message
- Control over maintaining a uniform scent
1. Control over ad messaging
With SKAGs— instead of divvying up your ad spend on 20 different keywords all competing for attention you bid on one.
Resultantly people see what they search for.
Because of this, few good things transpire. The discrepancy from search term to keyword to ad lowers.
Result? More conversions.
Ads don’t show up for unrelated search terms. The ad to message match lowers your cost per click and results in more conversions.
2. Control in keeping the scent
The concept of scent was coined by Bryan Eisenberg. Read his book if you want the whole picture.
All good. Let’s continue.
Keeping the scent implies keeping a uniform messaging that starts with the user’s search term continues to the keyword, then the ad and goes up to the landing page.
With a uniform scent, you ensure prospects don’t get confused.
They don’t hop in the bus to go to Newark and end up in Washington DC. Which is what happens with PPC more often than not.
If your visitor lands on your page searching for tank tops and your landing page is actually a homepage that has everything from dog food to Tesla cars you’re going to have hard time squeezing conversions or keeping that visitor from bouncing away.
Most people are able to maintain the scent from ad to landing page but are rarely able to extend this to their ad copy from the search terms.
With SKAGs you get to do that.
For example let’s see what happens when we tackle the search term ‘start your business.’
LegalZoom aces the ad by maintaining the smell from search term to ad copy.
The ad copy says. “We’re in The Business of Helping You Start Your Business.
Lifetime Customer Support · Satisfaction Guaranteed · Name Availability Check
A+ Rating – Better Business Bureau”
However, they drop the ball on their landing page.
It’s entirely different. The copy says:
“Form your business without the guesswork
Let us do the legwork when forming your business. Never touch a legal form – take the self-guided questionnaire and we will help get you set up for real success.”
The journey started with the promise of taking you to Newark but instead shipped you to Uganda.
I bet that altering their landing page to match the ad copy would not only move the ad higher up but also improve conversions.
b.) Organized structure
Structure is essential to conversions.
A laser sharp focus provided by one group for one keyword is excellent for conversions.
With this strategy you know which ads are performing really well because each one is different.
Plus it’s good for business. You send visitors with different needs to different value propositions.
Say you’re offering a business set up service.
Businesses can set up as LLC, C-Corp, S-Corp or DBA. Generally each one requires different paperwork and demands a different quote and often attracts people with different mindsets.
4 different ads that trigger 4 different landing pages land your prospects on pages that reflect the need that lies at their heart.
This boosts conversions.
On the flip-side sending all your visitors to one single landing page would result in much lower conversions.
c.) Improved quality score
Higher click through rate— the baby of marriage between message and keyword match—lifts your quality score.
Experts all agree that a high click through rate often indicates your ad’s relevance. People wouldn’t clicking on ads that aren’t targeted.
Which in turn results in higher quality score. This brings me to my next point— the importance of quality score.
Quality Score is the lynchpin of an effective AdWords strategy
Three factors underpin the quality of your AdWords campaign.
- Ad quality score— This metric scores the message match between keywords and ad copy
- Landing page experience— This metric scores how relevant the landing page is to the ad
- Ad relevance— Measures how relevant the ad is with respect to the search terms.
People are overly concerned with CTR, CPC and all that jazz. Much ado about nothing.
Among these factors, Quality Score is what matters most.
What’s meant by Quality Score?
Simply put, Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. It’s scaled from 0 to 10, with 10 indicating the best quality ad.
Benefits of improving quality score
- PPC success and ad quality score is correlated. Hence higher Quality Score automatically ups your odds for success with PPC.
- Higher Quality Scores bring a greater return on your investment.
- Higher Quality Score also results in lower cost per conversion.
Conversion is ultimately what matters since it means the visitor is taking the action you want him to take.
As Quality Score increases, cost per conversion goes down.
How to find Quality Score?
You can do that by running a keyword diagnosis.
Login to AdWords and click on Keywords. You will find the option at the left side towards the bottom.
Next to the keyword status you’ll get that keyword’s quality score. Along with other relevant data like expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page relevance. Among other things you’ll be able to see these.
Here are a few other tabs you’ll see in your account:
Ad relevance scores the ad copy to the chosen keywords.
Historic Quality score shows the last known quality score.
Ad relevance shows the historic ad relevance.
Now that you know how to find quality scores let’s move to improving them.
How to improve quality score?
If Quality Score is the lynchpin of an AdWords account, then relevancy is the lynchpin of Quality score.
Quality Score is directly correlated to relevancy of your keywords in the ad-groups.
To improve Quality Scores, ensure that your ad text matches the keywords in your account.
Ditch broad-match keywords. Better use SKAGs and build out different ads for each keyword.
The final step is building many more landing pages each one unique to the keyword you’re targeting in the ad-groups.
Have a look at another example.
This time I tackled the term ‘data scientist’ and its few long tail variations:
This particular ad showed up for all terms associated with data scientist starting with data scientist all the way through to long-tails like data scientist job, work data scientist, data scientist income and so on.
There’s no change to the landing page too.
Displaying the same ad for the target keyword and all its variations nullifies your chances at being relevant.
Instead if the ad changed accordingly for each keyword the CTR and quality scores would improve.
Everyone wants their ads to outperform their competitor’s ad.
In doing so, you falsely assume that higher the number of keywords in your ad-group the more relevant their ad would be. What could go wrong if you cover all the keywords that you can find? You believe that this would bring in far more conversions.
Nothing could be further away from the truth.
A please-all ad strategy would end up for you the same way as the time I tried mixing peanut butter jelly with hot sauce. I was a sucker for all three and 12-year old me thought that the combo would be hot and sweet in-tandem.
Only it wasn’t.
It tasted like broken dreams.
Most AdWords accounts bear an uncanny semblance to my failed culinary experiment.
And that’s scary.
Adding tons of keywords complicates your account and messes with your targeting.
If the accounts I’ve seen are any indication SKAGs are as rare as polar bears in Africa.
Here’s one example.
There are 20 more keywords below the visible area.
Think simple.
SKAGs entire framework is in the simplicity it provides in using different keywords but carrying none of the disadvantages of targeting multiple keywords.
Now that we’ve seen the benefits of SKAGs and cleared the air around Quality Score let’s move on to actually building them.
How to build SKAGs?
It’s a three-step process:
- Find seed keywords
- Create the ads
- Build landing pages for the ads
a.) How to find relevant seed keywords?
There are two ways to go about this.
- Keyword research
- Search terms report in AdWords.
1. How to do Keyword Research for SKAGs?
You could view the search terms report in AdWords.
Here’s how to go about this.
Or you could do keyword research in case you’re new to all this.
Keyword Research – Keyword research is the key to discovering great keywords that you can use in your SKAG campaign.
Google keyword planner is your best free bet.
Just login to Keyword Planner and tap in the keyword that you think is the most relevant.
The planner comes up with at least a few hundred suggestions.
You can also see the ad competition for each keyword. However, that’s irrelevant with SKAGs.
You should start with your root keywords.
No sweat. In most cases they’re fairly obvious.
For example if you offer a PPC management service then, PPC management would be your root keyword. Because neither PPC nor management by themselves describe your service.
A SKAG ad-group might have keywords in this format:
[PPC management]
“PPC management”
+PPC +management
Add more synonyms as you go for individual ad-groups.
You could replace management by manager and its synonyms.
- PPC success
- PPC manager
- PPC outsourcing
You could also replace PPC by Pay Per Click or other synonyms.
- Paid ad outsourcing
- Adwords outsourcing and so on.
You don’t need long-tail keywords because the SKAG— ‘ppc management’ will automatically generate additional terms in the search terms report.
The modified broad match and phrase match versions will trigger relevant long tail keywords. That’s why you need not worry about long-tails anymore.
Have a bone to pick with the Keyword Planner?
No worries.
There are quite a few alternatives like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Kwfinder that do pretty much the same thing.
2. Using search term reports for SKAGs
In AdWords, you’ll find search terms report that you can use to find new keywords to use in your ad-groups.
I will discuss more on this later.
b.) Creating the ad
You should create 2 ads for each keyword. Vary the second ad a little so that you can A/B test and see which one converts better.
An ad consists of the following elements:
- Headline
- Description
- URL path
Headline 1 should be the keyword within a short sentence.
Headline 2 should be the keyword but a slightly different line.
Description 1 could be the Unique Selling Proposition with a small description
Description 2 could talk about the features with call to actions
Alternatively, include a link to where an authoritative quote/testimonial came from like LegalZoom did with their ad.
Path 1: the URL can contain the keyword plus something more
Path 2: the URL with just the keyword
It’s imperative that the URL path displays the search term.
It’s a subtle confirmation to the prospect that tells them they aren’t being misled.
Ever heard loss aversion is a bigger trigger than scoring a gain. People would prefer not wasting their time rather than taking the risk of going down a path.
Understand the motivations that drive people in general and you’ll understand how to market to them.
Here’s a sample ad for the search term ‘best CRM’.
Ad #1: Best and most popular CRM software
Grow Accounts, Find Customers & Close Deals Faster. Improve Your Business Today!
Get More Leads · Accelerate Productivity · Close More Deals · Make Insightful Decisions
The ad has a description that educates users and a headline that contains the search term Best CRM.
For the second ad, you could try a shorter headline with call to actions to the site or pricing. The description should have the USP.
Additionally, ads should have the keyword in both the ad copy, headline and the URL path.
An example for that.
.
I stress on this so much because most of your prospects are in a hurry to find a solution. Their impatience doesn’t always work in your favor but with PPC you just hit jackpot.
Seeing how relevant the ad is, people actually in need of a solution click through.
They see that the headline matches the very keywords they’re searching for a.k.a solution. They additionally see the URL path— a spot-on match for their search term.
They’ve no option but click through and see what’s on the other end.
c.) How to build relevant landing pages?
As mentioned earlier, three factors underscore quality score. First is—Ad relevancy which is the match between your keywords and ad copy.
Landing page relevancy is another.
You should have a clear title that has the keywords.
The landing page copy should match with the ad copy. The searcher after clicking through shouldn’t feel as if he has landed on something alien.
A well-designed landing page has a single purpose— to get people to take ONE action.
How’s that achieved?
Through a clearly laid-out value proposition.
Remove everything that comes in between the prospect and the desired action.
Elements like an explainer video can boost conversion rates. But test and see if it works for you. If not, dump it.
You might be wondering about the effort required to change landing pages in response to each ad copy.
It sounds like a pain in the butt.
Except it needn’t be.
Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR), increases the relevancy of your landing pages by changing the landing page text in response to the ad copy from where the user lands on to the page.
Ongoing optimization for SKAGs
Using the search terms report for further insights
Once ads start running you can glean new keywords for your SKAGs from the search terms report. Here’s how to do that. You can also use the report optimizing existing ads.
Here’s how you do it.
Login to your AdWords account. Go to the campaigns and then go to the keywords tab and further down to search terms. Set the lookback period to 30 days.
Once you’re in the search terms click on download and you will get a pop-up box with the following options. See the image below.
Download the file as a csv file and if you wish you can set it to either monthly or even weekly. The setting will be the import frequency.
In the excel file with your report remove all the keywords that have had zero conversions. You can do this by sorting the column from largest to smallest and vice-versa.
You have now arrived at the list of keywords you want in your ad groups.
This helps you organize your keywords and get more conversions.
Split test ad copy
Don’t rest if your SKAG’s performing well.
Split test the current ad copy with another and see if the new one performs better. Use action words and fresh CTAs. In your ad copy, talk about the benefits rather than dry features. Make the benefits crystal clear.
Optimizing Landing Pages
Landing page is your fort. On AdWords you have a strict 70 character limit. On your landing page there’s no such limit. You can experiment with new angles, button copy, imagery, different design colors and so on until you create the best possible landing page.
WordStream found that big AdWords spenders had significantly more number of landing pages. Here’s what I think—those big boys are probably killing it with SKAGs. And you should too.
Negative keywords are your new BFFs.
Negative keywords are keywords that you absolutely don’t want your ads to show up for. After some time passes you’ll get better at identifying negative keywords with the search term report. This would enable you to consistently refine your ad.
Let’s say you’re an eCommerce retailer selling dumbbells. But unlike many others in the niche, you don’t retail every kind of dumbbell. You only list a very specific type with adjustable weights called adjustable dumbbells.
Exercise dumbbell is a prime candidate for a negative keyword. You don’t want your ads to show up for exercise dumbbells because you aren’t selling any.
The same research we talked about moments ago, indicates that 8 percent of low-spending AdWords accounts have no negative keywords at all.
On the flip side, 98% of big spenders on an average have more than 250 negative keywords.
Cons of using SKAGs
With so many benefits these little disadvantages can very well be ignored.
SKAGs can be a bitch to set-up. One keyword per ad-group. Poring over search terms report to glean new keywords and then building out ads.
Unique landing pages for each ad.
It’s a lot of time spent optimizing your ad and you didn’t even have your first paid click.
Well, that’s about it.
Bottomline
SKAGs are your best bet in getting the most out of your PPC campaign.
You don’t lose out on conversions. You don’t display the wrong ad to the wrong person.
Google’s happy, people clicking on your ads are happy, you’re happy, and your mom’s proud that you finally figured it out— what’s there not to like about it?
