Adwords - how many keywords do you use?

[Bikerjon]

Apart from word of mouth, Google Adwords is my only source of advertising. I’ve had quite a good run with adwords overall but just recently it seems to have fallen off a bit - lots of high bounce rate clicks blowing my daily budget and generally not as many enquiries as I used to be getting. So I spent a good proportion of yesterday going through all my ad groups and came to the conclusion there were just way too many keywords to make any sense of what was going on! Some of my ad groups had well over 100 keywords which I’ve now shrunk to around 10.

Just wondered if there’s any best practice on number of keywords or does it vary a lot depending on product/service?

[Dick Dastardly]

Varies completely depending on the number of products/services and the different things you can call them. I would only worry about number of keywords if there are too many for an advert to still be relevant, i.e. if you have so many keywords in an ad group that you can't get them into the advert, split some out into a separate ad group.

[Bikerjon]

Thanks, yes I've split my key services into 6 ad groups, 6 landing pages and 2 ads running for each one. I have one ad group with just a single broad match keyword and the others tend to have around 10. I think this will be much easier to manage than before providing I resist the urge to keep adding google's suggested keywords!

[MrSparks]

I have very niche products so had about 10 keywords for each product, broken down into adgroups with individual ads for each of those products. One agency told me 10 was perfect another one told me 10 wasn't enough so it's swings and roundabouts really... I think the general idea is more keywords = more search terms it'll show for, but if you're going quite "loose" on the keywords then you could argue that it's not worth showing up for as it will increase your bounce rate etc.

Ironically product listings cost me a fortune and barely convert but I'm too "scared" to stop them. It's the standard text listings that bring in conversions for me... I think mostly because people search the brand name then click on my site as they are too lazy to look down about 3 results for the organic listing... but hey if I don't do it a competitor will....

I've lost track of them a bit now since the google shopping change over. One of them seems to run away with itself and even the text ads really need optimising as I have fairly high bounce rates still.

[Stevanos]

10's of thousands!!!

[grumbas]

If you're getting a high bounce rate and you use broad match or broad match modifier have you run a search term report to see if you're missing some negative keywords you may not have thought of?

[Bigbox]

I've recently started a website offering a service and used adwords express under instruction from a google representative - only when i began to dig deeper did i realise that the express site shows your ad for a very broad range of topics directly and unfortunately indirectly related to my service... not sure the advice i received from Google was very helpful.

Prior to talking to google i had set up a google adwords account using the more complicated site and using phrases that i think are directly linked to my business. I had both adwords ads running together (inadvertently) and was receiving a few clicks per day plus a few converions of those clicks... when i cancelled the express advert, the same pattern continued. Basically, i think that due to the breadth of the phrases in the express advert my site wasn't sought as an answer to the googler's problem; i think the more targeted, with approx 30 specific phrases was more useful and more relevant.

I think that keywords are specific to every business - if a number of products and or services are offered then hundreds, if not thousands would be used, however with a targeted business then as few as 20 can hit the spot.

[grumbas]

I wouldn't touch adwords express, Google are very good at leading you to routes that will get extra clicks, which generate them extra income but probably not much value for you.

You're right re keywords, I'd say we probably get something like 70-80% of our traffic off our top 20, but our industry is so big it's worth the investment in additional hundreds/thousands of keywords to get the remainder.

So if 20 well chosen keywords get you enough leads to keep busy it's definitely a good strategy, and if you need more leads you'll probably find another 10-20 keywords will top the lead volume up nicely.