Google AdWords Keywords: How much is too much?

When setting up AdWords campaigns, how many keywords do you target?

If you’ve been doing it for a while, you already know that you should have very targetted adgroups, with your keywords matching your ads and also matching your landing page.

So, in other words, if you have a widget campaign, you should have red widgets in one adgroup, blue widgets in another, and green widgets in yet another, and so on.

In the beginning I used to do things like dynamic keyword insertion, which asked Google to substitute the real keyword for the dynamic token, but I don’t do that much anymore. In using DKI you can’t for example, use misspelled keywords because Google doesn’t allow misspellings in the ads, and if you have a dynamic keyword insertion token, and the keyword is misspelled, the ad text or title is misspelled. That will get your ad disabled very quickly.

So how much is too much? I’ve read books where the author advises using hundreds, even thousands of long tail keyword phrases (3 or more words in the phrase). I’m not a fan of that either.

The reason is that Google has some unpublished limitations on the size of an account.

For sure, you can only have 25 campaigns. Some have been told you can only have 100 adgroups per campaign, but I’ve had campaigns with more than that, so that’s a flexible number. I’ve also been told no more than 2000 keywords per adgroup, but really, you should never approach that.

The big concern is, and again this is just what I’ve been told, there’s a limit of 50,000 keywords per account.

If you’re targeting several hundred keywords per adgroup, it won’t take long to fill up an account, will it?

I prefer to target usually a couple dozen keywords per adgroup. I prefer to have 2 word phrases, sometimes 3, and then variations for the plurals. Also variations for the keywords smooshed together (like greenwidgets, no spaces in between). Also sometimes variations with .com at the end, so greenwidgets.com and greenwidget.com.

Then I’ll add negative matches so that I won’t get killed by a lot of long tail phrases that I don’t want to pay for, like -picture, -free, -screen saver, that kind of thing.

Once I see profits coming out of the main keywords, then I might start adding more keywords to the mix, and deleting the ones that are getting a lot of impressions and few clicks, or no impressions, of lots of clicks and no sales.

Success with AdWords isn’t a one-step, set it and forget it process.