Should I Use Many or Few PPC Keywords In My Adwords Campaign?

Kevin,

From first hand experience, I do better with under 10 keywords. The reason behind this is that I will use highly targeted keywords to help generate potential customers instead of "window shoppers."

Window shoppers cost money, potential customers buy.

I like using long string keywords and make sure my ads are very specific as to what the browser can expect.

Many times after optomizing my ads for best performance, I'll use 1 ad at a time with only 2 or 4 keywords to see not only how high the CTR is, but how high the Conversion rate for purchases is. After a couple days of testing, moveo n to the next set. Find a set that does the best and a set that does second best and mix and match the two and keep testing.

Try different keywords with different ads as well when you begin optomizing the ads for optimal performance. If you're unfamiliar with optomizing the ads, let me know, I'll try and elaborate.

This is just my take from personal experience and what's worked for me. With a zillion keywords you may get more visitors, but will those visitors buy things? Also, how will you know which visitor, from which keyword purchased?

You might want to have a look at the new tool Brad Callen release a couple of weeks ago called PPC Web Spy. The standard version is Free (but you only get 10 keywords on the free version) the upgrade versions give you the mother load. Also, its a Firefox plug-in, so you need to use FF browser for this tool to be any use to you.

What's nice about PPC Web Spy, kinda like his Affiliate Elite tool, is that you can quickly view the exact keywords used by the PPC advertiser and you can sort the columns by cost, # of clicks per day etc. When you combine this with Wordtracker, you can drill down and come up with a good set of keywords in a target niche pretty quickly.

I posted a review of PPC Web Spy with a nice 'How To Demo' on my Blog (2-14-09) that Brad did a couple of weeks ago. He clicks pretty fast so you might have to watch a couple of times.

If you PM me, I can share with you an analysis I did on a few niches that are doing pretty well over the past 11 days w/ my PPC campaigns.

If you use many keywords, you may want to use Adwords editor to create adgroups with one keyword per adgroup and create custom ads and custom landing pages for them.

If you are short on time, at least do custom ads and landers for your high-volume terms.

many in the campaign - but only a few in each AdGroup. i use 1-20 in a tuned AdGroup. up to 100 (sometimes) when casting about to find the hot keywords - but only for a few days otherwise i find quality score starts to slip. if i need more than a few days to find the hotties, then i shatter into more groups.

I guess you should use 3 to 6 keywords in your PPC campaign in Google Adwords because it needs to be relevant on what you are promoting. It is because the more you put keywords in your PPC campaign I guess lesser the chance on getting a high traffic. Sorry for that I was just giving my opinion. Although, putting many keywords in you PPC campaign would not affect your earnings.