Optimizing ads with tons of keywords

A campaign with import rules may accumulate massive lists of keywords over time. 

Having tons of keywords in the same ad can have some undesirable impacts:

• The campaign budget may not be sufficient to drive traffic to all the keywords.
• High-volume keywords can take traffic away from low-volume keywords, resulting in missed opportunities.
• It takes longer to optimize ads because only a subset of keywords get traffic.
• It becomes harder to split the advertising budget between keywords.

X-keywords per campaign structure

You can reduce the problem by creating multiple campaigns with a limited number of keywords (Etc. 10 keywords per campaign).

Such a structure gives more control but means more work, as you now have to do the following:

• Aggregate and analyze search terms across all the campaigns.
• Identify good search terms, and find if the keywords exist in any campaigns.
• Add keywords to an existing campaign, or create additional campaigns to hold these new keywords.
• Set up automation for these new campaigns.

N-tier campaign graduation funnel

A more automated approach is a performance-based graduation funnel.

Set up structures where keywords graduate progressively from one campaign structure to another based on performance.

For example, Mass Campaign > Fully Managed Campaign uses such a structure.

• The Discovery campaign imports search terms with >= 2 orders.
• The Sales campaign imports search terms with >= 5 orders and >= 15% conversion.

If you drive a significant traffic volume, consider creating even more campaigns with increasingly stringent criteria to funnel keywords into their campaign performance group and negating graduated keywords from lower-tier campaigns.

This graduation and negation approach reduces competing keywords and the number of "effective" keywords in each campaign.

You can automate the graduation and negation process for the N-tier funnel by referring to the Discovery and Sales strategic objective.

While X-keywords per campaign structure gives more granularity and control, N-tier campaign graduation funnel is helpful if the eventual goal is to uncover potentially rankable keywords to create a single keyword campaign structure for them.