Even if your keywords seem to be doing well, they could actually be wasting your money under the surface. It’s vital that you break down your ad groups into smaller pieces and exclude the demographics that aren’t performing well. You can do this by A/B testing different keywords and their match types, especially when you’re dealing with longtail keywords.
Exact keyword matches create the smallest icebergs.
From there, phrase matches are the second smallest.
Broad + Match + Modifier match types give you the third smallest iceberg.
Broad matches give you the biggest icebergs. And they are precisely what you want to avoid. They allow for way too much variation, and you’ll see that a lot of the search terms used to find your ad won’t align with what you’re selling.
So let’s say you’re selling cake.
Your keyword might look something like ‘London cake bakery’ as your exact keyword. But creating a keyword using ‘London + cake + bakery’ might give you many more strange or irrelevant results, like:
Cake bakery tutorial
London bakery bread
London bake Bakery reviews
London cake baker
London bakery delivery
Tower of London cake
Bakery cake ingredients
How to make a bakery-style cake at home
London cake bakery GBBO
Best bakery in London
Bake off cakes
While some of these Search terms might be relevant to your ad, many won’t be. So you run the risk of your ad getting a lower conversion rate with the match type you chose.
For Google Ads, SKAGS (single keyword ad groups) are like ice picks. They’re one of your best chances of chipping away at unnecessary clicks.
To create a SKAG, you’ll need to try keyword extraction to pick out individual keywords for a few different ad groups.
Rather than having 20 words in an ad group, you create variations for a single keyword in one ad group. With smaller ad groups, you can make more exclusions using negative keywords. This will help to focus the search terms that direct someone to your ad. This way, you get as close to an exact match as possible while still allowing for some flexibility (so that people can still find you). SKAGs can be tedious, but if you’re running a campaign with lots of similar keywords, it’ll pay off.
By implementing SKAGs into your campaign optimisation, you can better focus your Google ads strategy. Your goal should be to get your keywords to match the search terms used to find your ad.
It does take a bit of trial and error. But with time, knowing what negative keywords to use as exclusions becomes key.