How many keywords in a good PPC campaign?
04/04/2009
How many keywords in a good PPC campaign?
When talking to new PPC clients some of the most frequent questions are:
- How many keywords?
- Do we have to give you a list of keywords?
- Can we change the keywords later?
- How many keywords do you usually use on your PPC campaigns?
There are several important things to consider when talking about keywords for PPC campaigns.
- The best PPC keywords will keep changing – you can never have ‘done’ keyword research!
- Active PPC keywords should be a dynamic, changing list – you cannot have a fixed definitive list!
- More keywords is not necessarily better.
PPC agencies may charge an extra setup fee – and this will cover the initial extensive market and keyword research. But Cornish think a good PPC agency will be doing keyword research on an ongoing basis and just once at the start of the contract is not sufficient. Cornish WebServices have provide PPC management for many businesses in the tourism sector, and this is highly seasonal. Most keyword research considers a historical 3 month period, which is most unhelpful for tourism advertising.
The PPC keyword list should be dynamic with keywords paused when not performing well and bids continually changed according to the sales or leads generated by each keyword.
How many keywords? For those people who really want some actually figures
- Most of our smaller budget PPC campaigns have between 50 and 500 active keywords.
- Most of our larger spend PPC campaigns have between 50 and 20,000 active keywords. But the number of keywords used depends more on the market and not on the budget.
- The smallest number of keyword s we have had active (for a high spend account) was ONE. In a particularly competitive industry, the large number of specific keyword phrases on which we had been successfully placing most of the budget started to perform less well. For a period of three weeks we were able to achieve a far higher ROI by pausing most keywords and biding on ONE generic keyword.
This demonstrates that a good PPC manager will actively select the best set and number of keywords for your particular industry.
