Targeting All The Keywords

Should you really target every keyword you think is relevant?

Honestly, I’ve never seen a Paid Search account have every keyword in their arsenal performing at acceptable levels. The interesting thing is that you’ll have clients or leadership requesting more keyword targets. Is that really the answer?

Straight to the point, no, you shouldn’t just target every keyword if you’ve already established an account that is performing. I have worked on a Google team where we explored many different keyword explorations for various different stages of the funnel (we even created an “above-top of the funnel” targetings, we went far). Adding keywords never moved the needle in terms of performance. It really just added spend to our account and made our CPLs look worse. So what really helped build our performance? Focus.

When I say focus, I mean that we really doubled or even tripled efforts on keywords that were already performing. When we analyzed the highest revenue generating keywords (not even best converting, we looked at our CRM and saw what keywords actually generated revenue) we decided to build very dedicated text ads and landing pages for these targets. We also split out each keyword into its own ad group, never adding more than 1 keyword to the ad group so that we can control how focused that ad group was.

It turned out, that we had 25 keywords driving over 85% of our revenue! We were targeting 2,000+ keywords in the account. That is ~1.25% of our keywords driving the majority of the revenue! It was amazing to see this. It helped me realize you shouldn’t be targeting all the keywords out there, you should be optimizing your account towards finding the 1% of keywords that drive most of your ROI.

Feel free to reach out with any questions!

daniel@searchperfection.com