The Best PPC Optimization Tip: Single Keyword Ad Groups

Today we’re taking a quick and dirty look at one of our biggest “insider” tips for optimizing your PPC campaigns. 

This single strategy tripled our CTR (click-through rate) from an acceptable industry average 2-3% to an impressive 6.8%!

First – we need to talk about Quality Score’s real quick. 

So what is your Quality Score? 

Well, the Quality Score is the aggregate rating that Google gives to every ad based on three main factors: anticipated CTR, your ad’s landing page experience, and ad relevance.

• Anticipated CTR (Click-through Rate)

  • You may hear this term often, so let’s break it down. What is click through rate or CTR? Your CTR is the amount of times your ad has been clicked in relation to how many impressions or views it has had. Effectively, how enticing is your ad to people that are seeing it? How many people have searched out a relative keyword, been served your ad, and then clicked on it.

• Landing Page Experience

  • This one will be key as we elaborate a little further on our tip, but what you need to know right now is that your “landing page” is the page your ad sends people to when they click on it.

  • Best practice is to have your landing page be a standalone, single page that’s not linked from your main site. It’s also best if it’s highly optimized and, as we’ll discuss, specifically targeted and relevant to the viewer.

• Ad Relevance

  • That brings us to the third and final component of Quality Score ratings - your ad relevance. 

  • Basically, it’s important that your ad not be for running shoes and you indicate in your keywords that it should trigger for people searching to “umbrellas” or even “ballet shoes”.

  • Google wants to make sure they are showing the most relevant and likely to be clicked ad to the searcher at all times. It keeps people using Google as a trusted source of information and, let’s be honest, it makes them more money!

We’ll do another blog at another time on other hugely important factors you need to know like keyword planning, landing page optimization and more but for now, we just want to give you a nuts and bolts tip that will help those of you who may already be running PPC campaigns.

The secret we’ve started using is Single Keyword Ad Groups.

Basically, the key is to get very granular with your ads and keywords to ensure that you’re boosting the ad relevance to the searcher. 

Here’s an example – as a marketing firm we offer many different services from social media management, to graphic design, to public relations to branding. 

Not to say that there isn’t value to promoting our general “marketing services” or “graphic design” but what we’ve started doing is drilling deeper and creating highly targeted ads around specific content of ours. 

For example, we have done branding work with a local yoga studio. 

So as opposed to generally promoting our branding and graphic design work and including the yoga-related items in the mix; we’ve started running targeted ads specifically to current or potential yoga studio owners that may be looking to establish or update their branding, then we point them directly to the relevant work we’ve done in that field. 

We have an entire ad group focused just on this specific niche. The same with others we have experience in!

The results are amazing!

What happens is that because your ad is incredibly relevant to the search query, you’re getting much higher CTRs, which ultimately boosts your Quality Score rating, which further lowers your CPC (cost-per-click) and increases your likelihood of having your ad being shown!

When we tapped into this idea it changed our entire PPC strategy for the better. 

It’s all about creating micro-content at a macro level (our inner Gary Vee is so proud!)

Think about how you can implement this strategy in your business of workflow and let us know if you have any questions or other tips to pass along. 

Have a great weekend!