Outrank your competition, lower your costs, and significantly improve your marketing results and ROI with single-keyword ad groups!

Getting better results from AdWords and Bing Ads can sometimes seem like an impossible mission, especially when competing with large-scale advertisers with deep pockets. Learn why and how to use single-keyword ad groups, to beat your competition and maximize results.

What are single-keyword ad groups?

Single-keyword ad groups are exactly what they sound like – ad groups that contain one keyword only. The only thing that can be a bit confusing, is that it’s actually one keyword, but it can be of different match types, so Google or Bing will actually consider it as two or three keywords, depending on which match types you are using.

A single-keyword ad group with multiple match type will look like this:

As you can see, it’s the same keyword “oribi analytics”, but in exact, phrase and modified broad match types.

Why use single-keyword ad groups?

1. Higher Click through rates – Get more clicks

Using single-keyword ad groups allows you to write much more accurate and relevant text ads, that can easily contain the keyword in the ad group, and therefore make more people click on them, since the ads better answers their search query. The higher the ad relevancy is, the higher the CTR gets.

As you probably know, a higher CTR leads to a higher quality score.

2. Higher quality scores – Be able to bid lower

One of the things that affect the quality score the most is the CTR. When more people click on your ads, out of the people who saw them, it “tells” Google or Bing that your ad is more relevant for that search term, and therefore you will get a higher quality score. Quality score is one of the most important metrics on search campaigns and highly followed by search marketers. The higher the score is, the less you will have to bid for higher positions and more traffic.

When the quality score gets higher, so is the average position.

3. Higher Avg position – Outrank your competition

When your ads click through rates and quality scores are up, the required bids for higher positions get lower. Advertisers with high CTR and quality scores are being rewarded by Google and Bing, and are able to bid lower than the competition, in order to be ranked higher. Meaning, you will be able to bid and pay a lower amount to outrank your competition. For example, if your quality score was five out ten, and you had to bid $10 per click in order to rank at the average position of one. Improving your quality score to above five will require a lower bid than $10 in order to rank number one.

4. Higher search impression share – Get more impressions

As in average position, the higher your quality score is, the more impressions you will get for the same bids (out of the total impressions for a certain search term), meaning a higher impression share, which basically means more impressions and possibly traffic for you.

5. Lower cost per click – Get more clicks with less budget

Using single-keyword ad groups enables you to easily reduce the average cost per click. Since your quality score gets higher, Google and Bing allows you to get the same or higher ad ranks for the same or lower bids. This means, you are outranking your competition with possibly a lower bid and will be required to pay less per each click.

When you pay less for your clicks, you also lowering your cost per conversion.

6. Lower cost per conversion – Reduce your CPA

Single-keyword ad groups can help you lowering your cost per conversion in two ways:

Since you’re paying less per click, your cost per conversion gets lower as well. For example, if you paid $1 per click, and your conversion rate was 10%. That means each conversion cost you $10. Now, if your cost per click is down to $0.7, and the conversion rate stays the same, your cost per conversion is $7.

Using single-keyword ad groups enables you to create more focused and relevant landing pages. When the ad group contains one keyword, it is much easier to create a landing page that will match the ads and will answer the search query better. Doing so will increase your conversion rate, and will lower the cost per conversion.

7. Higher ROI – Become more profitable

The bottom line of each campaign is its ROI. Marketers aim to constantly optimize for the highest possible ROI. By now we know that single-keyword ad groups are increasing the CTR and quality score, get us more traffic at a lower cost per click and reduce our cost per conversion. The final outcome of all this is a higher ROI.

Bottom line – Single-keyword ad groups help you get better results, and improve your ROI.

The Downside of using single-keyword ad groups

While single-keyword ad groups can definitely improve your search campaigns, it also has its downsides. Single-keyword ad groups may require a higher maintenance. Obviously, having one keyword per ad group also means to have much more ad groups. More ad groups also mean more ads and landing pages to optimize, which can be a huge time consumer.

In addition to that, having more ad groups also means fewer data per ad group, which means it takes more time to gain data and figuring out which ads work better, and which search terms to include or exclude.

How to get started

If you’re starting a fresh new search campaign, it’s easy. Simply divide your keyword into single-keyword ad groups, with all the relevant match types, and upload them to AdWords and Bing (if you’re not using Bing ads yet, you should defiantly start doing that).

If you already have existing, and possibly successful campaigns, the process of switching to single-keyword ad groups is a bit more complex. My suggestion is to take a few of your top keywords (by conversions or traffic) and move them into single-keyword ad groups, with highly relevant ads. Once you see their improvement, keep doing that for lower tires keywords, and if you’re happy with the results, keep on switching your entire search campaigns into single-keyword ad groups.

Bottom line

Even though single-keyword ad groups can make your daily optimization of your search campaigns a bit harder, and it will take more of your time, it is definitely worth doing! The results you will get from single-keyword ad groups will be worth all the efforts. You will bite your competitors (let’s just hope they are too lazy to use single-keyword ad groups as well), and you will improve your results. Eventually, this is what every marketer is aiming for.

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