Considering the fact that the Spartans defeated the Persians at Thermopylae with an army of just 300 soldiers (plus squires and assorted farmers, et al – don’t believe everything in the movies), it’s safe to say that strength isn’t necessarily found in numbers. If what you have is of superior quality and geared for the job at hand, then volume is academic.
There’s a popular misconception about keywords that sees advertisers load hundreds of them into their accounts in the belief that more is better, that a swell of keywords will rustle up a bevy of customers falling over themselves to make purchases. The fundamental flaw in equipping so many keywords is that you’ll inevitably draw in unwanted, poor quality traffic and end up pushing up your own costs as keywords compete with one another – the one with the highest Ad Rank will enter the auction, and you can almost guarantee that it’ll be the one with a ropey Quality Score and elevated Maximum CPC.
1000 is actually a rather low keyword figure for some of the accounts that have entered the doors of PPC Rescue. The vast majority of our managed accounts now run on fewer than eight keywords per Ad Group yet when we originally took on these accounts, they came in with in excess of 3000 keywords (and in one case, over 5000)! The most startling element of these voluminous accounts was that hundreds of keywords hadn’t received a single click in all the time they’d been running, and some hadn’t even accrued an impression! If you’ve keywords that sit there generating impressions without clicks, you’re damaging your overall CTR without receiving any traffic whatsoever.
Beating your competitors to the better positions doesn’t come down to how many keywords you have, but how you utilise a powerful and select few.
