I have been running an adwords campaign for my online gift store and have quite alot of keywords (different combinations, negatives etc..). Is having too many keywords good or bad as most do not yield any impressions or clicks. My budget is low (I think) at $10 a day but I am hoping to raise that to $30.

Cheers.

I read somewhere in the Google help files to try to keep it to 20 or so keywords. I've tried with only three and up to 50 -- when I start out with a bunch like that, I watch which one's seem to generate the most clicks and slowly get rid of those that don't get any or very few views and no clicks. You can sort of feel things out and narrow things down this way until you have the best performing keywords.

From my experience, every new ad campaign needs a lot of tweaking and trial and error.

Only the first so many are counted, the rest are not even checked. Having many of the same keyword can get your website a penalty as well

Thanks for advice. Should I be ignoring keywords that that don't yield impressions ? Surely, the impressions will depend on your budget right ?

Well, personally I get rid of those after two or three weeks, but again, that's a matter or choice, I guess. However, if a keyword isn't getting any impressions at all, it's pretty useless, the way I see it. Waiting for a month or more in hopes it will get an impression or two won't, I don't believe anyway, help you much.

Yeah, keyword does not getting any impression is useless. Try to select the best keyword that fits your site content.

Originally Posted by MyRedPacket

Thanks for advice. Should I be ignoring keywords that that don't yield impressions ? Surely, the impressions will depend on your budget right ?

Well, mostly, and also yes and no. You say you're about to 3x your budget - bet you a day's spending that at least one of the no impressions keywords pulls in at least one visitor when you advertise more.

In other words, look holistically at the situation. Trim the fat, get rid of stuff that's not helping you. But before you go yanking anything, ask why it's not helping - some are just going to be unhelpful keywords, and others you'll find blocked by some other issue that might be within your control.

And to avoid confusion, it seems the question is one of adwords keywords, not seo keyword stuffing.

with a large keyword list it is hard to make them all relevant to the ad and therefore they will cost you more.

it is better to break them into different ad groups each group talking about a different facet of your site.

ie hypothetically if your site is about travel in europe you might have three ad groupds

one with keywords like

battlefield tours
tour the battlefield
dday landings battlefield tours

two
disney euro trips
visit euro disney
disney euro holidays

three
canal cruises
cruise french canals
canal holidays

so each ad group has a definite theme and the main word from each group (from above would be battlefield, disney and canal) would be ideally in the title of the ad.

google will see this as your ads being relevant to your keywords and therefore give your ad a better ranking with a lower cost

keep your ad groups tighly focussed and your ad relevant to your landing page and you should do ok

keywords with no impressions, up to you, but one month then delete. your keywords are THE MOST important part of your campaign
all the best

Thanks mcjp6. The more ad groups you set up, do you need to increase your budget ?

No yuo don't, these ad groups are all in the same campaign. so if your campaign is call travel, once you click on travel you then go and set up your different adgroups, your campaign settings are then relevant for all the ad groups in that campaign, you can of course still set each keyword bid individually if you want.

so your daily budget, country setting etc relate to your ad groups as a whole.

so if you have three adgroups and your campaign budget is $50 per day then the total of the three campaigns over a month will never exceed $1500 (assume 30 days to a month).

The daily budget is averaged over the month. So some days it may exceed $50, some days under, if it goes over for the period google will credit your account with an "over delivery charge"

I guess all good points have already been suggested here Just remeber when choosing keywords for your niche, always keep in mind your market - what would these people be searching for? Once you have answered that question. You are on t he right track