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Marketing is all about focusing, otherwise you end up wasting a lot of time and money.  We focus on a niche.  We focus on a demographic.  We focus on a geographic area.  The list goes on.

It’s no different for PPC.  Money will be wasted in ad groups whose “themes” aren’t tightly focused.  Recently, I tested this out for myself and found this to be the plain and simple truth.

I began with a decently targeted ad group.  An example is as follows: (these are only the keywords of a fake ad group to illustrate the point)

Ad group:        Miami bicycle

Keywords:      Miami bicycle

Miami bicycles

Miami bicycle wheel

                        Miami bicycle wheels

                        Miami bicycle seat

                        Miami bicycle seats

                        Miami bicycle handle

                        Miami bicycle handles

In this example you can see that the theme is Miami bicycle and that every keyword phrase has “Miami” and “bicycle” in it.  So the quality score might be “Good” and have a minimum bid of 10 cents.  But I wanted the quality score to improve to lower the minimum bid - to 5 cents for example - and lower the CPC (cost per click).  So I broke them up into much tighter themes. For example:

Ad group:        Miami bicycle wheel

Keywords:      Miami bicycle wheel

                        Miami bicycle wheels

Now I can get much more specific with my landing page and my ad to reinforce these keywords which will improve my quality score all around.  In the first example, there are just too many secondary words to fit into one ad.  So by tightening the themes, I can taylor a visitors experience from, the moment they search for the relevant “Miami bicycle wheels”, to the ad they see in the results that talks about “Miami bicycle wheels”, and finally to the landing page I’ve created specifically for “Miami bicycle wheels” once they’ve clicked the ad.

This is just a basic example of having focused ad groups.  There are more advanced methods which will be discussed later.  If you don’t believe this method to be true, I challenge you to test it out on one ad group and look at the quality score when you are done.  Remember, focusing the ad group means, focused keywords, focused ads, and focused landing page.  The results will make you spend countless hours restructuring your campaigns if you are anything like me.  Cheers!