4,085 Keywords, 1 Ad Group, and a Misspelled Headline

4,085 keywords in a single ad group. One ad doing the work for all of them. And the word cleaning was misspelled in every headline.

Claire breaks down the air duct cleaning account that had everything wrong — dynamic keyword insertion pulling in random terms, target impression share wasting budget on visibility instead of leads, and one landing page for every service.

She explains what a properly structured campaign actually looks like and why the competitors with separate pages for each service were winning.

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Transcript

Welcome to Clicks and Clarity with Claire.

I want to tell you about the most keywords I have ever seen inside a single ad group.

4,085.

An air duct cleaning company came to me. They were running Google Ads. Performance was getting worse. They wanted to know why.

So I opened the account.

One campaign. One ad group. 4,085 keywords, all chucked in together.

Now, to put that in perspective, we typically build ad groups with 5 to 15 keywords. Maybe 20 at most. Because you have one ad doing the work for all the keywords inside that group. If the keywords are tightly themed, the ad can match. If you have 4,000 keywords in there, that ad cannot possibly be relevant to all of them.

It is like having one salesperson standing at the door trying to answer questions about 4,000 different products simultaneously.

This to me says the account was set up by someone who just went through a keyword tool and said yes to everything. Every keyword. Every variation. All dumped into one place.

And then I looked at the ad itself.

They were using dynamic keyword insertion, which is where Google automatically swaps in the keyword the person searched for. It can work in small, tightly themed ad groups. But with 4,000 keywords, Google is pulling in all kinds of random terms and sticking them in your headlines.

And here is the part that really got me.

The word cleaning was misspelled. In every single headline. Not once. Not twice. In every headline where it appeared. Somebody had typed it wrong and it had been running like that the whole time.

So you have got an air duct cleaning company whose ad cannot spell the word cleaning.

Bear in mind, this is the first thing a potential customer sees. They search for air duct cleaning near me. And the ad that appears has a misspelled headline. What does that tell them about the quality of the service?

Now, it gets worse.

The bidding strategy was set to target impression share. That means the account was telling Google to show the ad as often as possible, rather than telling Google to bring in leads at a specific cost.

Target impression share makes sense for a brand campaign, where someone is already searching for your company by name and you want to be at the top every time. But for a cold traffic campaign where you are trying to attract new customers searching for air duct cleaning services, you want to be telling Google how much you are willing to pay per lead.

That is the difference between saying show my ad everywhere and saying bring me customers I can afford.

And then the landing page.

One single landing page for the entire account. Every keyword, every search, every type of service, all going to the same page.

Now, I looked at what their competitors were doing. One competitor had separate pages for air duct cleaning, for duct replacement, for mold remediation. When you clicked their ad for air duct cleaning, you landed on a page about air duct cleaning. When you clicked for mold removal, you landed on a page about mold removal.

This business was sending everyone to the same page regardless of what they searched for.

That hurts quality score. It means you pay more per click. It means your ads do not show as often. And it means the people who do click are less likely to convert because the page does not match what they were looking for.

When I looked at the search terms, the keywords that were actually driving conversions were a tiny fraction of those 4,000. Air duct cleaning near me. Duct cleaning Houston. The basics. The rest were experiments that never had a chance to work because they were all competing with each other inside one ad group.

So what did this account actually need?

Multiple campaigns. Each one with its own budget. Air duct cleaning in one campaign. Mold remediation in another. Duct replacement in another.

Inside each campaign, themed ad groups. People searching for cost go in one group with an ad that talks about pricing. People searching for a specific location go in another group with an ad that mentions that area. People searching for a company or a service provider go in another group, because those are the hottest leads and they need their own ads.

Each ad group gets a matching ad. Each ad group ideally gets a matching landing page. And you tell Google what you want to pay per lead, not just to show your ad as often as possible.

This is not complicated. It is a lot of work, but it is not complicated.

The account needed a complete rebuild. And honestly, the fact that it had brought in any leads at all with 4,000 keywords, one misspelled ad, and the wrong bidding strategy told me there was real demand in that market. The potential was there. The setup was just letting it all leak away.

That is it for today.

If you want me to look at your account and tell you whether your keywords are structured properly or whether they have all been chucked in together, book a free audit at clairejarrett.com.

So many thanks for listening.

Bye for now.