How Many Keywords Should Your Account Be Targeting?

by Jenny Hatch May 6, 2015

Paid Search advertising can be intimidating. If you’ve never done it before—or if you’ve tried it without success—platforms like Google and Bing don’t necessarily provide clear guidelines on some basic questions. Today we’re going to address one of those: how many keywords should your account be targeting?

Before I answer the question let me say that Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates had different beliefs and opinions, and so do different PPC experts!

There’s not necessarily a single right answer for every company or every situation, and that’s okay. But here at Disruptive, we’ve devised a not-so-top-secret formula that we use when we’re building accounts for clients new to PPC.

This formula lets us decide how many keywords to target starting out so that we will get enough clicks in the first few weeks of testing to learn something meaningful. In order to learn if a keyword is worth targeting, it should have at least 100 clicks to have a sample size large enough to avoid statistical anomalies. It’s not always the ideal number, but it’s a good starting point that we’ll use as our baseline here.

First, you need to know your budget. In the long run your PPC budget should be flexible and responsive to the number of leads you’re able to close profitably, but when you’re starting out you probably have a general idea how much you’re able to for testing.

Once you’ve set your budget, The formula for finding the number of keywords to target based is:

Monthly budget/Anticipated Cost per Click/100 clicks=the number of keywords to target

The monthly budget is how much you are willing to spend a month on AdWords.

The anticipated cost per click is the average click price for your keyword. This can be found using your keyword history or AdWord’s Keyword Planner tool. The Keyword Planner Tool is found in your tools tab in AdWords.

Using the Keyword Planner Tool, you can find new keywords, plan your budget, and get insights for keywords. To use it, pick which option best suits your needs, add keywords and targeting, and then let Google run its algorithm and predict the future based on historic trends. Below is a screenshot of the data input section followed by the results.

Keyword_Planner_–_Google_AdWords

Keyword_Planner_–_Google_AdWords 2

Click price can range from a few cents to over $100 depending on your industry, so be realistic and remember that the AdWords Keyword Planner often underestimates actual costs.

Sometimes your budget may be low enough, and the cost per click high enough, to make bidding on very few keywords the optimal strategy. When this happens, I’ll target 3 or 4 keywords or go back to the keyword planner and find longer-tail, more intent based keywords that have a cheaper cost per click.

Another problem is that in some niche industries there might not be enough traffic to get 100 clicks in a month. In this case, your keywords might be too specific. Try introducing a few shorter-tail keywords into the account.

For instance, if you were targeting the keyword “print management solution” and it isn’t getting any impressions, add the keyword “print management” to see if it gets you qualified traffic instead. Before doing this, make sure you add negative keywords so you aren’t getting clicks or impressions for searches you know might be irrelevant, like “what is print management” or “print management jobs”.

Some people want their cake and to eat it, too. They want to target those certain critical keywords regardless of what it costs. The formula above can be tweaked to tell cake lovers how much money they should expect to budget to get what they want.

Now that’s some expensive cake.

For example, if you know you have to bid on a twenty industry keywords, you’d tweak the formula as follows:

Number of keywords x Anticipated Click Price x 100 clicks=Monthly Budget

Try out this formula in your existing account or to help you set-up your account and let me know how it helps!

  • PPC

Jenny Hatch

Jenny Hatch

As the Executive Assistant, Jenny's primary focus is to help the Executive Team better lead the company with the proper financials, reporting, presentations, accountability etc. Jenny's role as an account manager, social media marketing manager, and accountant along with her recently earned MBA have allowed her to develop an understanding of the business that few others have.

Leave a comment

Featured Posts

Background Parallax
Background Parallax

Let's Do This!

Let's get in touch to see if we're a good fit to help you reach your business goals.
Contact the Disruptive Team
  • Google Premier Partner Logo White
  • Hubspot Certified Partner Logo
  • Bing Ads Accredited Professional Logo
  • Facebook Marketing Partner Logo
  • Klaviyo Master Elite Marketing Partner Logo
  • 5-Star Reviews on Clutch Logo
  • Best PPC Rankings Award
    Best PPC Rankings Award
  • Utah Venture Entrepreneur Forum Top 25 Under 5 Company
    Utah Venture Entrepreneur Forum Top 25 Under 5 Company
  • UB Best Companies to Work For Award
    UB Best Companies to Work For Award
  • 2020 National Excellence Award Winner
    2020 National Excellence Award Winner
  • Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies Award
    Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies Award
  • Inc. 500 Fastest-Growing Companies #145 Icon
    Inc. 500 Fastest-Growing Companies #145 Icon
  • Top PPC Company 2022 Design Rush Award
    Top PPC Company 2022 Design Rush Award
  • Top 1000 Companies Global 2021 Clutch Award
    Top 1000 Companies Global 2021 Clutch Award
  • Top Digital Marketing Agencies 2022 Clutch Award
    Top Digital Marketing Agencies 2022 Clutch Award

©2024 Disruptive Advertising