Keyword Grouping: The Secret Recipe to Slash Google Ads Costs

The importance of proper keyword grouping in a nutshell:

Have you ever had a craving you couldn’t resist, leading you to a bakery for your favourite treat? You settle in, order dessert and coffee, and anticipate a well-deserved indulgence after a tough day. The place is filled with relaxing music and the delightful scents of fresh bread, brewed coffee, fruit, chocolate, and vanilla (are you hungry yet?). After a few minutes, your dessert arrives, and your mouth waters in anticipation. 

The biscuit feels hard and dry, the cream is a little sour, and it lacks sweetness. The low-quality ingredients ruin the moment, undermining the entire experience.

In PPC campaigns, keywords are like those critical ingredients that make up a dessert. When keywords are not properly grouped, the entire mixture — and campaign — can be jeopardized. For some advertisers, after all the work they put into:

• Researching and strategizing around keywords 
• Setting goals
• Getting conversion tracking in place
• Matching keywords up

Their campaign doesn’t perform as expected or worse, it goes way over budget and is usually because of incorrectly prepared keywords. 

Two of their ads may be competing for the same keyword. This is called keyword cannibalization.

Or, they realize they do not know what to do with so many words or how to divide them up efficiently between the campaigns. Should they use the same words for different ads, or is it better to categorize them separately?

Although all these elements seem simple, like the importance of ingredients in a cake, they can significantly impact your ads, ROI, and results.

This is where keyword grouping comes in! 

What exactly is Keyword Grouping?

In PPC, keyword grouping sorts related keywords into themed groups. This is done to ensure that ads and landing pages are aligned with the user’s search query and help them solve a specific pain point.

What benefit will you get when grouping keywords?

• More Quality-Score-friendly ad groups
• More relevant text ads
• More aligned landing pages drive more conversions
• Better ad cost efficiency/effectiveness and potential success

Why do I need Keyword Grouping?

So, how do I start?

1. SERP Analysis: Develop keyword ideas based on Google searches and analyze the SERP to spot opportunities.
   
   
2. Do Keyword Research: The first step should be to collect as many keywords as possible related to your niche.
   
   
3. Create smaller Subgroups: The next step is to divide top-level groups into smaller groups. Do this until they are targeted and small to make a hierarchy.
   
   
4. Optimize your keyword groups: After the hierarchy is set, you can add variables and set optimal match types, which will help further specify the target audience.
   
   
5. Iterate and re-iterate: The key to a successful PPC strategy is continuous research, testing, and analysis of insights.

Put Your Keyword Groups to Good Use

Take advantage of Keyword Grouping to discover what content to create and what possible changes you can make to your site.

You can create content, update existing content, improve your site structure, and get ideas for additional pages to include, taxonomy (classifications/categories) to add, or topical areas to explore in your website.

Based on the groups you get as a result, you can develop your site’s page hierarchy, categories, subcategories, filters, etc.

You can do the same with your ad campaigns, as ad groups are created similarly to keyword groups. 

An ad group is a group of ads and keyword phrases that trigger those ads in Google Ads.

Within an ad group, your text ads are tied to your keywords. When someone searches for something that matches up with your keyword, one of the ads tied to this keyword is served to the consumer. Thus, the closer your keywords are related to each other, the more relevant that ad will be.

On the other hand, a campaign is one or more ad groups.

How to group keywords in your ads: 

Basically, you have two main options when it comes to organising your campaigns.

1. Build campaigns based on high-level criteria. Separate them into large groups by their most critical shared traits.
2.   Build your campaigns around key differentiators in your business, like categories of products or services.

Ad Group Best Practices:

• Cluster your desired keywords by themes as narrowly as reasonably possible
• Each group supports different ads. A good way to guide ad group structure is based on the copy you expect to run in each case.                                                                                    
• Sometimes, a few keywords may command lots of traffic or more share of the results. In this case, you may separate them into multiple groups so these “power keywords” with other terms are housed in others.
• Once you have your ad group strategy, consider match types and how audience needs can affect ad text. Do this before creating your group structure. Then, evaluate landing page needs.

Keyword Grouping by Funnel Stage

While there are many ways to group keywords, here is a done-for-you example of how to clearly and tightly group keywords by funnel.

Top Funnel Keywords

These contain broad defining terms like “shoes” or “plumber” that summarise your value proposition in a single word. For a bakery, this might be something like “cake” or “doughnuts.” These keywords have a large audience as they have virtually no other defining characteristics like flavour, price, location, etc. Thus, they are usually used to drive large volumes of traffic and have low conversion rates.

These broad terms like “shoes” or “plumber” summarize your business in one word. For a bakery, examples might be “cake” or “doughnuts.” These keywords attract a large audience because they don’t include specific details like flavour, price, or location. As a result, they drive a lot of traffic but usually have low conversion rates.

However, we are not fans of one-word keywords because they can attract a lot of irrelevant traffic. Pairing these with a comprehensive list of negative keywords can help filter out unwanted searches and improve the quality of traffic to your site.

Mid-funnel keywords

These are more specific keywords that address product features and attributes. They usually cater to audiences who are researching options with higher intent. Some good examples include “best bakeries in New York.” These keywords have a good balance of volume and relevant traffic, and as a result, they have better conversion rates than top-funnel keywords.

Bottom Funnel Keywords

These are usually very specific or high-intent keywords. Customers are ready to take action, which signals a strong intent to purchase. A good example for a bakery is “buy chocolate cake in New York.” These keywords will usually have very low volumes. At any given time, only a fraction of the audience is in the market. However, due to their high intent, they usually have very high conversion rates.

(Pro Tip: Avoid overloading your Keyword Groups with Bottom Funnel Keywords solely for conversions. This approach can significantly increase your acquisition costs and hinder your brand-building efforts in the long run. To find the right balance, you should test and iterate your mix consistently.)

 

Why is it important to iterate and refine?

Once you have set your keyword groups and your ads are running, it is easy to forget about them and blame Google Ads for whatever results you get. This is because it is humanly impossible to see all the relevant keywords and group them perfectly in one go.  

You must regularly analyze your keyword performance. Review the Google Ads Search Terms report to see how keywords beyond your groups are performing for your ads. Based on this, you can add keywords that are performing well and remove low-performing and irrelevant keywords using the negative keywords option.

Not updating these groups can cause stagnation and a decline in campaign performance as competitors and customer interests move ahead. This regular refinement allows you to adapt to market dynamics and consumer behaviours. It ensures that the PPC campaigns remain aligned with current trends and your business goals.

This iterative process of research, testing, and gaining insights helps fine-tune PPC campaigns and significantly contributes to sustaining business growth and market presence.

What factors should I consider while optimising Keyword Groups?

Now that we understand why optimising your keyword groups is important let’s examine the best ways to do it. 

According to your goals and overarching strategy, you should cluster your desired keywords in tightly themed bundles and craft ads tailored to those groups. This boosts the Click-Through Rate (CTR) by tailoring the ad copy more closely to user searches.

While doing so, a great practice is to define your primary keyword which would be the one with the most high potential traffic. This can be narrowed down by finding the keyword with the highest search volume that lies between the green zone of keyword difficulty i.e. 15-49

Consider this keyword list for our Bakery:

Chocolate cake near me  | Volume: 1,000 | KD %: 46

Chocolate cakes near me | Volume: 590 | KD %: 52

Chocolate cake in New York | Volume: 320 | KD %: 37

Best chocolate cake in New York | Volume: 720 | KD %: 23

Choco-chip cake near me | Volume: 720 | KD %: 35

It’s clear here that “Chocolate cake near me” is going to be our primary keyword as it not only has the highest search volume but an ideal Keyword Difficulty level.

Beyond this, adding negative keywords is a fundamental part of your keyword strategy. As you add new keywords, you must also remove non-performing and irrelevant ones. This keeps your targeting effective and helps reduce wasted ad spend.

Finally, if you’re still not sure about how your keyword groups should look like or which would be the better way to meet your goals, click the link below:

7 Strategies for Effective Keyword Grouping

Final words:

Keyword Grouping is a powerful PPC strategy that will help you organise your ads and campaigns, rank for more terms, and reduce your Cost Per Click.

Grouping by keywords helps you avoid wasting time. It also lets you set more Quality–Score-friendly ad groups. This makes your ads more relevant and drives more conversions.

Even though keyword grouping may feel complicated and cumbersome at first, trust us, it’s worth the effort, and you’ll get the swing of it in just a few campaigns!

Don’t forget —you’ll be providing the right ad experience for people as if they were coming into your bakery. If the ingredients are high quality and prepared correctly, you’ll definitely keep them coming back for what you have to offer!