What are Single Keyword Ad Groups? (SKAGs)

Let’s talk about single keyword ad groups (SKAGs): what they are, and why they’re an amazing tool to master if you’re an AdWords manager or marketing professional!

First, let’s consider a small campaign that I ran for my in-laws, who rent baby equipment here in town. I set it up as a single keyword ad group structure, so you can see what it looks like.

There’s a single type of keyword that is used in every single ad group. Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s literally just one keyword in the ad group, but it means that there’s only one type of keyword.

This is a baby rental campaign, and there are several different ad groups within the campaign: booster seats, car seats, cribs, high chairs, etc.

So, if you’re going somewhere and you want to rent baby equipment, you might search for these things. Believe it or not, the SKAG ‘baby rentals’ is one of the highest searched and converting keywords. Car seat rental and then stroller rentals top the list, then crib rentals, and so on.  These are the most important searches, and these reach ad groups.

When you click into an ad group, let’s say car seat rental, you might say: that’s three keywords? But when I say’ single keyword ad group,’ I mean the single keyword is car seat rental. That’s the keyword.

Then you have different match types associated with that: Modified Broad, Phrase, and Exact.

ParaCore Tip: we typically avoid Broad in most instances because it’s too generic and generates too much irrelevant traffic.

Something else to consider certain types of keywords might have more than one keyword or more than three different match types. What does that mean?  One example that we’ve run across lately is lawyer and attorney.

So, if you’re looking for personal injury lawyer, you might do the three, Modified Broad, Phrase, and Exact, and put personal injury attorney in the exact same ad group. In this case, it’s six keywords: personal injury lawyer Modified Broad, Phrase, and Exact, and then personal injury attorney, Modified Broad, Phrase, Exact, all in the same ad group.

One of the biggest reasons that we do single keyword ad groups is so that you can align the consumer search with the ad. Here, I’ve clicked on Ads, where all my ads are related to car seat rentals. So, Phoenix Car Seat Rental, Car Seat Rental, Car Seat Rental, Car Seat Rental. You have very high click-through rates, and high conversion rates.

Let’s say I’m looking for car seats; I don’t want to see an ad for just generic baby equipment. If someone’s looking for a car seat, and not looking for a crib, I don’t want to take them to a generic baby rental page. I want to see a car seat ad, so I can click that car seat ad and go to a page where it talks about car seats.

At ParaCore, that’s a pattern you’ll see throughout all the different ad groups we manage.  When we take over accounts, it’s rarely set up like this. There might have one campaign with one ad group called Ad Group Number One, and then, 50 or 100 keywords, this huge variety of Broad match, Phrase, etc.

Instead, by setting this up so that the person who is searching for car seats sees a car seat ad, it’s in high alignment with what the consumer is searching for.

At the campaign structure, one of the most common variables is budget. You want to have a very specific budget. Geography is something you set up at the campaign level like placements. Or, you might just have different categories of your services as a campaign. You want to control those budgets; you don’t want to have one service category getting more budget than another.

Then, within that campaign, when you get even more narrow with the search terms, you run the single keyword ad groups to make sure that you’re highly aligning. What this does is allow you to see which ad groups and which keywords get the most activity and convert the best.

So here, baby rentals and car seat rentals are clearly the front runners. And then stroller rentals are number two. And these others have very low activity. You can also look at cost per conversion; they’re all compartmentalized within each other in an awesome way.

One thing I forgot to mention on the ad side: when you’re creating ads that take people to a landing page. At ParaCore, we use Unbounce, which has dynamic text insertion. We can change the URL tracking parameter, so when the viewer clicks it, it’ll pass in a dynamic variable like booster seat rental. You can also dynamically swap the text on the landing page, so that people will see text even more closely related with what they’re searching for, which can also increase conversion rates

In summary:

• Single keyword ad groups are something that we use exclusively here at ParaCore.
• When taking over accounts, we tend to transition slowly to this type of structure, but we typically see a boost in conversion rates, much lower cost per conversion, and high alignment with search intent.
• It’s a very clear story for the consumer, and we recommend adopting it whenever possible!

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