At GoogleAdSpecialist.com, we have always adhered to the conventional wisdom of using single keyword ad groups, and it seems to have worked well as anecdotes and theory suggest. But what does actual data say about 1. the supposed boost to quality score and 2. supposed elevation to click-through rates?
Let’s start with the click-through rate. To investigate we’ll refer to one of our accounts in the chiropractic care vertical in which we happen to have invested heavily in building out single keyword ad groups. Let’s take a look at a rough before and after:
| Before: | After: |
| 3.89% | 7.62% |
Pretty conclusive data here. In fact it looks like the click-through rate almost doubled. It makes sense after all that an ad triggered by one exact search would be the most likely to be relevant to what a user is looking for. Using less restrictive keyword structuring and targeting can have its place, but hypothetically and also with some actual data behind the idea, single keyword ad groups have a huge impact on overall click-through rates. In turn, this improved CTR number alone should boost overall quality scores to help shave cost and improve ad visibility, but it may also be that narrowing an ad group down to one keyword improves the quality score in and of itself regardless of the CTR factor. It will be interesting to see if the quality score change lags behind the CTR change (click-through rate was the main factor) or if the quality score change is more immediate.
Let’s investigate further by doing a similar comparison of quality score data before and after implementing SKAGs