Today I decided to try something new with my Google Adwords PPC ads.
Hear this story first…
A few weeks ago I was guest of an online Radio Show courtesy of my pal Ben Settle.  The main topic was Google Adwords and I was brought on to talk about my experience with PPC. While on the call, the other guest showed a snapshot of his adwords account where he was bidding on over 400 keywords–get this–in the SAME adgroup. That’s something a lot of experts, including Perry Marshall will tell you is a biiiiig no-no.
Well the surprising part that had me baffled was that he had a 93% conversion rate. Dude, there’s the very same screenshot I saw in the captioned image below. What a guy! Seriously, I have been impressed since and that’s a really long time to be impressed with someone, ok?
Today, I thought finally to give it a go myself.
I added 500 keywords to the SAME adgroup and gave them individual bids. That’s pretty crazy for me considering I usually have ONE keyword (with 2-3 matching types) per adgroup. And so far it’s been working brilliantly.
But I decided to give the multiple-keywords-in-an-adgroup trick a go. After all, I’m still working on my original 1,000 leads/day challenge that I set maybe a month or so ago (if you remember).

One of the lessons I learned through my online marketing experience is that just because something is working doesn’t mean it’s the best way. So what were the results of this experiment?
First, my click-thru-rate on that adgroup went from 1.5% to 12%. Heck yes! Double digit CTR!
That doesn’t even make sense. Considering that i’m using the exact same ad on 500 keywords. Theoretically, the more targeted the ad is to the keyword, the better response it should get. Here, instead, 500 different keywords with the same (much less tailored ad) are getting clicked more frequantly. Here’s why I think this happened:
When bidding on just a single keyword I would use the same bid for potentially 1000’s of searches. But when I’m targeting longer-tail keyword derivatives I’m gaining the advantage of being able to put down individual bids more customised to each search string’s competition. And I also think that Google is giving preference to my ad over others, regardless of my bids, because I’m telling it specifically (instead of implying) that it should show the ad on those exact search strings.
There is a down-side to this trick though.
My conversion rate shot all the way down. I mean, there’s literally ZERO conversions for the couple of hundreds clicks accumulated today.
Expensive experiment. But a very valuable lesson learned about increasing click-thru-rate.
Now, onto figuring out how to make the landing page convert more of those clicks!

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.