How To Setup a Google AdWords Campaign With
Possibly Thousands of Keywords In Only A Few Minutes

The classical way to setup a Google AdWords campaigns is to create tightly focused adgroups that contain several related keywords. In general, an adgroup will contain something around 5 to 50 keywords.

A radically different strategy would be to setup adgroups that contain only one keyword. In other words, for each of your keywords you would create one adgroup with the same name as the keyword. So, for example if you have 500 keywords, you would create a campaign with 500 adgroups.

Now, let's take a look at the advantages of this "1 keyword per adgroup" strategy. Probably the biggest advantage of this strategy is that you can easily automate the setup of your campaign and save yourself a lot of time and a lot of boring work.

Just to give you an idea, setting up a Google AdWords campaign with several thousand keywords will take about 40 – 50 minutes using Excel spreadsheets. With my free software tool you can even further reduce the setup time and do the same in only about 3 minutes. Try to setup a campaign with several thousand keywords manually in your Google AdWords account and you will be busy for a few weeks.

But what's actually the advantage of setting up a campaign that contains thousands of keywords? Well, the big advantage of this approach is that you will be able to generate quite a substantial amount of very cheap and possibly high converting traffic from thousands of less-competitive long-tail keywords.


Here are the steps involved in setting up a campaign that contains one keyword per adgroup:

* Get started with an initial list of about 500 – 1000 keywords.

* After optimizing and fine-tuning your campaign you keep on adding more keywords and you scale it up to possibly tens of thousands of keywords.

* For each keyword you create one adgroup. Use the name of your keyword as the name for your adgroup.

* Use the name of your keyword with the first letter of each word capitalized as the headline for your two split-tested ads.

* Write two different ads (description line 1 and 2).

* Define an initial bid price for all your adgroups. One- or two days after launching your campaign, you will modify the bid prices so that you get most of your keywords (ads) on the first page of the Google search results.

* Define a standard ad headline that will be used for all those keywords that are longer than 25 characters.

Almost all of these tasks can be automated and this allows you to setup a campaign with possibly thousands of keywords in only a few minutes.


So, here are the major advantages of creating AdWords campaigns that contain only one keyword per adgroup:

* Setting up your campaign is child's play and will take only a few minutes.

* Your campaign will contain many long tail keywords and this allows you to generate lots of cheap and possibly high converting traffic.

* You will be bidding on tons of keywords that are neglected by most of your competitors.

* Your ad headlines contain the keywords users are searching for. That means your ads are highly relevant, you will get a higher click-through rate, your Google quality score will go up, your minimum bid price will go down…

* Each adgroup contains two ads that are split-tested against each other, which allows you to continually improve your ad click through rate (by modifying and improving your weaker performing ads) and to keep on increasing the profitability of your campaign.

Now, one of your questions might be how you can manage a campaign that contains thousands of keywords - as you can imagine, split testing ads for thousands of adgroups represents quite a bit of workload…

Truth is, even if you have thousands of keywords, you will only have a relatively low number of high converting keywords. And you keep on split-testing and improving your ads only for these keywords. For all other keywords you don't really have to worry that much.