SF Digital Studios

Google lets you put 20 keywords in an ad group. Most people read that as a recommendation. It’s a technical limit, in the same way a lift has a maximum weight rather than a target weight. The recommended number is between 3 and 10, sharing a single search intent. We regularly take over accounts with forty, sixty, sometimes over a hundred keywords sitting in one ad group. Nothing is broken. Everything still runs. It’s just costing them up to four times more per click than it needs to. This post explains why that happens, how to tell if it’s happening to you, and how to repair an account that’s already grown wild. What Keyword Bloat Actually Is Keyword bloat is what happens when an ad group accumulates keywords over time, and nobody ever removes any. It’s rarely a decision. It’s usually a series of small, sensible-looking additions. You launch with eight keywords. You spot a good search term and add it. A month later, you add three more. Somebody suggests a variation, so in it goes. Two ...