I answered some questions about PPC keywords yesterday then realized that you might find these useful. I’ll keep posting PPC questions and answers over the next several days.

Ask your own question in the comments. Depending on how many questions I receive I’ll answer either all or the best ones in future blog posts.

How many PPC keywords should you buy?

Continuing the Portent PPC series, today’s insight is how to determine how many keywords you should have in any given ad group or campaign.

Ultimately, the actual number of appropriate keywords depends on your industry, but the rule of thumb is keep it simple and group PPC keywords related to your business appropriately.

One sure sign: if you have to run an Adwords Search Query Report every time you log into your Google account you’re most likely bidding on too many terms (unless you are Target or Amazon).  If it’s in the hundreds, it’s too many.

Too many keywords!

High volume keywords can create several thousand impressions each day. Break them out into their own campaigns to control costs and ease maintenance. Some examples are real estate, lawyer, cars, jewelry, bridal, furniture, and shoes.

If you must bid on a difficult to control PPC keyword, place it in a separate campaign. Make sure that you actually need that keyword and that it converts. This way you can control costs, exposure and filter out low quality clicks and visits. Ideally, you want to have no more than 20-25 keywords in an ad group. This will make it easier to not only see all the keywords on a single page in the PPC search engine’s interface, but also keep things neat and increase quality score potential.