Ahhh the age old debate. If you're in the PPC industry chances are you see this question come up often in online forums and blog posts.
"Should I use SKAGS? Will SKAGS supercharge my campaigns? My boss said he saw something on Facebook that said you must use SKAGS or else you're dumb."
SKAGS stands for Single Keyword Ad Groups, which is pretty self explanatory in name. Although Google advises that you group your keywords into themed Ad Groups of 6-12 keywords, SKAGS defies that advice by only using one keyword in each Ad Group.
The thinking behind the strategy of a SKAGS build is twofold.
First, it allows you to achieve an Above Average result of the Ad Relevance component of your Quality Score Quality Score: The way that Google grades the keywords you’re targeting in your campaigns. It’s composed of Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, & Landing Page Experience.. Maintaining a high Quality Score is important to your Search Impression Share, Cost-Per-Click, and therefore your Cost-Per-Acquisition.
Second, it allows you to tailor your landing pages exactly to the keywords that you’re targeting so you can deliver the best experience to users after they click your ad and improve conversion rates.
I see this question alllllll the time across the web and the answer is no. It is a way to improve your Ad Relevance, but that’s only half the battle when it comes to running a successful Google Ads campaign.
The second half of the strategy that benefits SKAGS is crucial to seeing the true benefits. Without creating landing pages that match not only the keywords but the intention of the user, you’ll likely not take full advantage of this build structure.
I could write an entire post about matching and exceeding user intentions, but for the sake of this post, let’s look at two examples.
Let’s say you’re running campaigns for a dentist in New York City and targeting two keywords using exact match: [dentist near me] and [best dentist in nyc]. In the first case, users are demonstrating that location is of the most importance to them while the second search shows that user cares more about getting the best dentist than they do about location.
If you’re targeting someone who searches “near me” you’ll want to cater the ad copy to address that you are close by and then take them to a page that contains an H1 tag indicating location, a map, and on-page copy that explains where you’re located.
If someone, especially in a metro area, is looking for “best” or “reviews” they’re indicating that they’re looking for someone reputable and who can be trusted. In that case, you should include copy addressing those preferences, and send them to a page that includes testimonials and reviews from reputable sources like Google.
Just as there are benefits to this strategy, there are some drawbacks.
First, setting up and managing a SKAGS build is quite time intensive. Let's say you're doing a build for an men's apparel client. They have 10 types of shirts and each shirt comes in 5 colors/styles. Some keyword examples would be [dress shirts], [best dress shirts], [chambray dress shirts], [yellow flannels], and all of their variations. When you're done spinning the keywords you could easily end up with 300 keywords within your account (10 types of shirts X 5 colors X 6 variations of keywords). This would likely take ~3-4 hours to set up according to best practices.
Then, once your campaign is built and launched, you're going to have to manage and optimize it after setting it live. Consider that Demographic bid adjustments are made on the Ad Group level. That means you'll have to sort and filter your data and then decide your next steps. Sure, you could look at the Campaign level to see where your best-performing Ages are and then bulk implement bid adjustments, but what if that view is too macro to enact successful optimizations?
Let's take the example of the Men's Apparel company. Maybe it looks like your best-performing Age demo is 25-34, so you sort by that age group and make a +12% bid adjustment so your ad appears higher on the page when that demo performs a search for one of the keywords you're targeting. This could work, but what if that age demo is only buying flannels and you've just increased your bids across that entire demo? You could potentially negatively impact your campaign performance spending more on a demo that's only converting on certain keywords.
Now, mass editing bid adjustments in such a way is not the best method to optimize campaigns, but we are only human and there are only so many hours in a work day. If you're managing a small number of accounts and have the time to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb, then this issue with a SKAGS build won't be as much of a problem.
If you're an Account Manager at an agency and managing 20-30 accounts, SKAGS builds tend to get unweidly and can be quite difficult to manage and scale.
I used to be a big advocate of the SKAGS method, but lately I've found greater success using the Alpha/Beta method.
This is a strategy where you use your Broad Match Modified Broad Match Modified: A keyword match type that allows your ad to show when certain words are included in the user's query in no particular order. (Beta) keywords in one campaign and Exact Match Exact Match: A keyword match type that allows your ad to show only when the words keyword(s) you've chosen are searched in the exact order or close variants. (Alpha) in another. Then add your Exact match keywords as negatives to your Broad Match Modified campaign so you can force the Exact match keywords to show when someone searches your exact query regardless of Ad Rank.