SKAGs don't need to be "debunked"​.

Last year was the year of the SKAG. Or was it the year before? Or was it a long time before that?

Single Keyword Ad Groups got a whole load of coverage towards the end of last year that, I must say, I missed until a client asked me my opinion about them.

“Skags?”, I asked in turn.

“I think they’re adgroups populated by a single keyword. I read about it online”.

“But that’s how we’ve always done it, at least in part”. To be completely truthful, it sounded like SKAGs had a whiff of Emperor’s New Clothes about it.

The logic behind elevating the top-performing or strategically most important keywords into their own adgroup in Google Ads is very sound, simply taking the principle of making keyword and ad association as specific as possible and extrapolating it to the nth. To explain, Pay Per Click (PPC) ads in Google are ranked by a system called Quality Score, that relies primarily on the price the advertiser is willing to pay and Click Through Rate (CTR, the frequency with which the ad is clicked). This latter part is direct function of its perceived relevance to those who have searched for the keyword which triggered the ad.

What this in turn means is that the most relevant ads appear most prominently, the user thereby having a great experience and easily finding the best result in Google and not some other upstart search engine. Everyone wins.

Putting a keyword in its own “adgroup” in Google Ads means that ad copy can be associated uniquely with that keyword. This makes it as precise as and as appealing as possible to the searcher, boosting the CTR and super-charging the ad’s rank.

My umbrage with this “SKAG” business is its treatment as some kind of secret “hack” by many of its proponents. But the reality is that this isn’t anything radically new — it’s been best-practice in my teams for as long as I have run them.

However, Googling “SKAGs” these days brings up a whole load of articles poo-pooing the strategy, telling us to “Say No to SKAGs!”. And my issue with these articles is even greater.

As far as I can make out, the counter argument against SKAGs amounts to this…

Google is getting better at recognising and understanding longer-string search terms, e.g. “Who was the US president when the Angels won in the World Series?” (as one article uses as an example) or, more usefully to a retailer, “find me a bottle of wine that goes well with steak”.

As such, with the greater ability to recognise longer-tail keywords, its these that should be the focus of our PPC build strategies.

Fine. But the two things are not mutually exclusive. Developing a strategy to “work the tail” does not mean we shouldn’t be doing everything we can to sweat the top-performing generics. The fact is, for this latter group, a SKAG strategy (or as near to it as we can get) is the way to go.

“But SKAGs are a faff and are time-consuming to implement”. It doesn’t matter! These are the bread and butter of your PPC account. Take a look and see what proportion of budget is taken up by the top 10 or 20 keywords in the account. Addressing these in a detailed way is worth it.

Another point: top-spending generics have historically always been known to be important but have been occasionally difficult to justify: high in traffic and, therefore, spend, but not always the best performing in terms of sales/returns. Typically these terms are what we call “mid- to upper-funnel”, relatively generic terms when users are in a research or “consideration” phase of their buying decision journey. The actual sales would often be attributed to a keyword later in the funnel, on a “last-click” basis.

But it’s 2020. We now have the tools that can get us over this (mis)attribution and apportion value to our upper-funnel generics better than we ever have before. As such, the big-spending keywords that we may have cut back on in the past can be justified again. SKAGs ensure the ads are as hyper-relevant and on-point optimised as they possibly can be.

Yes, Google will be better than ever at delivering results for “find me a bottle of wine that goes well with steak”.

But it’s still time to SKAGify “buy wine online” in your Google Ads account.