Do SKAGs Really Work Anymore? An Expert Weighs In

Short answer: No, not really. But there’s more to it: SKAGs are ad groups that only target one keyword in Google Ads campaigns. They used to be an effective strategy, but today’s PPC marketing landscape demands a broader focus on single topics instead.

Name a marketer who isn’t plagued by nightmares of wasted ad spend.

And let’s be real: Nothing blows more money than ad campaigns targeting too many unqualified leads.

So Google came up with single-keyword ad groups (SKAGs) to make ads more effective, relevant, and profitable for brands. These SKAGs dominated the marketing scene up until a few years ago.

But now? The heyday of their efficacy has come and gone. We wanted to know more, so we tapped into the expertise of HawkSEM co-founder and CEO (and PPC marketing veteran) Sam Yadegar to elaborate.

Below, he gives us the lowdown on the SKAGs vs. STAGs (single-topic or single-theme ad groups) debate and shares why effective digital marketing strategies have moved beyond SKAGs.

What are SKAGs?

SKAGs are single-keyword ad groups, a Google Ads strategy where an ad group targets only one keyword.

Ad groups are collections of ads categorized by a common theme. While ad groups can target multiple keywords within one category, SKAGs only use one keyword per ad group to create more tailored ad copy and landing pages.

SKAGs were once used to capture more relevant audiences and boost CTRs and conversions. (Image: Adobe)

How do SKAGs work?

SKAGs work by closely matching one keyword to one ad group. In theory, your search ads are more relevant because the ad copy and landing page content are so closely aligned with the search term.

Let’s say you offer immigration legal services for both Americans and Canadians looking to work in the opposite country. You might create one broad ad group with multiple keywords under a similar theme like “American visas for Canadians” and “Move to the US as a Canadian.”

But if you opt for a SKAG strategy?

You wouldn’t target multiple keywords within the same group of ads. Instead, you’d create multiple ads within one group that target only one keyword, even if the keywords are close variants.

• Ad group 1: American visas for Canadians
• Ad group 2: Move to the U.S. as a Canadian

Looks pretty organized, right?

The idea here is that SKAGs speak more directly to individual searcher intent, making ads more relevant and thus promoting better clickthrough rates (CTRs), Quality Scores, and conversions.

In SKAG campaigns, you’d target “exact match keywords” to ensure your specific keywords and respective ads show up on the search engine results page (SERP) of whoever types them into the search bar.

However, every marketer knows that PPC strategies have a limited shelf life. This is especially true when you work with a platform like Google Ads, which constantly releases updates.

That said, their use has dwindled over time.

Are SKAGs still relevant? 5 drawbacks

The short answer? No. They’re too expensive, time-consuming, and risk missing the mark on a qualified audience.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. As mentioned above, SKAGs were once used to capture more relevant audiences and boost CTRs and conversions.

But these days?

A few factors deem them inefficient for ROI and general operational efficiency.

Let’s break it down:

1. Time-consuming
2. Duplicate keywords
3. Expensive to A/B test
4. Chaotic for your Google Ads account
5. Google Ads is leaning into automation

1. Time-consuming

Think about how long it takes you to set up an account structure in Google Ads. Once you plug in each keyword, bidding strategy, and amount, then create all your ads? It easily consumes chunks of time in your marketing schedule.

But if you make separate ad groups for every keyword?

Hours will turn into days as you scramble to create different ads for each keyword. And don’t forget to factor in your headline, meta description, landing pages, and ad copy.

No marketer has the time, and even if they did, spending hours creating SKAGs would eat into potential ROI.

2. Duplicate keywords

Say your ecommerce brand sells a hundred different female apparel products. So you make separate ad groups for each category of clothing, as well as each item, down to the last color.

We predict two issues here:

• You’re human, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to overlook a duplicate keyword or two.
• SKAGs create separate ads for keyword variants, which means you’d bid against yourself. This also duplicates your own ad groups.

All of this combined will cause keyword cannibalization, which involves too many duplicate or similar keywords across your marketing assets that negatively influence your rankings.

Therefore, testing your SKAGs is a must. But…

3. Expensive to A/B test

We all know the importance of A/B testing, right?

In case you don’t, it’s a PPC strategy that tests ad elements for certain metrics, like landing page experience, ad copy effectiveness, visual user experience, and more.

The goal is to see which elements are most lucrative before you commit to them for the long haul.

Now, a sweet spot for A/B testing is usually a couple of weeks for each element.

But what if you need to test hundreds or thousands of ads? All of a sudden, your A/B testing budget has ballooned. This is because you’d need to test different elements within each ad in one of way too many ad groups.

And that can get messy.

4. Chaotic for your Google Ads account

It’s easier to miss crucial factors (including high- and low-performing keywords) with SKAGs because you need so many of them.

Our well-equipped marketing agency doesn’t use SKAGs for many reasons, including this one. Now imagine how difficult it’d be for small businesses to manage each search term report, or monitor search volume, conversion rates, and bounce rate for each ad’s landing page.

SKAGs make it overwhelmingly tedious.

In fact, SKAGs disorganize your Google Ads campaigns unnecessarily, making it difficult to maintain a big-picture lens of your PPC marketing strategy.

Still, the main reason why SKAGs aren’t an ideal option for your ad campaigns has to do with Google Ads and its constant updates.

5. Google Ads is leaning into automation

After SKAGs grew in popularity, Google Ads expanded keyword match types to incorporate the behaviors of broad match modifier (BMM) into phrase match.

For starters, they include variations of word order within long-tail keywords, even if you select “exact keyword match types.” It also started to include more keywords as a match if its algorithm reported it had the same meaning as the original.

Google has continued to lean into machine learning with automated bidding, responsive search ads, and data-driven attribution.

“Google continues to learn and better match search intent [from search queries] with search results,” says Yadegar. “It’s taken its own liberty in serving ads and being less concerned with match types.”

So, how can we address the new limitations of SKAGs?

Why STAGs win over SKAGs for PPC marketing

SKAGs reflect a preference for relevance in your ad groups, but Yadegar says Google’s changes to match types call for a different strategy, achieving the same relevance with specific topics instead:

“While historically we used to literally only have one keyword in each ad group, given the new match type changes from Google,” explains Yadegar.

“We tend to be a bit more ‘single topic per ad group (STAG),’ which may contain a handful of different keywords as opposed to just having one.”

Take our example from earlier. Instead of separate ad groups and ads for “American visas for Canadians” and “Move to the U.S. as a Canadian,” these would be categorized under the same topic: Canadian immigration to the U.S.

Top benefits of STAGs:

• Heightened return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Lower CPC and effective marketing budget
• Less intimidating Google Ads account structures
• Minimal chance of keyword cannibalization
• Increased reach and web traffic with broader keyword targets

How to build a STAG strategy

How do you know which topics your audience cares about? And which topics will result in more conversions and thus more ROI for your brand?

“The answer is always on the SERP,” says Yadegar. “Our team goes through a deliberate research process searching multiple keywords and identifying whether they are actually separate topics or just a variant of each other.”

Even Google can miss potentially irrelevant keywords.

(Image: Adobe)

But are same-variant keywords a no-go?

Yadegar suggests that if they’re a variant, it’s best to put them in the same ad group.

How many keywords should each ad group have?

Ideally, you want to stay between 5 and 20 keywords under one keyword topic per ad group.

“There’s no hard and fast rule here,” says Yadegar. “But if you naturally still stay very tight and thematic, keywords usually don’t have a large amount of variants.”

Best keyword research tools for your STAG strategy

At HawkSEM, we subscribe to the latest SEO and keyword software to help generate the most accurate keyword insights for every client.

These are some of our go-to tools:

• Keyword Cupid: an SEO keyword clustering tool that discovers relevant content topics and accompanying keywords with AI
• ConversionIQ: our agency-developed marketing software, which tests and collects data on various keywords, topic clusters, and accompanying metrics from a wide range of content assets over time.
• Google Keyword Planner: a free tool that shows exact match keyword variations, search volume, competition, and suggested bid (great for forming tightly themed ad groups and gathering initial keyword ideas from Google).
• Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz: these in-depth keyword research tools help you find semantically related keywords to group by theme and can identify gaps in your strategy.
• Answer the Public: This resource is great for finding question-based and long-tail keywords grouped by search intent.

But the process isn’t without its challenges. What if we find hundreds of potential new keywords for each topic?

Why a negative keyword list is essential

Google thinks it knows best when it comes to matching search intent with search results. The problem? Even the search engine titan can miss potentially irrelevant keywords.

“That’s why negative keyword management has become more important these days,” says Yadegar.

For example, a swimsuit ecommerce store might sell a wide variety of women’s swimwear. But if Google includes “Speedo” in a broad match when the brand doesn’t even sell men’s products, then that brand wastes precious marketing dollars on targeting irrelevant leads.

In this case, the keyword “Speedo” should be included in a regularly updated negative keyword list. Negative keywords are manual keyword insertions you plug into your ad campaign so it doesn’t target those particular search terms.

Can’t see the ROI yet?

Check out this case study on our higher education client, California State University – Northridge (CSUN), which witnessed epic results after we revamped its negative keyword list.

The client wanted to recruit more students to a wider variety of their program offerings. Along with ad copy optimization and enhanced cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, negative locations and keywords helped us accomplish the following for CSUN:

• 50% reduced cost per acquisition (CPA)
• 50% increase in year-over-year (YoY) revenue
• 2X increase in conversion rate

The takeaway

SKAGs just don’t cut it in today’s evolved PPC world of automated keyword inclusions and Google Ads targeting.

But that doesn’t mean you should charge out of the gates and target every keyword under the sun. Ad relevance is still a vital requirement for effective ad groups and PPC campaigns, and single-topic ad groups help brands achieve it.

Still, the keyword research required for an effective keyword list for a specific topic must be chiseled to perfection.

And most brands don’t have the software, horsepower, or unique skillset for effective keyword research. That’s where a top-3% digital marketing agency like HawkSEM steps in.

Our roster of seasoned PPC experts brings years of experience with Google Ads campaigns. Collectively, we’ve structured thousands of search campaigns with relevant keyword topics that generated game-changing traffic and conversions.

Need an ally on your side to dive into the research and formulate a strategy that raises your bottom line?

We’ve got the technique (and results) to back it all up, which spans diverse client industries like finance, education, SaaS, ecommerce, and more.

Ready to bring your campaign conversions from zero to hero? We’re your caped crusader, and STAGs are our sidekick.

This article has been updated and was originally published in January 2024.