Unmanageable number of keywords warning

Is there a limit to keywords per account?

[chicora]

HI - I am new to Adwords, just having begun a month ago. I have had Adsense up for about 4 months and am very pleased with the results.

A question - I am taking the approach of building a large list of keywords, and bidding only the minimun $0.05 for each one. I have a large (5000+ page), extremely content rich health site and can imagine creating perhaps 100 Ad Groups, and altogether perhaps 10-20,000 keywords.

I just noticed a message when I logged in saying that I am getting close to an "unmanageable" number of keywords, and should start eliminating the unproductive ones.

So, is there a limit that Adwords will accept? Will they close my account if I exceed this limit? Eventually I do plan on weeding out the unproductive ones, but I would like to give it a few months to see which work, and to fool around with changing the wording in my ads.

Having thousands of keywords isn't really "unmanageable" to me ;-) Thanks.

[MarkHutch]

Yes, they have a limit and I'm not sure if it's the same for everyone. For us, the limit is around 30,000 keyword lines for all campaigns and adgroups. Good luck with Adwords! It can be fun and hopefully profitable for you.

[inbound]

My experience is that if you add loads of keywords to a relatively low spending account it will flag up as a problem.

Once your campaign has run for a while and you have been spending more you should be able to add many more.

It's about Google getting a return and keeping their systems operational for everyone (unlike earlier this week).

I just added 16,000 terms to a low spend account and reached the limit, now I have had a few weeks of spend it seems happy to let me add more. For reference my click through is 2.7% with average position of 3.0

Hope this helps

[sailorjwd]

I use the same technique - 1000's of keywords at 5cents. Also run into unmanageable size too. What I do is create an ad group and let it run for a least a week or two then delete keywords with no impressions in that group. Then you'll be able to add a new group.
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Also periodically delete 'disabled' keywords and maybe 'on hold' keywords.

[chicora]

Thanks for the helpful advice.

I have found it so interesting to start using Adwords after having beenn on Overture / Yahoo for a few years. With Yahoo you really have to tie your word / phrase to specific content on your site. With Adwords, page content does not seem to be an issue - it seems you are allowed to connect your Adword advertisement to any word or phrase - irregardless of a direct relationship to page content. Very freeing actually.

And so much quicker to build up a large inventory of keywords. No customizing each one as on Yahoo. Now I just need to determine how far removed from the google search term I can go before the ctr becomes nill.

[patient2all]

chicora,

<< So, is there a limit that Adwords will accept?

As has been indicated, the limit varies from user to user for reasons Google will not divulge >>

<< Will they close my account if I exceed this limit? >>

No, you'll find out when you are over your limit by entering a bunch of keywords in "Add Keywords" and then having the text box return empty. Always save your keywords in a document first!

patient2all