In this instructional video, Austin LeClear argues that Google Ads accounts perform better when you start with a small, highly relevant set of keywords rather than a "spray‑and‑pray" approach that dumps thousands of terms into a campaign. He illustrates the point with real‑account data showing that a single keyword can generate 70‑80% of conversions and a large share of revenue, invoking the 80/20 (or even 90/10) rule. LeClear recommends organizing campaigns into single‑theme ad groups—e.g., general, emergency, affordable for a plumber—so that ad copy and landing pages match the keyword intent. He proposes a practical guideline: once an ad group approaches 20 keywords, you should evaluate whether to split it into more focused groups, though he notes this is not a hard rule. The video concludes with a call to explore his deeper trainings (PPC Copilot) for systematic keyword research and campaign structuring, emphasizing that starting with core, high‑impact terms and expanding methodically leads to cleaner accounts and better ROI.
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Okay, I get asked this a lot. How many keywords should I be using in my Google Ads account? It's actually probably the answer. You wouldn't be thinking, which is less is more. Especially when you're starting out and you don't have infinite money. Right. Starting out with less actually will produce more for you. And if you follow my trainings on doing like proper keyword research and finding the correct seed terms to start with or campaigns to start with, you'll be better off. But it's way better than when I see people, what I, what I call like, you know, they spray and pray. They just like throw a thousand keywords into a campaign and then they just let it rip. That is not what you want to do. That is an absolute good way of just like burning through your budget with little to no data. You have no idea what to do with any of that. I'll give you an example. A company once came to me, they wanted to spend very little money, and then they're like, oh, we also want to advertise every 500 option. It's like one of those lab testing places. They have like 500 different, you know, tests they can do. And like, we want to advertise all of that for $50 a day. And you're like, so, okay, what are you gonna get? One click a day per one keyword. And that won't even give you full coverage of all of those keywords or what's going to happen after 30 days. You're going to end up looking at a bunch of like one click keyword data and have no idea what to do with any of that. So you get no momentum and you go nowhere with that. And that is why less is more. I want to give you a few examples. So these are a bit extreme, but. And all this is going to be blurred out. But here's one. Last 30 days, $80,000. This is one ad group and an account. And this does have a bunch of keywords in here. There's like 55, right? But you don't need 55 in here. Look, out of 3,000 conversions in the last 30 days, 2,200 of them came from literally one keyword. Then 300 from the next 200, 155 and it kind of goes down. Then at a certain point there's none of the other keywords are doing anything. This is total, like waste of space at this point. There's no reason to have any of those keywords in there. The keywords will be blurred out to keep this confidential. But I just wanted to show you that as an example because it doesn't take much in regards to keyword targeting to figure out once something starts working. That's where most of your volume comes from. You've all heard the 8020 rule. You know, 20% provides 80% of something. So like 80% of your revenue is gonna come from 20% of your products, or 80% of your weight loss is gonna come from 20% of YOUR efforts, whether it's through diet or the exercise. Right. So it's one of those universal principles that can be applied to a lot of things in Google Ads. It goes beyond that. It's almost like 90 10. It's like 10% produces 90% and then the other stuff is like in the middle and you're just trying to figure it out. But eventually you find what I call like your core terms, core products, core campaigns, your king makers, your money makers, whatever you want to call it. The. That's in most accounts, what you will find. And so there's going to be a small group that produces a large amount of the volume and performance. And when you're starting out specifically, you don't want to give, you don't want to spray and pray because you don't probably have the money to do that, right. You're going to allocate all these clicks to a bunch of different keywords and you're going to be left with no data to optimize from. I want to show one more example. Again, this will be blurred out. This is one keyword in an ad group and it's producing most of their, I mean, from, you know, from this account specifically, this did about 10,500 in revenue. This is euros, but you know, it's not the most. But this, this account only did like 50k. So 10k came from one keyword. Right? Now that's not like everything to them, but it's one of the most like important keywords that's producing for them. And it's just one keyword and that's minting them 10k in reven revenue profitably, at least for their business. So it doesn't have to be 5,000 different keywords. Now I've done a training, multiple trainings, like best campaign structures and things like that. Some of those trainings I'll have in the description below. But I talk about how to theme your ad groups out. So here's one ad group structure and obviously within an ad group are your keywords. And so in this visual that I created, I talk about and I Didn't create this naming convention. I actually don't know who did. So whatever it's called themed ad group, single themed ad groups or stag method. Right. And so in this case I use a plumber. So in here we have three different ad groups. We have general. So like plumbing company services, near me and even near me could actually kind of go towards more of a location based one. You have emergency, so emergency plumber, 24. 7 plumber, and then you have affordable, cheap, affordable, yada yada. Most people or a lot of people think, oh, I'll just throw all of those into like one ad group and then let my ad copy, I'll have emergency ad copy in there, I'll have affordable ad copy in there, I'll have general ad copy in there. And then you would think, oh, Google's algorithm will figure out like if it's a 24.7plumber, the RSA will just show 24.7ad copy. In that, in that case, this is not. You want to theme them out, you do want to segment, segment them out, you want them themed. Because now your ad copy can actually be precise to emergency and 24.7plumbers. It makes managing the keywords and ad groups way more efficient. The landing page is probably going to be different in this case for an emergency plumber versus plumbing general. Someone who's just looking up plumbing companies or someone who's looking up affordable. Right. So you can tailor the ad groups to the theme of those keywords and you don't need to dump 5,000 different emergency plumber terms in there. Especially the way match types work. I have a whole training on how keyword match types work as well. So I recommend generally this isn't a hard rule. If you start approaching 20 keywords in an ad group, you, you should start looking. Can I actually split this in a way that would allow for my ad creative and keywords to match better if you're above 20 keywords? Not always. Like, I have accounts where I'm running more than 20 and I'm, I'm minting money from it and there's no need to split. Okay. But in most cases, once you get above 20 keywords to an ad group, you're at a spot where you definitely need to start thinking, is there a way to theme this out? Split some of these out where it would be beneficial to the searcher in regards to the ad copy I'm creating for it, the landing page experience that I'm sending them to. If you don't believe that's the case, then leave them. But 20 is that number that I start really scrutinizing. So for you, when it comes to how many keywords should you be using, remember less is more. Going after the most impactful terms first, which I have in my teachings on this YouTube channel. Or we have PPC Copilot, the school group where there's courses, trainings I do weekly Q&As video reviews. You can learn more about PPC Copilot in the description below if you want to learn more about the frameworks of what I teach. So less is more and then you expand as you start getting momentum, but you're doing it in themed structures and as you approach 20 keywords, not a hard rule, but once you're in that 20 keyword range per ad group or in an ad group, you start scrutinizing. Does this still make sense to have all of these keywords in one ad group? And again, not a hard rule. I have many ad groups with more than 20 and it's fine. I can't really get better than that. So segmenting would just be stupid. But in a lot of cases when you're above that 20 mark, you can start looking at like, okay, I can probably slice and dice this a little more. But if you think like that less is more themes and then don't go above 20. And if you do scrutinize it, you'll be in better shape and you're not going to have a filthy, messy Google Ads account.
