What is a SKAG Campaign?

A SKAG campaign, is a Google Ads campaign where you have only one keyword in each ad group. We have written a big article on this here.

This blog post will show you how to easily use this method of building a ppc campaign.

Feeling lazy? Use our SKAG Generator. It's a necessity for your keyword research and it does everything written here and more automatically for you!

What does a SKAG Google Ads campaign look?

There are many variations of a SKAG campaign, but in this post we will cover the one that's most common and used. At the end we will also go through a couple of variations and we will see when it makes sense to build a different SKAG campaign.

SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group, and as the name implies you need to add just one exact keyword for each of your mutliple ad groups. However this doesn't mean only one match type. We usually suggest adding your keywords as exact match type, phrase match type and broad with modifiers. We do not add only the broad match type because it often just leads to a lot of irrelevant traffic.

A SKAG campaign has the keyword as "headline one" in each ad, since you have only one keyword in each ad group for each keyword you will have unique ads, so you will be able to add your keyword in the headline without issues.

That's it, really! That's how simple it is to build a high quality google ad campaign structure!

A SKAG campaign example

Let's imagine that we sell books and we want to create a SKAG campaign for our top performing keywords:

  • History Books
  • Geography Books
  • Math Books

This is how a perfect SKAG Campaign should look like (This is a screenshot of how our SKAG Generator would build the campaign):

skag campaign google ads

The negative keywords are automatically added by our software and they make sure that your ads don't compete with each other. If you want to create SKAGs manually simply cross negate every keyword as negative, but be careful because if you do it manually it is very easy to completely block some of your ad groups.

Other SKAG Types:

There isn't a perfect SKAG google ads campaign, so it's important that whatever you decide to do you keep on testing, iterating a try on new campaigns. A very common variation is to use only the exact match type for SKAGs. Other variations include to add close synonyms in the same ad group or to create an ad group for each match type.

In summary:

To build a perfect SKAG Google Ads Campaign you need to:

  1. Add one keyword in each ad group. 3 match types per keyword. So in total you will have 3 match types in each ad group.
  2. Create at least 2 ads for each ad group.
  3. (Optional) Cross negate every ad group with each other.

That's it! It's a quick process which can drastically optimize your ad budget, stimulate your conversion rate, and improve overall ad performance.

If you need to do it for many keywords, check out our skag software keyword tool at fiuti.com/app/campaing-builder