Duplicate Keywords in Ad Groups

Question:

Its been a long week organizing an older account  Now I am at the point to where I am cleaning up some keywords. In the past I typically remove all duplicate keywords across all ad groups no matter what. Is this a best practice? 
Group A is for general surgery, Group B is more specific surgical terms. 
Group A
knee repair, knee repair surgery, knee repair recovery.
Group B
knee repair, arthroscopic knee repair, total knee repair.
Should knee repair be removed from both ad groups? It would be better suited for on group over the other, that is obvious to me but how do you guys approach this? 

Answer:


What I've found is the more tightly themed you can get your adgroups, the better off you'll be, especially in Display campaigns.

You can use a variety of match types to cover variations of the terms/phrases you're using but repetition should not be needed.

Try grouping all of your "knee repair" keywords together and see if you can organize them into a one or a couple of really tight adgoups.  Think of it in terms of ad creation.  The more specific and relevant you can make your ad text and ultimately, your landing pages the better off you are. 

I'm not sure if your campaign is targeting only knee surgery or if there are other procedures you're covering but looking at what you have so far...Those keywords would end up in the same agroup in one of my campaigns...they're too closely related.

Although its intended use is the Display Network, the contextual targeting tool may be able to guide you in organizing your adgroups. 

Here is an example of what I would try to do.  Obviously, these can be expanded quite a bit but this grouping style allows for very relevant ads and landing pages.  Also, as I mentioned earlier, your match types will determine quite a bit.  The deeper down you dig, the more specific you get, the more phrase and exact match you want to use so the keywords are not competing between adgroups. A (knee repair) query will trigger '[knee repair]' to compete with '+knee repair recovery' etc...
Group A - [knee repair], "arthroscopic knee repair", "knee repair surgery", "total knee repair"

Group B - [knee surgery], "arthroscopic knee surgery", "total knee surgery"

Group C - "knee repair recovery", "knee surgery recovery", [knee surgery recovery time], [post knee surgery recovery]