How to bid on Two Broad Keywords

One less known aspect of keyword performance is the relationship between its performance in your account, versus its overall performance in all accounts using it.

Whenever you start using a new keyword, its initial quality score takes into account its historical performance across all others accounts using is.

In order to have the system weigh YOUR performance for that keyword, you need about 1000 exact impressions for that keyword. That's roughly the threshold when the AdWords system weighs your CTR, and not the historical CTR for that keyword.

Now, if you go too broad, and use, for instance +levis  +jeans as your keyword, the Quality Scores for that keyword will be your own only after 1000 impressions for exactly levis jeans. Not blue levis jeans, not buy blue levis jeans.

And if the historical performance of levis jeans is not great, and if people search for levis jeans something more often than they search for levis jeans alone, you're stuck with that bad performance for longer than you'd wish.

Yes, broader nets are nice, because they give you more fish as a whole. But if someone ordered sea bass, and that's what you get your money for, coming ashore with five tons of tuna will not take care of that particular customer.

That's why every search term which comes along often enough, and is considered relevant, should be transformed into a keyword, with exact and sometimes phrase match. Either in the ad group responsible for it, or in a newer, even more relevant one.

This is also how you can 'heal' a damaged keyword (Kim has an article about it on her blog). You can, in time, raise the Quality Score of a damaged (historically) keyword, and make it better in your account, if you can place it in a highly relevant ad group, with ads which get clicked often.

If you can write good ads, and people click on them, and your CTR is much higher than what others managed to achieve, you should see the Quality Scores rise after these approximately 1000 precise match impressions.