I thought SKAG campaigns don’t work?

It’s true that the benefits of SKAG campaigns have become less effective since Google added the “Close Variant” keyword matching to (eventually) all match types, including exact match.

However, there are still many cases where SKAG campaigns are still suitable. In some ways, it’s the opposite of where the power used to be (in the long tail), but rather now in smaller exact match campaigns.

There is a fair bit of debate about this. My personal view is that SKAG’s designed with intent in mind are fine and help you create more creative and elegant ads in SpeedPPC. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m using “ladies hats” in my ad and Google matches for “women’s hats”. The fact I have “women’s hats” in the ad instead of generic “hats” will mean better CTR and QS as a result.

Overall, I think the safest road to travel is using STAG campaigns most of the time. STAG campaigns have other benefits like more keywords per ad group (which helps with the Google machine learning) and generally make the campaigns easier to manage. 

While I don’t totally endorse everything this article says, it’s good coverage of the SKAG vs STAG debate.