A well-organized structure is the foundation of a strong PPC account. Without proper structure, best practices can be ineffective, Quality Score and CTR will remain stagnant, and further improvements will be unattainable. To ensure your structure is efficient, follow the practices below within each level of your account.
Account Level
Establishing an account is the first step to begin advertising with AdWords, and the first level to consider how you’ll be structuring your advertising. A good practice is to have a separate account for each unique business you operate or are advertising for. The purpose for this is in case the management of the advertising ever has to be segmented, as the User Permissions for AdWords are set at the account level. For instance, you can imagine an agency, who might manage a great number of accounts. If all of those clients’ campaigns were run under one account, it would be impossible to transfer ownership or access of a specific client’s advertising without access to the information of all other clients. If a client was ever lost or wanted to take their advertising in-house, they would have to start over and lose all of their historical data. In the same vain, if you wanted a particular manager to have access to edit one account, but not several others, that setting would be specified on the account level. While that is an agency example, the same concept applies for general businesses, particularly if one was sold, etc.
Campaign Level: Budgeting and Targeting
There is a great Google recommendation to structure your Campaigns the same way you would your website. If you have different product lines that are specified in your navigation, this can be a great starting place to begin with your campaigns. Additionally, there are two primary things to consider when deciding when to create a new campaign: Budget and Targeting. These are the two main components of this particular level of account structure.
Budget plays a clear and critical role in every campaign; however there are a few things to consider that are a bit more subtle. If you ever want a product or service to have a dedicated budget associated to it, perhaps a core offering or high volume product, create a campaign specifically for that product or service. This will guarantee that the budget is expended solely on that product. If you have several ad groups in one campaign, they will share the budget, and one ad group with a high volume keywords could use up most of that spend effectively cannibalizing your preferred product.
Targeting has a few components included, and it’s a smart practice to separate campaigns advertising to different networks or diverse Locations. This will help you optimize each respectively, and enable you to do so far more than you could if they were combined. Here are the targeting options to consider when editing the settings of a campaign:
Type / Networks:
- Search Network Only – Focuses only on Google Search and Google’s Search Partners. This network has more intent to purchase as they are actively looking for the product and it more likely to convert.
- Display Network Only – Display uses a combination of text and creative image ads on websites and pages across Google’s Display Network (GDN). This network is typically best for branding, and, with proper management, is shown to boost the performance of brand search campaigns after two weeks of operation. CPC’s are also typically cheaper than the search network which makes this a valuable channel in competitive industries.
- Search with Display Select- This option combines both networks to help them work simultaneously, allowing the advertiser to reap the benefits of both networks. The inclusion of the display network helps to reach a wider online audience.
- Shopping- These campaigns are designed to manage Product Listing Ads from the Google Merchant Center. They’re designed to be a bit more user friendly than the legacy PLA campaigns.
Location:
- The benefit of segmenting campaigns by location is so you can optimize each according. For instance, different countries have different terms for the same product yet you might only want to bid on a local term for that country. For this reason, it’s easier to optimize when the locations are segmented. Your campaigns and keywords won’t compete against each other as long as the locations targeted are different.
Languages:
- Many advertisers target all languages, yet if you want to hone in on a specific language due to conversion rates or relevancy, you can specify that on the campaign level.
Bidding:
Google has made bidding strategies available for Campaign and Ad Group levels. Additionally, bid adjustments can be made for locations, time of day, and day of week, based on whether they are under or over performing. Here are the Flexible bidding strategies you can choose from to apply to your campaigns:
- Target Search Page Location: Focuses on getting your ads to the top of the search engine result page. This setting is position focused, rather than based on CPA and volume.
- Maximize Clicks: Targets bringing the most volume of traffic to your site.
- Target CPA: Focuses on getting as many conversions as possible while maintaining the Target CPA.
- Enhanced CPC: Will adjust your bid up or down based on the probability of that click producing a conversion.
Ad Group Level
One great way of considering ad groups is to think of them as themes. While the campaign level is used to specify settings, be identified as the general product type, and serve as the umbrella for the ad groups, the groups themselves are the theme of the specific product or services and the keywords that represent it.
Google recommends limiting your keywords to 20-30 per ad group. While that is a guideline, the bigger idea is that you want to make sure you limit all keywords to this specific, singular theme. The assumption is if you go over 20-30 keywords, the probability of overlapping different themes is high. To avoid this, use a simple exercise: if you ever find you would like to direct specific keywords to a more relevant landing page or meet them with a particular ad, create a new ad group for that theme. It’s important to note that the total of 20-30 keywords doesn’t include different match types for the same keyword. With those different match types, you could easily extend beyond 30 keywords and still be relevant.
The benefit of creating hyper-specific ad groups is that you can include these relevant keywords in your ad text and landing pages. Including the keywords in ad text will result in them displaying bold in ad, drawing attention from searchers. With more clicks drawn to your ad, your CTR will increase, and the combination of these factors will improve your Quality Score. All of these positive components begin at the structural level, making these practices crucially important.
If you need any help understanding the components of account structure, please do not hesitate to reach out to your dedicated Customer Success Representative, or utilize our Chat Now feature.