9 Tips for Organizing Your PPC Campaigns by Lyris, Inc. (1 of 2)

1. Understand the Google AdWords structure

Many people who use Google AdWords are not entirely clear on how the system is designed or why it is designed that way. But understanding the system design makes all the difference.

First, it is worth knowing a brief history of PPC advertising. The original PPC system was GoTo.com (circa 1998), which later became Overture, which was then acquired by Yahoo. Th is system used a straight bid-for-position auction model.

In 2002 Google introduced a new concept into the PPC model - relevance. In this new model, the click thru rate (CTR) and other aspects that related to ad quality factored into the placement of the text ad, allowing the cream to rise to the top and discouraging irrelevant ads, which ultimately resulted in a higher overall CTR
and more revenue for Google. This was a better mousetrap, and the rest is history. Today Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter are both standardized on this model.

In order to accommodate what they knew would be very large numbers of keywords and in order to facilitate testing that could contribute to the quality of ads, Google designed the Campaigns => Ad Group => Keywords/Ads structure that is used today.

Under this model, an AdWords account can contain multiple campaigns. Each campaign can contain multiple ad groups. Each ad group is made up of up to 2000 keywords and up to 25 ads. For a search on any given keyword under a particular ad group any one of the ads associated with that ad group can be displayed. This allows you to conduct tests of which ads perform the best.

The key is relevance. When a visitor searches on a specific key word or phrase, those words need to appear in the ad itself. That’s how relevance is established. And the AdWords model provides you with a way to associate specific keywords with matching ads.

Thus, Google has provided a taxonomy within which you can organize and test a wide range of ads across a vast array of keywords and always show the visitor an ad that is highly relevant to them.

Now that we are clear on the structure and purpose of the system we’re using, let’s investigate how to utilize it to its full potential.

2. Organize campaigns around specific concepts 


The campaign level provides your first opportunity to organize your ads. You should create multiple campaigns that are oriented to very specific concepts related to your business. These concepts are typically something like product groups or target markets.

For example, if you’re managing the web site Top 5 Flicks (http://www.top5flicks.com/) you might want to organize your campaigns into genres such as “Action”, “Comedy”, and “Drama”. If you sell and rent videos, you might want to organize your campaigns that way too. Or you might even want to combine these concepts and have campaigns such as “Action Rental”, “Action Sale”, “Comedy Rental”, etc.

Don’t hesitate to create multiple campaigns. You’ll be glad you did when you set up your ad groups as described on page 3.

But first, a few more tips about organizing at the campaign level.


3. Separate campaigns for content and search networks

Google campaigns are organized into two very distinct types: Search and content-targeted. The search network (which also includes Google’s search partners’ sites) displays your ads along with the organic search results in the search engine. The content network is a vast collection of websites that have incorporated Google ads into their website using Google’s AdSense system. In the content network, Google matches your keywords to the content found on the website, as opposed to the search network where your keywords are matched to what the visitor typed into the search field.

If you set a campaign to run on both the Search and Content networks you have just made your ability to track performance much more difficult. Why? Because the clicking behavior of visitors from the search and content networks tends to be quite different from each other. Visitors from search ads tend to be much more purposeful. They are more likely to be looking for what you are selling. Visitors from content ads tend to be more impulse clickers and may be less likely to convert.

You can expect click thru rates (CTR) from search result ads to be something like 100 times the rate of content ads. For instance, you may get an average CTR of 2.00% from your search ads and 0.02% on your content ads. Combine these into the same campaign and your overall campaign CTR may be something like
0.95%, which doesn’t tell you anything meaningful.

Not surprisingly, the cost per click (CPC) from content ads tends to be much lower than search clicks. So with content and search combined, not only is your CTR all muddled up, but so is your cost information. You may find yourself wasting time in a futile attempt to understand just what the data is telling you.

The other reason to create separate search and content
campaigns is that the keyword grouping, ad messaging and optimization for search and content are quite different. While grouping keywords for a search campaign, your focus should be on grouping similar keywords so the ad messaging is focused. While grouping for content, you will probably want to choose fewer keywords and keywords of different types so they trigger relevant content.


4. Separate campaigns for fat head and long tail keywords

Having created two different campaigns for the search and content networks, you may want to take a further step and create a separate search campaign for your “fat head” and “long tail” keywords.

For every category of products or services, there are a few keywords that have a high volume of traffic. These are called fat heads and they usually very broad words which can refer to a wide range of products or services. They have high traffic volumes and therefore attract more bidders, resulting in a higher cost. Their conversion rates tend to be lower but in terms of volume they usually get the most conversions.

Long tail keywords on the other hand have lower volumes but are naturally more specific. They tend to happen later in the purchase cycle and generally have higher conversion rates higher quality leads.

So using this method you would now have the following campaigns:

• Action movies – Content
• Action movies – Search (Top Keywords)
• Action movies – Search (Long Tail)

By putting your popular keywords in a separate campaign you can more easily focus on that campaign on a regular basis without having to wade through the masses of long tail keywords. Of course you’ll still want to peruse those long tail ad groups, but since there is less money on the line you can deal with them less frequently.

Another critical reason to separate these ads is budget management. On Google, budget is allocated at the campaign level. If your fat head and long tail keywords are all combined under the same campaign, the fat head keywords can burn up the entire available budget, thereby limiting exposure of your more profitable long tail keywords. To ensure this does not happen, it is essential to group the keywords by potential volume.


5. Filter Campaign Summary by Network

A dropdown control in the upper-right corner of the Campaign Summary allows you to display only traffic from the Search network, only the Content network, both Search and Content separately, or both Search and Content combined (the Summary view). Because you have defined your campaigns to separate the search and content traffic, you can view this report in the Summary view and still be able to see all your content and search traffic separately.

Now you can sort the Campaign Summary on various columns and it will reveal areas on which you need to concentrate. If you  sort this report by cost and you don’t see all your “Top Keywords” campaigns clustered toward the top, then you should check out your “Long Tail” campaigns to see what important keywords have
not been identified. Sort the column by CTR and you may see the “Long Tail” keywords near the top while the “Content” campaigns cluster at the bottom. If you don’t, you’ll want to take a closer look because there’s probably room for improvement.

The idea here is to give yourself the data you need to triage your ad groups because, as we will see, you don’t want to just go meandering through your ad groups aimlessly—you may never return!