One of the first steps you should take to Revitalize your PPC Campaign is to review your account structure and organization. Better organization within your PPC account not only means you can manage your campaigns and ad groups easier, but delivering more relevant ads to your customers; If you’re serving highly targeted, relevant ads to your audience, your click-through rates and conversions are likely to increase. In turn, this can enhance your quality score as well, and you’ll be in higher positions without having to raise your bids.
In this post I’d like to go over five best practices for keeping your PPC accounts organized for optimal performance
- Create an outline before you begin to re-organize your account or before you start a new account.If you don’t have a clear idea of how you want to organize your account you could waste a lot of time setting up campaigns and ad groups, then come to realize that’s not how they should be set up. I’ve included this tip in this post because it is one problem I have encountered in the past, and having a clear direction or outline before I get started really helps.
- Keep your keywords to a maximum of 10 – 20 for each ad group.There is much talk in the forums about how many keywords one should have in each ad group. Some say 2 or 3, while others say 50. The best practice here is to limit the number of keywords in each ad group so that you’re targeting your customers with ads that display exactly what the customer is typing in as their search query.
- Keep your Higher Converting Keywords together.Google reps. suggest one way to optimize your account is to keep your highest converting keywords together, and move all under performing keywords into their own ad groups. A lot of people start out their account with a keyword dump into each ad group. A keyword dump is basically adding every version of a keyword that not only you can think of, but what the keyword tools offer as well. Then, once a few weeks have passed, you can then determine which keyowords peform best, keep them in that ad group, and move all the others. This will help your click-through rate in the ad group overall, as well as your quality score.
- Separate your Content Network Keywords from Your Sponsored Search. The content network audience is a completely different audience from search. Adwords takes all your keywords in an ad group, and comes up with one over arching theme. That theme then triggers your ads to display according to a like-themed website. The best thing to do is turn off the content network in your sponsored search ad groups. Create a new ad group just for the content network and make sure each keyword group is based on one theme. Your keywords in the content network ad group should be more general to help ad sense advertisers recognize your theme. Don’t just copy your keywords from your sponsored search ad group and paste them into a different ad group with only content network on.
- Organize your account based on customer buying patterns. One way of organizing your account is to base your campaigns and ad groups off customer buying patterns. People who begin their search online looking for a new keyboard will start with the most general of terms by nature. For example,” keyboards.” As their search continues, they realize what they really want is a wireless keyboard. So their next move is to look for a ‘wireless keyboard’. The longer they continue to do their research online, the more long-tail and specific their keywords get. For example, one could start with, keyboards > wireless keyboards > Dell wireless keyboard > T490 Dell wireless keyboard. Your most general terms will get the most traffic, but those people are more than likely just beginning their research. Bid lower on general keywords. As their search terms get more long tail and specific, you can begin to bid higher. Organize your campaigns/ad groups into these different buying patterns.
Remember, not only does organizing help you manage your account easily, but the goal is to deliver the most targeted, relevant ads to your customers. Organizing can also help increase your quality score as well.
