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Now that you’ve completed your keyword research it’s time to put all of your hard work together into one very relevant and targeted pay-per-click account. As the last post in our series on keyword research, one must know that great keyword research is a critical part in starting up a new pay-per-click campaign, but how you group and organize all those keywords can be even more critical. The ultimate goal should be to deliver the most targeted ad text for each and every keyword in your account. If you have a bunch of random keywords in one ad group and only 2 ad texts for all of those keywords, you’re probably not targeting as well as you could be. When you don’t target well, you end up losing traffic and sales, and eventually you could end up losing a client or your own business!
In this post I’ll show you the best practices of how to set up and organize your keywords to maximize traffic potential and increase sales.
If you’re new to pay-per-click, I’ll give you a quick break down of how PPC campaigns are typically organized. They start with campaigns, which are then broken down into ad groups. Each ad group has a specific, very targeted set of keywords, and each ad groups has one or preferably multiple ad texts for testing purposes.
You may think you’re getting just fine results with the account structure you already have in place,but I’d advise you to take another look and think of the potential your account has if your keywords and ads were just a little more targeted to someone’s search. How important is it to you when you do a search on Google and click on a website that you get correct or relevant information you’re inquiring about? Think about your customers and your own site when putting together your account structure!
The best practice for organizing your keywords is to adhere to the consumer buying cycle. The buying cycle is the process that customers typically follow when shopping online. Each campaign should follow this cycle (I will use cookies as an example):
- Research: A consumer knows they want cookies, but they’re not really sure what kind. The keywords in the phase of the buying cycle are general like, ‘cookies’ or ‘best cookies’.
- Narrowing Down Search: Here the consumer is finding that through their research there are many types of cookies. They’re starting to narrow down their search and make a decision on what type of cookie they want like, ‘peanut butter cookies’.
- Decision: Now they know exactly what they want and now they’re trying to find the company that can best deliver these yummy peanut butter cookies. These keywords would be much more specific and what we call ‘long-tail’ keywords like, ‘mrs fields peanut butter cookies’.
What this boils down to is having specific campaigns for general keywords, short-tail keywords, then long-tail keywords. You would typically bid higher on your long-tail keyword since these people are in buying mode versus just shopping around.
To keep our cookie example, here’s a great account structure that would provide the most relevant information to a person’s search for cookies.
You can see here that every campaign is broken down into multiple, very targeted ad groups that reach a customer at different points in the buying cycle. Each ad group will have a specific ad text written just for those keywords.
If you have keywords like ‘buy cookies’ , ‘cookie store’ and ‘peanut butter cookies’ all in the same ad group your ad text isn’t going to be very targeted to the specific keywords which can hurt your overall traffic and revenue.
Just remember that relevancy is most important when organizing your pay-per-click campaigns. The more relevant your ad text is to your set of keywords the better the click-through rate is. And that lends itself to many other factors including increasing traffic, revenue, quality score, etc. Plus, from an advertiser standpoint it’s much easier to manage an account when it’s properly organized than when things are all jumbled together.
