Welcome to the third article in our April Showers Bring May PPC Flowers series. Today we will dive into structure and the building blocks of a successful PPC account.
You’ve seen Field of Dreams, right? “Build it, and they will come.” This can be a challenge when you are handed a new client’s PPC account and you may secretly wish for Kevin Costner to help you out. You have created a good initial relationship with your client and set your goals, it’s time to build your account or make sense of an existing one. Here are a few simple tips to hit home runs with your new account.
Build Your Stadium: Campaigns & Ad Groups
The first step of building your PPC account is to have a strong, organized set of campaigns and ad groups that reflect your client’s higher-level ideas. One of the best places to start your journey to the major leagues is to look at the client’s website and see how it’s structured. By following the flow of the website, it will be easier for you to optimize your account.
Based on your client’s goals and industry, you can also choose to set your campaigns up based on the following ideas:
- Based on the products and services you offer
- Based on geographical location
- Based on performance and bidding
- Based on brand names vs. generic names
- Based on seasonality of your service or product
- Based on keyword match types (you can also segment this way on an ad group level too.)
Now, you will want to drill down and create more tightly themed ad groups, add strong keywords, write benefit driven ads to keep everything highly relevant.
Build Your Team: Solid Keyword Rosters, Settings
It’s best to start with all three keyword match types in your ad groups so that you can gather the most data and figure out what works for your account. Exact match will most likely convert the best for your account for the lowest CPLs, but you may be surprised! Make sure that you have your campaign settings correct as well so that your structure has a fighting chance in the big leagues. Segmenting by device, choosing languages and locations, network options and your budgets and bids are all found under the settings tab. For a run down of settings best practices, check this article out!
Being Called Up From Triple A: Inheriting an Account
For people who have inherited an account from another account manager or from the client’s in house team, here are a couple tips that will keep you off the disabled list. If you feel that there is room for improvement in the account by restructuring campaigns and ad groups, don’t move everything at once. This can upset the balance of the account and end up hurting quality score and other core metrics. Once you feel that you have put your keywords into tighter ad groups, found the best ads (and add new ones!), and decided on your daily budgets, make sure that you keep the older campaigns running in tandem with the new campaigns. This will allow your new campaigns to gain a bit of traction, have something to directly compete against and keep the traffic flowing to your client’s site from the old campaign.
Opening Day: Start Driving in Your Conversions
So it’s time, your ads are running, fans are clicking, conversions are happening. Make sure that you are bench marking your progress every couple of weeks so that you can optimize the account towards achieving the client’s goals. Also start creating customized reports for your clients showing the results from your new structure. This is especially helpful when you have moved things around and done slight restructuring of the account. Show the old data versus the new data and help strengthen the client relationship by showing your value as an account manager.
Dave will take you through how to nurture your new account and how to accomplish those goals that were set from the beginning of your relationship. Let us know if you have any best practices for account structure or helpful tips during restructuring campaigns and ad groups!
