The first stage in building a Google Adwords campaign is to define your goals and objectives. This will define how you structure your account. The following are some key points to consider before you even go near any keyword research tools.
Brand
Will you benefit from running a brand campaign? Do you want to run a brand campaign to drive brand awareness, perhaps for a new product or for breaking into a new market or are you confident that your SEO results are sufficiently good that you don’t need to spend money on a brand campaign? Even if your SEO is ranking well, it can be very effective to run ads for new products or special offers on brand keywords and may be worthwhile testing.
The pros and cons of the so-called “cannibalization” of the first page listings is a much debated subject, worth exploring in a separate article. For now, suffice it to say it is worth testing with various messages. If you learn that the ROI makes it worth running a brand campaign, you should surely do so!
Website Structure
This is a common method of splitting your campaigns, and it can work very well because the Quality Score of your keywords is in part determined by their relevance to the landing page. For example, a website offering education courses might be segmented into sections such as distance learning, tutored learning and classroom based learning. With this type of campaign structure these categories would form your campaigns. The courses within each category would then form your adgroup
Product Line
Another good way to categorise is by product line, or theme. Imagine the same education courses website, but this time rather than categorising to match the different types of learning, the campaigns are split by the area of study, e.g. Maths, Science, Languages.
Taking it a level further, the courses within Languages might be German, Spanish and French. The adgroups within your Languages campaign should therefore mirror this structure, so that somebody searching for German courses sees an ad about German courses and in ideal circumstances, then lands on a page about German courses when they click the ad.
Language/Region
If you are running campaigns in multiple languages and geographical areas, you should obviously create separate campaigns for each language so that the audience you are targeting will be searching for the keywords in their language and understand the ads presented to them. This is a huge area which will be covered in another article.
Distribution Channels
If you want to run ads on Google’s Content Network as well as the search network you should also create a separate campaign for content network. In fact, the rules for creating a good content network campaign are entirely different to those for creating a search campaign, and will be covered in another article.
Adgroups
Moving on a step from Campaigns to Adgroups, it is vital to understand that segmenting your keywords properly into adgroups is a very important key to Adwords success.
Google does not assign the ranks of ads solely based on how much you are bidding; it also takes into account what it calls “Quality Score”. Whilst the exact algorithm to calculate Quality Score is one of Google’s most closely guarded secrets, it is no surprise that one of the major contributors is relevance. This means if your ad is considered relevant compared to your keywords, the keywords will be given a higher quality score and you will pay less for a higher rank, relative to someone whose ad does not reflect their keywords. Of course, if your competitors bid more per keyword they will still appear above you, despite your better quality score! However following this advice will help you keep your costs as low as possible whilst your ads and keywords achieve as high a rank as is affordable.
Another reason to keep your adgroups tight is, if any of the keywords a user searched for appears in your creative, Google rewards your relevance by making that keyword show up in ad in bold. Your ad is more likely to grab their attention, and when it does it’s more likely to keep it since they see a mirror of what they were searching for. If they then go on to click your ad, you need to carry this theme through to your landing page, ensuring the content your users land on is relevant to what they searched for. I will go into more detail on both creatives and landing pages in a future article.
It is important also to consider that your potential customers will all be at very different stages of their buying cycle, so separating your keywords based on this allows you to show them an ad and landing page which is more appropriate to their state of mind. There is no point sending someone who is looking for introductory or exploratory information on a subject straight to a Buy Now page. Likewise, someone who is ready to buy your product will not want to navigate through several pages of your site to get to the product they want to buy. The understanding that you sadly cannot force a user to do anything they are not ready for is another important factor towards the success of your campaign!
Comments
Leave a comment Trackback