Tips on How to Properly Structure Your AdWords Account
While the keywords, adverts and landing pages you select for your AdWords campaign are extremely important when it comes to the overall performance that you’ll achieve, you won’t come anywhere close to reaching your maximum potential if the structure of your account is not up to scratch. Among others, the types of problems that a poorly designed AdWords structure can cause include; poor quality scores for keywords & adverts, below average CTRs (‘Click-Through-Rates’), hindered conversion rates… the list continues.
Below are some tips on how to ensure that your AdWords account structure is set up in a way that ensures you’re getting the most out of your marketing dollars.
1) Separate brand keywords into their own campaign.
This is extremely important from an ease of reporting point of view. When brand terms are mixed in with generic search terms, the fact that other marketing efforts can impact the performance of your brand terms means that your overall SEM performance has the potential to be artificially skewed. You want to be able to report on brand terms and your generic terms separately, and creating an individual campaign for your brand terms makes this very easier. Additionally, some advertisers might not want to invest a large budget into brand terms given that you should already be in 1st position on Google’s organic search, and creating a specific campaign will give you complete budget control over your brand terms.
2) Specific campaigns for each product or service area.
Creating specific campaigns for each of your product and service areas is extremely beneficial for a number of reasons, including:
- You may only offer particular products and/or services in select locations, so creating a specific campaign for these areas will allow you to target your ads only to the locations in question, while showing your other service/product keywords elsewhere. This makes your campaign much more targetted and will help to improve conversion rates.
- You may find that particular products or services convert at a much higher rate than others. Creating a specific campaign for each product/service will allow you to allocate specific budget caps to these areas, so if you find that a particular product is converting extremely well, you’ll be able to simply increase its campaign budget cap!
- If you only want certain products to appear on PCs, rather than mobiles and tablet devices, this is a setting you’ll be able to adjust at the campaign level.
3) Minimise Adgroups to 10 keywords at the most.
One of the most important aspects of an AdWords campaign is keyword to advert relevancy, and having hundreds of keywords within the same AdGroup makes it almost impossible to create ads relevant to each keyword. Because of this, I recommend creating an AdGroup for each keyword – or at least one AdGroup per 10 keywords. This will ensure that you can mention your keyword within your ad text, resulting in a strong CTR and thus a great quality score for your keyword list.
4) Create several ads for each AdGroup.
When putting together your adverts, ensure that you’re creating 3-4 ads for each AdGroup rather than just 1. This allows you to run several adverts alongside each other to test which king of messaging works best with your audience. This testing should be performed consistently throughout your campaign and will ensure that you’re constantly seeing improvements to your CTR.
5) Separate search, display, mobile & tablet targeting into individual campaigns.
When creating your structure, ensure that you have specific campaigns for each device and/or network. This will allow you to tailor ad creative – something that can make a big impact with devices such as mobile where ads with a local feel or shorter description may work best, as well as giving you the ability to edit settings such as geo-targetting, ad scheduling, daily budget cap etc. for each device/network. Often there will be particular devices that perform better in certain locations & at certain times so you ideally want the ability to edit these targetting settings for each device separately.
These are some of the main tips on how to correctly structure your campaign, however there are many more points that you’ll pick up along the way. The trick is to make your campaign as granular as possible, while ensuring that it’s easy for you to navigate & set up in a way that allows for maximum ad relevancy.
Do you have any other points that you think should have been included in this article?
