Ad Groups & Campaign – Important Things to Consider
If you have collated a list of keywords that you would like to use for your Google Adwords Campaign, you now have the laborious task of organizing this list in to ad groups and campaigns.
There are a lot of things to consider when grouping keywords. Here are some hard earned suggestions, tricks and best practices that will help you with this task.
1. Never use duplicates
One of our favorite rules is that you should not have identical keywords in multiple groups. In fact, some of the 3rd party Adwords platforms have settings that won’t allow you do this. However, for those that do, if any of your Ads is triggered by a keyword appearing in multiple groups, the system must pick one. What this means is that you lose the control to decide which group of Ads should be shown for that term. This can be problematic later on in the reporting and optimization phase because it can end up generating false information about how that keyword actually performed.
Note: You can certainly use identical keyword in multiple ad groups provided they appear in different campaigns which are targeted in a variety of ways. So, for example, for those who have created individual campaigns for a couple of states and geotargeted all of them, there would not be any conflict, so that’s great.
2. Think Ahead before Grouping
When people who are new to Google Adwords begin grouping keywords, they have the tendency to create too few a group or too many. It takes time to really craft the right grouping technique/strategy for each campaign, so do not worry too much at this stage. You can always make changes as the account matures. However, if you have an inadequate number of groups, you won’t be able generate as many insights swiftly during your optimizations.
Consider, for instance a used car dealership. If grouped all your car brand name terms into a single ad group, you won’t have the ability to split messaging that addresses the unique intent of each key word. Obviously, there is a difference between users looking for energy efficient vehicles Vs Humvees right? How about BMWs vs Ford Trucks? By splitting these conditions into different groups, you are able to address the users who are looking for them in different ways.
Another common mistake that brand new search marketers make is the creation of too many groups. Indeed, it can be argued that there are various user intents with conditions like used car, used vehicle and used automobile. You could make a case that they ought to be split into different groups. Keep in mind, you are going to be spending lots of time with your accounts while enhancing, reporting, and analyzing. While too few groups give you much less to work with, too many groups may become challenging to manage. I know it might be difficult at first to grasp what is too big and what is too small, but don’t worry, you will get the hang of it in a short time.
3. Campaigns
Keywords are segmented into ad groups and this ad groups are assembled into campaigns. Before grouping keywords, you should have an idea about how you want your campaign structure will look. The reasons you will decide to produce different campaigns will essentially come down to the available configurations that the engines offer at the campaign level.
For example, when using Google AdWords, the following settings are unique to each campaign:
Budget.
If you have keywords that need their unique budget, they’ll need to be split up into different campaigns. A good example of this occurs when you have one accounts with different business units such as a software program company with different products or perhaps a large consumer package products (CPG) company (Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, etc) which has many different brands.
Geotargeting.
You are able to only set location targeting at the campaign level. Therefore, if you need to address different nations, states, cities, metros, and so on in different ways, you’ll have to break those out in to new campaigns.
Dayparting.
Google Search Engine provides very robust day of week/time of day targeting at the campaign level. If you want to bid differently or even use different ads for your weekend or nights, you will have to use different promotions.
Flight Date/Scheduling.
Used by many companies who have certain special offers that they want to highlight during key areas such as the Xmas holiday season.
Language.
If you’re focusing on other languages, you’ll require ads in those languages-thus, new campaigns.
Networks.
Google allows you to target either search users on http://google.com or even partners in the Google search network. You can also decide whether you would like your ads to appear outside of search-related web pages such as Google content network. I stopped here.
Bidding options.
These enable you to bid in different ways, for example, manual or automated bidding tactics or even cost per acquisition (CPA) targeting where you can inout your desired cost per action (such like a sale or a lead generation contact form signup) and the system will attempt to optimize your account to meet that goal.
4. Ad Groups.
What dictates which keywords and phrases should go into which ad groups? Well, there are many points to consider, but the main driver here is that every keyword in one ad group will share the same ads. And remember, all those ads each have a single squeeze page URL. If users who searched using different keywords that are similar in the same ad group and are directed to the same landing page, it implies that you have a good group.
Other things to consider for grouping terms:
Purchase intent.
Okay, if you have a bunch of dog terms which could go into one group, what would be best is to divide them based on the buying cycle. Terms segmented by attention terms, interest terms, browse terms and buy terms certainly makes sense. This way you can stop, activate or change advertisements to meet your needs at that level.
Head terms vs End terms.
The terms that have a huge search volume level (such as real estate, vehicle, computer and so on) ought to be split out. Because your head terms will be generating probably the highest volume, you’ll want to maintain a closer eye on them. Even though they would certainly fit into a bunch with tons of other terms, by splitting them away, you’ll be able to manage all of them better.
Brand terms generally get their own ad groups and campaigns. They tend to very well and most certainly ought to be treated with more care compared to general terms.
Misspellings/plurals
Plop these in their own ad group so you can see how they are performing versus correctly spelled terms. When screening new terms you may want to force them into their own campaigns as well as ad groups so you can find out if they are helping or harming your campaigns before publishing them into your standard groups.
Quality score
The engines will reward all those keywords that perform best.
The grouping tool
If you need a few help to sift through your massive keyword list, why not try WordStream’s free keyword grouper? It is a cool tool which will let you paste in your conditions and get some good grouping suggestions in seconds.
The process of organizing huge lists associated with website keywords to find a useful grouping can take hours, actually days, using typical key word tools or spreadsheets. WordStream’s Free Keyword Grouper simplifies that process – simply paste in up to 10,000 keywords and the device finds the most profitable key word groups for you to target in only seconds. The keyword groups that you discover are incredibly useful for informing and optimizing both SEO and PAY PER CLICK marketing.
Good luck with your groups! Once again, don’t get discouraged if you’re having trouble figuring out how you can group your terms. Simply put them together in a way that is sensible to you and you can always regroup them later. Over time, you’ll a good handle on this job and be able to quickly organize your own key terms.
