PPC Campaign Organization: Don't Forget Landing Pages

A common mistake I seen made when reviewing PPC campaigns is the failure to match keywords with their correct landing pages.  Why does this happen?  Probably because people are taught that their ad groups need to contain keywords that have similar words in them.  What? Isn’t that right?  Well…yes…and no.

It is true to an extent; but only to the extent that each of the keywords that you are grouping as similar should be landing on the same landing page.  Ad groups should be organized not only for keywords, but also for landing pages.

For example, if you are creating a campaign for Nike and you want to work on building a shoe campaign, then you may be tempted to create an ad group called “womens shoes,” and send the traffic to the womens shoes landing page.  Naturally.  But, the mistake I see made a lot is including a keyword like “womens tennis shoes” in this ad group.

While you would definitely gain conversions by sending this keyword traffic to this landing page, the problem is that there is a better landing page for this keyword on the Nike site.

Although the keywords “womens shoes” and “womens tennis shoes” seem to be closely related; the addition of the word “tennis” makes an extremely large difference.  With the term “womens shoes,” the searcher didn’t tell you specifically what type of women’s shoe they wanted; so we can’t make assumptions. Take them to the relevant category page and let them go from there.

With “womens tennis shoes,” the searcher told you specifically what kind of womens shoe they are looking for.  So, take them where they want to go!  The more you make them work to find exactly what they’re looking for, the less likely they’ll want to stick around.  So, when organizing your ad groups, ask the following two questions of your keywords:

1.  Are the people using all of these search queries looking for exactly the same thing?
2.  Should all of the people searching on these terms land on the same landing page?  Or is there a better option available?

PPC campaign organization is an underrated skill.  Master it and watch your performance shine.