Posts Tagged ‘ad groups’

In part one of Paid Search is Customer Service, Not Advertising, I shared a tip about your target audience.  They’re lazy.  We’re all lazy.  Most shoppers/searchers follow what is called “The Principle of Least Effort.” Here’s an excerpt about this principle from Wikipedia…

This principle states that an information seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method in the least exacting mode available. Information-seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found.

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If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad.  You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries.  Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order.

Then, broad match became “expanded broad match” where Google’s algorithm was given free reign to decide if search queries were a close enough match in search intent to show your ad.  Many of the results were not even close.  Your keyword could be business cards and your ad would show on state ids and business plans.

The overwhelming advantage of broad match of course is that you get more impressions, clicks and conversions; although you most likely would have a lower conversion rate that will make you pay more for each conversion.  So for some it works and for some not so much.  The major disadvantage is that you have to spend time going through your search queries very often to weed out those that are not applicable to your business because you paid for clicks state ids and business plans.

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If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn’t you?), you’re always testing.  Always.  It’s the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels.  One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.

Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from different time periods (except for ads).  For example, you’d have to run ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the new bid price for a while.  Then, you’d have to compare the results from different time periods.  The problem? When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes.  But fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.

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Google’s Display Network has two types of targeting options.  The first, automatic placements, we’ve talked about already.  This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group.  Now, we’ll talk about the second – managed placements.

This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:

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First, we took a look at types of ads that you can test and then we look at how to analyze the results of your tests and set up new ones.  But, one more thing we must know is when to consider a test complete and ready to be analyzed. If you consider a test complete before you have statistically significant results that prove with great confidence that what you observe is actually true, you may find yourself making conclusions that simply are not.  Therefore, you need to know when you have enough data for this to be the case.

You’ve got two options -

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Most of the PPC accounts I look at do not take advantage of all of the different options that AdWords offers to organize your account for maximum success.  Most of them simply organize their campaigns based upon keywords.  They’ll separate keywords into separate campaigns just because they’re different keywords.  Or, they’ll keep all different kinds of keywords for all different kinds of products with all different kinds of marketing goals in the same campaign.  But, AdWords has given us the flexibility to have much more control over how we are spending our money so that every dollar can be maximized.

First, your account should be organized based upon your marketing objectives.  Therefore, before you create your campaigns (or if they’ve been running for a while now), lay out specifically what it is you’re are trying to accomplish. Click here to keep learning

OK, we got rid of some wasted clicks from our PPC campaigns there.  Now, let’s do some more.

Let’s say we have an ad group that is dedicated to selling something specific like “Gibson Guitars.”  We’ve got keywords and targeted ads directed to a targeted landing page dealing directly with guitars that are made by Gibson.  And let’s say we’ve got a decent amount of money to work with so we decide to use the broad match term “gibson guitars” in our ad group.  Well, with broad match, we will get our keyword matched to all kind of queries, even as simple as “guitars.”

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There’s a big temptation that PPC managers need to stay away from, especially when first building an account.  The temptation is assumption. (And yes, we all know what happens when….)  If you assume, you can waste a lot of time building out a campaign that you will just have to spend MORE time fixing later.

A couple of primary assumptions that would be easy to make…

• Keyword phrase “x” is definitely going to work so I’ll spend the time to build an ad group and write targeted ads for it.
• Keyword phrase “y” isn’t working, so I’ll just delete it.

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If you have a PPC account, as you read this you are paying for wasted clicks.  Visitors that aren’t really interested in what you offer are coming to your website and you’re paying for them.  Isn’t that frustrating to know?  The bad news is that the nature of PPC won’t enable you to ever totally eliminate this from happening.

Why?  One reason is because you can’t control searcher behavior.  You could write the perfect ad for your most targeted keyword on exact match so that it cannot be mistaken what it is you’re offering.  But, searchers that are not at all candidates for purchasing will still click through for many reasons.  Maybe they thought you were in their price range, but aren’t.  Or maybe their query failed to return the kind of results they were looking for but your ad piqued their curiosity so they clicked through in exploration mode just to make sure.

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One of the most important things you can do to get all that you can out of your PPC campaigns is to practice granular ad group organization. This is because the more of your budget that you can funnel into granular ad groups, the better your results will be.

Basically, this means that your ad groups contain keyword phrases that are specifically the same in their search intent, as well as the same language that the searcher used in their query.  Typically, I’ve found that this means each ad group’s foundational or anchor keyword be at least a 3-word phrase. No, this does not mean you throw out 1-2 word phrases.

Yes, “tv, hd tv, flatscreen tv and Panasonic flatscreen tv” could all be in the same ad group and you would sell some tvs.  But, you wouldn’t have as good of a CTR and conversion rate as if you practiced granular ad group organization.

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