This is part of my series of posts that I’m putting together about how we approach PPC campaign management for our clients.

My planned PPC Campaign Domination topics:

• Landing page optimization
• Google AdWords, quality score & you
• Google AdWords ad extensions – Part 1 – What they are & how they work
• Google AdWords ad extensions – Part 2 – Our client test

Today’s topic is:

PPC Campaign Organization

Everyone at Amplify Interactive knows that I tend to obsess about organization. I have a folder for everything, I maintain a well pruned task list, I harp on them about keeping our project management systems up to date, we have a process in place for nearly everything, etc. So it should come as no surprise that  all of our PPC campaigns must be well organized and thought out so that our efforts at optimization are easy.

“Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.”

-A.A. Milne

Success Starts at the Very Bottom -  Organizing Your Terms

One of the biggest PPC campaign pitfalls we see when we take over campaigns from someone else is that the previous owner was lazy and put too many terms into too few ad groups. Taking the time to organize your terms into granular, extremely focused ad groups makes things easier in the long run. Consider the following example:

Let’s say your company is called “SawCompany” and you make Circular Saws. After doing your keyword research, you realize there are three major categories of terms.

1. Branded: terms that contain your brand name “sawcompany”
2. Circular Saw: searches for circular saws ranging from general to extremely specific
3. Safety/Injury Prevention: searches for safety features

In AdWords – we’ll turn these distinct categories into “campaigns”. Within these campaigns – we’ll organize the terms into specific ad groups where the terms within each ad group are specifically related to one another, and generally related to the general category. After some work – we come up with the following structure:

Example of an organized PPC campaign

PPC Campaign Organization Will Set You Free

Organizing a campaign like this will give us the power to do two very specific things:

1. Understand performance and manage our spend by term, group and category. If a particular Ad Group and/or Campaign is performing particularly well – we’ll be able to tell right away and explore options like allocating more budget to the top performing group/campaign so that our ads show as often as possible. We’ll also be able to tell if there’s a specific group or campaign that doesn’t perform very well so we can prune it from our spend and maintain a good quality score.
2. Test ad copy at the ad group level and run the best possible ad copy for each individual group which will, you guessed it, help us to maintain a good quality score. If we didn’t have our search terms broken up into really specific ad groups, we might end up running the same ad copy for a term like “woodworking safety” that we do for “best contractor saw”. These terms are clearly entirely different and we should be serving different ads and landing pages for each.

There are other benefits to be sure, but I’m not going to give you all our secrets. Please feel free to share any PPC campaign management & organization tips with our readers by commenting below!

The surprise answer – run display ads.

Just read an interesting article over at eMarketer “Display Campaigns Boost Search Effectiveness” about a study that  shows that display ad campaigns increase visits from search engine users by nearly 14% from both organic (SEO) and PPC search combined. Another benefit? Cost per click for PPC decreased as well – demonstrating greater efficiency of the PPC campaign as a result of display. Read the rest of this entry »

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Microsoft’s Bing & Yahoo will be teaming up to take on Google, StatCounter reports that Bing gained another 1% of the search market last month and is slowly but surely growing their share. In a preview of what’s to come with a joint Bing/Yahoo effort, their combined market share comes in at a little over 20%. Granted – it isn’t Google’s near 80%, but the opportunity to reach 20% of the search market with a Bing/Yahoo combined effort is worth paying attention to.

We’ve already had several clients start inquiring about testing a PPC campaign with Bing and I’m sure we’ll see more as we move into Q4 and start looking at 2010 budgets. Let us know if you want to look into a PPC campaign with Bing or any of the rest. We’d also like to hear about any recent experiences you may have had with Bing.

Finally – maybe Google will get a run for it’s money. I love Google as much as the next guy, but it’s been tough to watch the rest of the “competition” get left so far behind in the dust.

As you can read in this article on Search Engine Watch “It’s Official: Microsoft and Yahoo! Finally Strike a Search Deal” – the deal basically says that:

1. Bing will power Yahoo’s organic search results

I think this is a great move. Bing has made some pretty terrific strides in creating a better search engine. Spending another 100 mil on advertising it is making a dent as well. Bing isn’t perfect, but Yahoo organic results haven’t been all that great either.

2. Yahoo will handle the paid search

Again – this is a great move. If you manage paid search campaigns – you know there’s two specific problems with Microsoft/Bing.

1. AdCenter sucks to use. It just does. That’s not to say that Yahoo’s platform is great, but it is better than AdCenter and now they can focus on making it more usable.

2. Low search volume: WIth the exception of some verticals, the search volume is rarely there for clients to justify the time, energy & budget required to build & manage an additional campaign with Bing

So ideally, as a part of this deal we’ll just be able to opt-in or out of displaying ads on Bing with a simple check box. Just like you check a box to add the Google search partner network today.

This move will still be tricky and they’re both a long way from pulling it off. But hopefully by allowing each to focus on what they do best – maybe they’ll be able to actually compete and we’ll also have to start thinking about results from more than one search engine!

This is part of my series of posts that I’m putting together about how we approach PPC campaign management for our clients.

My planned PPC Campaign Domination topics:

• Landing page optimization
• Campaign organization
• Google AdWords ad extensions – Part 1 – What are they & how do they work
• Google AdWords ad extensions – Part 2 – Our client test

Today’s topic is…

Google AdWords Quality Score Optimization

Before you yawn or leave because you don’t know what Quality Score is – you should realize that the success of your PPC campaign may in fact hinge on quality score. So it’s kind of important to know what it is and how to make it work for you!

I recently did a presentation “Google AdWords Tips You Can’t Live Without” at the Portland Online Marketing Summit where I had 4 minutes to give a couple of Google AdWords optimization tips. Most of my content was based on quality score but 4 minutes isn’t much time – so I wasn’t able to finish all of my tips for the crowd. What follows is an extended presentation of my AdWords Quality Score tips plus a few bonus tips for you loyal readers.

(note – the presentation isn’t visible in the feed if you’re reading via email/rss/facebook)

A summary of the Google AdWords Quality Score tips in the presentation:

• Improving your Quality Score will drive down your cost per click and ultimately your cost per acquisition/lead/sale
• You can’t succeed at AdWords unless your search terms (keywords) are grouped into many, very tightly aligned ad groups
• Your campaign settings are critical to AdWords success and will have a huge impact on your Quality Score – see slide 5 & 6 in the presentation for my tips
• Always be testing ad copy – I give specific advice about how to structure your ad copy testing (slide 7 & 8 )
• Keep your keyword list pruned – eliminate zero & low impression keywords that could be dragging your quality score down and add keywords that could improve your targeting & cost per click (slide 8 )
• If you aren’t using conversion tracking – you’re sucker. I also give tips on how to implement conversion tracking even if you can’t track “real” conversions (slide 9)

And – a few bonus AdWords management tips for you:

• Budget allocation: Optimize your impression share by fully funding the campaigns/ad groups that are giving you the best performance.
• Pay attention to the Geographic Performance Report and look for geographic areas (countries/regions/cities)  where you get higher impressions/clicks/conversions and create separate campaigns for targeting those areas specifically. This can help you allocate budget to top performers (see below)
• Use AdWords Editor and make spreadsheets for campaign planning that you can import directly into AdWords editor. It will save you HOURS of campaign management time.

Got any other AdWords tips you’d like to share or ask us about? Comment below.