If you want to have a successful PPC campaign, you need to have a well-structured campaign. There are numerous ways to consider structuring your campaigns.
There are best practices advertisers should follow when setting up a paid search campaign structure:
- Create a separate Search campaign for brand keywords. Your brand campaign(s) will perform quite differently from your non-brand campaigns because these users are already familiar with your company, products or services at some level. You’ll want to be able to budget, manage and report on brand separately from non-brand.
- Be sure to add your brand keywords as negative keywords in your non-brand campaigns to ensure all brand traffic goes through your brand campaign.
- Don’t target more than one network in one campaign. These days we have to qualify this a bit. This recommendation applies to standard Search campaigns. Newer campaign types — Smart, Local, Discovery, etc. — that automatically serve ads across multiple properties and there is no way to separate them. In a standard Search campaign, however, you want to uncheck the option to have ads served on the Display Network.
- Create a campaign structure that will support your goals. Your non-brand campaigns might be organized based on your sales funnel stages, conversion action type, product or service type, geographic targets etc. The key is to map out a structure that maps to your goals and business objectives.
- Settle on a naming convention that will be clear to anyone managing the campaigns now and in the future. Map this out in a spreadsheet that is available to everyone on the team.
- Have enough budget to sustain your campaigns throughout the day.
PPC Budget Estimating
The amount of money that a campaign has to spend is set by the campaign, but there is also an option to spread the money out evenly over a number of campaigns. You want to set your ad budget so that your ads will have the opportunity to run throughout the day or night, depending on when you set them.
The Keyword Planner tools in Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads can give you an estimate of how much it will cost per click for keywords related to your business. You can use these methods to get an estimate of how much money you will need to reach your goals.
To access the Keyword Planner in Google Ads, click on the Tool icon in the upper right navigation.
After adding keywords to the plan in the Keyword ideas section of the Keyword Planner, the Plan overview page will show estimates for how many clicks the keywords will get at a budget and maximum CPC. This is an estimate and a guide, but it can help you get started.
Ad groups
Ad groups are a collection of one or more ads that share the same keywords. Ad groups are groups of ads that are targeted to a set of related keywords.
This allows you to group related keywords together and write ads with a common theme. After people click on the ad, they will be taken to the landing page that is included in the ad.
It’s very important to carefully plan the structure of your ad campaign, including which keywords to target and exclude, what your ad copy will say, and which landing pages will be most relevant to the keywords. Your ad groups should all be working together to help you achieve your campaign goal.
Your ad copy should be closely related to the keywords in your ad group and accurately reflect the intent of those search queries. This is critical for achieving high Quality Scores.
A retailer who sells both high heels and running shoes would not want to put those two types of shoes in the same advertisement. They would want to write different advertising copy for each of those products. The store will want customers who search for “high heels” to be directed to a page featuring high heels, and customers searching for “running shoes” to be brought to a page with the store’s selection of running shoes.
Search term reports
You will be able to see which search terms triggered your ads after your campaigns have been running for a while.
Search term reports allow you to improve your keyword targeting by seeing which keywords are grouped together properly, which keywords you can add to or remove from groups, and whether you should further segment keywords into multiple ad groups. This allows you to write ad copy that is better targeted to the relevant groups.
Set up a regular schedule to review these reports and add relevant keywords to your ad groups or campaigns.
Text ad copy
Ads that consist of a headline, description, display URL, destination URL, and ad extensions.
Headlines
Each headline can have up to 30 characters (including spaces). The company name and slogan appears on one line at the top of the advertisement, separated by a pipe or dash. The most important part of your ad is the part that will catch the attention of the person searching. The headline of your ad should be reflective of what the user is searching for, and should offer a benefit or feature that sets it apart from other ads.
Description
The description can be up to 80 characters long. Search intent is what a person is looking for when they perform a search. You can experiment with the length and content of your descriptions to ensure they reflect what the searcher is looking for.
Display path
The display URL will show the domain name from the final URL destination. You can relate up to two paths of 15 characters each to the URL. These paths will be displayed after the URL. An example of this would be if an ad was being shown for the search term “women’s jeans”. The ad might use one path of /jeans or two paths of /womens/jeans.
Final URL
This is where users will go after clicking on your ad. Make sure that the page a person lands on after clicking a search result is relevant to what they were searching for, and provides a good experience. No matter how great your search ad is, it won’t matter if your landing page is bad.
Ad copy testing & best practices
Even though the ad that has the highest click-through rate might not have the best conversion rate, it will still cost less per click and rank higher in search results than ads that have lower-than-average click-through rates. As machine learning becomes more relied upon by search engines to determine which ads to serve, ad testing is changing significantly.
Google suggests that every ad group should have at least three ads. You will want at least two different versions of each ad in your ad group. PPC ad testing is important and always changing, even with Google’s help.
Ad extensions
Ad extensions provide more information with your ad. Search engines are constantly introducing new types of ad extensions. Extensions are served based on contextual factors, including device and location, and in combinations that are anticipated to improve click-through rates.
If an ad is in the top position, it will be eligible for more ad extensions. An example of a search for “mother’s day flowers” is shown below.
In 2013, Google added ad extensions into its Ad Rank calculation. This means that the extensions you use will affect the price you pay per click and the position your ads show in the search results. Ad Rank is what decides whether ad extensions will appear with your ads. This means that if you have relevant extensions, you will pay less per click and be closer to the top of the page. Advertisers should use every relevant ad extension in their campaigns. Google will create some extensions automatically, for example Sitelinks, if you haven’t set them up in your campaigns.
An advantage of extensions is that they let you add extra information and promote items like events, sales, and more without making new ads.
How to Structure Your PPC Account?
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Campaign Structure
It is beneficial to have multiple campaigns in your Google Ads account. However, do not neglect to have a well-organized Google Ads campaign. Imagine you own a shoe store – you could have separate campaigns for men’s shoes, women’s shoes, and kids’ shoes.
When naming your campaigns, choose a name that will resonate with your audience and accurately reflect the campaign goals. When creating a campaign in Google Ads, it is important to give it a clear and logical name that will be easy to identify and understand at a glance. This will help you keep your campaigns organized and make it easier to find the information you need. For example:
- UK – Men – Sports Shoes – Increase Conversions
- USA – Women – Dress shoes – Brand Awareness
Here are some other essential factors to consider that will help you devise a smart structure for your PPC campaign:
- Budget – Each campaign should have different keywords. You can analyze performance to determine which keywords and campaigns generate a higher return on investment (ROI). Knowing this will guide your budgeting and investment decisions You can learn how to plan for PPC spending?
- Bid Strategy – It’s a straight choice between Automated bidding vs. Manual bidding. In a nutshell, newcomers to PPC advertising should start with manual bidding, as automated bidding requires historical data. Just make sure you set a maximum cost-per-click (Max CPC) bid limit.
- Location Targeting – You can refine your targeting based on specific cities, regions, or zip codes. Even if you have a global audience, it’s good to create separate campaigns for each location, as it makes analysis easier and more effective.
- Device Targeting – Create separate campaigns for each device that your audience uses. With segmented insights for desktop, mobile, and tablet, you can assess your campaigns to see which device delivers the best results.
- Brand Vs. Non-Brand – If you are running brand campaigns with branded keywords, slogans, or unique niche products, these will always perform a lot differently to any non-brand campaigns. For that reason, you should always isolate these in separate campaigns.
Learn More: How Analytics Improves Google Ads Device Targeting
Ad Group Structure
Keep these parameters in mind when structuring your account:
- Maximum of 7-10 ad groups per campaign
- Maximum of ~20 keywords per ad group
- Only 2-3 ads per ad group
When creating ad groups, it’s important to consider what the user is hoping to accomplish. When creating your ad groups, you should have one group for keywords that indicate buying intent and another group for keywords that don’t indicate buying intent.
For example, if you offer home remodeling services, any keywords like ‘buy flooring,’ ‘buy landscaping,’ ‘buy painting,’ and ‘buy refurbishing’ could indicate that the customer is ready to make a purchase. The keyword “painter” is searched for differently than keywords like “home repairs” or “landscaping.” People searching for “painter” may not be interested in home repairs or landscaping.
Don’t stuff your ad group with too many keywords or it will become bloated and unfocused.
Think about the following when creating your ad groups:
Match Type Mirroring
If you want to use match type mirroring when you structure your duplicate ad groups, you will need to make sure that the keyword match types are the same. Ad groups that contain only one match type are more efficient.
Exact Match groups will likely have the best results since you can display your PPC ads to people who use your keyword exactly. Phrase and broad match groups typically don’t perform well since they trigger for irrelevant search queries, making negative matching a focus.
Match type mirroring means having the same keyword in multiple match types. This makes it easier to identify and pause under-performing match types and keywords. You can save your budget by avoiding unnecessary expenses.
One benefit of creating multiple ad groups, each with a single match type, is that you can break up a high-volume campaign into smaller sections to make it easier to manage. It is important to use keyword match types correctly in PPC campaigns to improve results.
Use SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Group)
An SKAG is an ad group that focuses on a single, closely related keyword. One PPC ad is associated with one keyword. In other words, it’s easy to see how well your ads are performing and adjust your spending accordingly.
Learn More: SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Groups) or Not to SKAG?
Use STAG (Single Theme Ad Group)
A STAG is an advertising group that has a single theme, and all terms in the group must match that theme. For example, a group with a theme of “services” might include terms like “company”, “contractors”, and “firms”.
STAGs typically focus on topics rather than syntax, and try to have three to five keyword concepts that are similar in theme for each ad group.
Use SPAG (Single Product Ad Group)
SPAG is a single product ad group. It’s typically best to use SPAGs for shopping campaigns, but if you have Ads related to products, they can also be effective in Search Campaigns.
For example, if you have multiple products, and each product has different brands, you can target each brand to a different audience. The products are all over the place, and the brands are all over the place. There is a lot of variety when it comes to both products and brands. The iPhone and all of its related brands, such as the iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPhone X, are among the most popular smartphones on the market.
Use Alpha / Beta Ad Groups
To understand one benefit of creating multiple ad groups, you should look at the Alpha-Beta ad group strategy.
An alpha ad group uses only exact match keywords that are closely related to one another in order to deliver more focused and higher quality traffic. In contrast, Beta Ad Groups use keywords that have been slightly changed to allow for new keyword discoveries. The traffic to the beta groups will decrease as more negative keywords are added to screen out unqualified users.
If you use Alpha-Beta strategy, start with the beta ad groups to come up with new keyword ideas. Once it’s no longer giving you useful results, you can turn it off. The most important search terms can be added as exact match keywords in a separate group.
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