Following on from Caelen’s post about increasing your AdWords CTR for free, I’m going to be sharing a few tips with you about the things we’ve learned since starting our AdWords campaigns 2 years ago.
Since we started we’ve created 129 campaigns, 4681 ad groups, 19,799 ads, 11,104 negative keywords, and 191,672 keywords. Believe it or not 99% of those keywords have unique tracking parameters in their landing URLs so that we can do very exact ROI calculations.
If you’re just starting out, there is probably no need to go to those extremes yet. In fact, you’re better off starting one niche campaign and learning from it as you go and then expanding outwards. So, where should you start? First of all, let’s talk about how to structure your AdWords account. The very simplest AdWords account would look like this:
The Most Basic AdWords Account Structure
Now, unfortunately most of us don’t work in companies selling just one product or service, so this example isn’t going to be of any use, but by adapting it over the course of a few examples it will help to show more clearly the benefits of a well structured campaign.
Say for example that you are running a small clothes shop selling t-shirts, hats and shoes. There are lots and lots of keywords relating to these products that you hope will bring people to your website and lead to a sale. The simplest thing for you to do would be to put all the keywords into the one ad group in the one campaign shown above and hope for the best.
Lots Of Keywords In One Ad Group In One Campaign
Unfortunately though, you’ve left the rest of your account unchanged, so now someone searching for a new hat sees the same ad as someone searching for new shoes. Your ad is going to have to try and speak to both people, meaning it won’t be as focused as it could be, meaning you’re going to get a lower click through rate, which will in turn lead to a lower quality score, and ultimately a higher cost per click.
You’re also going to land both types of visitor on the same landing page, which means it’s going to have to be very general, and from experience this will lead to a much lower conversion rate than landing each type of visitor on a page relevant to the product that they searched for.
In this simple example, you are better off running three separate campaigns, one each for t-shirts, hats and shoes. You could run different ads, bids and landing pages per keyword in the original example but splitting them out into separate campaigns makes it much easier to monitor the overall performance of your advertising for each product category. Now at least someone searching for shoes will see an ad related to shoes. This should lead to a better click through rate, and consequently a better quality score for your shoes keywords and ads, and ultimately you will end up paying less per click.
Multiple Campaigns Per Account
Now the exact same advantages can be had by sub-dividing within these new campaigns too. For example, in your t-shirts campaign, if you sell a number of different styles or brands of t-shirt, then you should create different ad groups for each. This again lets you run different ads for each brand or style, and also lets you land the visitor on a page specific to whichever product they’re interested in.
Visitors landing on pages that closely match the keywords they searched for are much more likely to convert. AdWords will also give your keywords and ads better quality scores for having more relevant landing pages, again potentially reducing your cost per click.
Multiple Ad Groups Per Campaign
Ultimately you can keep breaking campaigns down more and more by sub-dividing your products. You can even go as far as to create specific ads and landing pages for each individual keyword in your account. It is definitely worth the effort to do this as much and as best you can as it can significantly reduce your overall cost per click, and increase your conversion rate at the same time.
In my next post I will talk about how to decide what to bid per keyword, and how to monitor your ROI.
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