Today we continue with some Adwords Consulting basics that were started a month ago in Part 1. In August we talked about the structure of your Adwords program on a concept level and how it is important to be as specific as possible. This week I will talk about campaign structure and budgeting to show how to fit your specific concepts in to the framework of Google’s structure.  I will do a future post or posts about some of the additional features you can use to enhance your ad performance like mobile targeting, remarketing, and ad extensions.

Campaigns: Campaigns are the highest level within your Adwords account.  At the campaign level you will set your daily budget and geographic and media targets.  You should keep these differences in mind when you are breaking down your advertising spend. If you want to target different geographies differently or want to spend some money on display advertising separately from specific search advertising, you will want to make that decision here.

I have also worked with clients who started with one campaign but when they saw how demand and costs worked out, they separated in to two campaigns because they wanted to be assured that a certain percent of their budget always went to a specific product or service. For example, a chiropractor may begin a campaign that has facets that target “chiropractor” terms as well as more general symptoms like “back pain”, “neck pain”, etc. It may prove that “chiropractor terms” convert best for them, but they still want to show up for everything.  Over time, it appears that “back pain” terms are eating up most of the budget.  The chiropractor can then break their one campaign in to two campaigns and target one campaign at only the “chiropractor” terms and use 70% of the budget there.  They can then leave the rest of the budget for the other campaign the covers the symptoms.

This is one example where it may be helpful to use multiple campaigns. You may also find that you want to target different geographies differently or even split your budget in to display and search campaigns, but keep this in mind as the campaign level is where this changing to your targeting structure takes place.

Adgroups: Adgroups are where you get very specific about keyword concepts as we talked about in Part 1. All of the adgroups in a specific campaign are sharing the same daily budget, as we discussed above, so keep that in mind. However, you should have an adgroup for every specific concept you are targeting and landing page you want to send visitors to.  Extending the example above, our chiropractor would have an adgroup for “chiropractor” terms like “best chiropractor in town” or “NJ Chiropractor”, etc,, but also adgroups for each individual symptom, like “back pain”, “neck pain”, or even “back doctor”, “wellness doctor”, etc. These are all potential targets and should be split up as much as possible for your visitors sake as well as your own.  The more you are able to break these down, the easier it is for you to measure results and the better landing experience you can provide because you know exactly what your user is searching for.

Ads: As we discussed last time, you ad copy should touch on exactly what the user is searching for as well as providing a selling point and trust elements. It is advised that you have multiple ads running for each adgroup so you can see which work best.  Every ad is associated with an adgroup and only that adgroup.  If you run a similar ad in a different adgroup you will have to create it separately in that other adgroup.  If you change an ad, it will become a new ad and often lose that history in your account, so be careful with that.  Sometimes for small ad changes, it is actually better to just make a new ad so you can still have that data there to look at.

As a Google Certified partner, we can help you put together you Adwords campaigns to best utilize your budget.  In future posts we will dive in to some of the other features that can help you out.  Please give us a call if you need help managing or improving your Adwords experience.