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SMX Sydney: PPC Ad Group Management

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Live blogging of Writing Killer Ad Copy session by Tim McDonald from The Found Agency at SMX Sydney 2009.

Tim says PPC advertisers need to structure their ad campaign effectively. How much time do you have to manage your campaign? Plan effectively BEFORE launch. There are limitations to an AdWords campaign but generally you can use a single campaign to manage hundreds of keywords.

Within your campaign you can use the targeting and then within the Ad Group is where you get specific.

Targeting options

Campaign targeting =

- search / display /
- geo / time / demographics
- start / end dates
- daily budgets

Ad Group targeting

- keywords and sites
- CPM / CPC bids
- Ad creative – text, display

25 campaigns per account
100 ad groups per campaign
2000 kw’s per ad group
50 ad creatives per ad group
spend $$$ and limits can be increased manually

Keep in mind when planning that relevance is key. It leads to high click through rates.

Why be concerned with Click Through Rate (CTR)?

- direct impact on your CPC
- it’s a metric of ad/keyword effectiveness
- impact on your quality score
- if little or no relevancy, ads may not show
- high CTR = more visitors/better ROI

Showed an example search query for “richmond real estate” where PPC ads lead to specifically targeted landing pages for the query.

Best AdWords Account Structure

- no single structure is best
- make it granular + manageable
- clustered keyword themes
- test and adapt

Tim also recommends using few keywords per Ad Group, which I always agree with, but when he suggested using 30 separate AdGroups for 30 different keywords, he kinda lost me at that point. From a management perspective, I’ve found that grouping together keywords via specific themes is much more logical than creating a new AdGroup for each and every keyword.

Tim says to consider separating:

- brand & high performers
- content / display
- Head vs long tail
- keyword match type
- keyword topics / themes

Tim recommends breaking out high performers from Ad Groups and putting them in their own Ad Groups so they have their own budget rules. Break out search and content ads into different ad groups to allow easier management and ad type display. Also consider breaking out separate keyword match types (exact / broad / phrase etc)

- Isolate exact match keywords

- Use phrase / broad match for keyword discovery

- Use negative keywords

- Don’t rely on AdWords to show you the “best match”. Do your own keyword research

- Use search query reports in your analytics to dig deeper

Content Network Recommendations

- Separate Content Network-only campaigns

- Fewer keywords per Ad Group

- Use Broad Match

- Separate bids for content audience

- Consider top-performing placements

Tags: adwords, Google, ppc, smx