ClickEquations Blog

Managing paid search accounts is in many ways an exercise in prioritization. There are endless opportunities to expand and refine your account, run reports and analyze data, or make changes and conduct tests.

The only limits are hours in the day, and days in the week.

But not everything you might spend time on is equally valuable, or even has equal potential. So we thought ClickEquations should make it easy to find and focus on critical aspects of your PPC accounts.

That’s why we’ve added four new ‘One-Click Segmentation’ features to ClickEquations V2 which went live last week:

• One-Click Brand Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Head Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Content Network Segmentation
• One-Click Custom-User-Defined Segmentation

Each of these enables you to quickly isolate the performance history and then take action on important subsets of your account.

Brand Keywords Are Special

As discussed in our ‘Success Through Negative Brand Keywords‘ post last week, keywords that contain your brand terms and phrases are distinct from your non-brand keywords, and in many ways they should be managed differently.

But many accounts still have brand keywords scattered across many ad groups and campaigns. Wouldn’t it be great to see them all (and nothing else) with just a click?

Now you can. Just choose ‘Brand Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu.

You’ll near-instantly be presented with a list of all the brand keywords in your account. You can review their performance and make any necessary changes. You can even create and apply additional custom filters to run on your brand-only keywords.

Head Keywords Are Special Too

The concept of ‘head’ and ‘tail’ has got a lot of press in the last year. And we all know that a relatively small percentage of our keywords earn the lion’s share of our revenue and consume the lions share of our cost.

This has lots of implications for paid search, but most important is the fact that most of us don’t allocate our relatively precious resource, time, in proportion to the results various keywords produce. In other words, we don’t spend enough time fishing where the fish are.

Wouldn’t it be great to click that mouse of yours and see only that small segment of keywords that are driving the vast majority of your revenue? Or clicks? Or costs?

Now you can. Just choose ‘Head Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu.

You even get to control the definition of ‘Head Keyword’ that you wish to use. You set the target percentage, the key metric, and the lookback period.

The results are amazing. For the account we use for demonstrations – which is a real working paid search account with about 170K keywords in AdWords, just 281 drive 80% of the revenue. Those are an important 281 keywords to focus on, which is the point of this feature.

Content is not Search

We’ve also recently discussed on this blog the distinctions between search advertising and content network advertising. Given those thoughts, it makes sense that we’d support easy segmentation of search and content within ClickEquations.

So now we do. Just choose Search Network or Content Network from the Filters and Views menu.

Any campaigns that aren’t in the group you’ve chosen, will disappear. You can review results, navigate freely, and make any additions or changes.

Most importantly, you can focus. You can think about the campaigns in terms of the distribution network. And not get confused or distracted by the entirely different numbers that come from other network type.

Custom Saved Filters

The one-click access to brand keywords, head keywords, and search or content campaigns is a great start towards making it easier to focus on what’s important within your paid search accounts.

But in the complication of paid search, there are many other segments you may also want to access quickly.

So we’ve also added very powerful named and saved filters. You can define nearly any combination of account structural elements (like ad group or keyword attributes) plus performance results (such as click-through rates or quality scores) and status flags (including paused or disapproved) and even timeframes within which elements were modified. Then just enter a name and save it for easy future application.

These filters can be used anywhere in the account – they’re smart enough to ignore irrelivant settings – so if you define CPC as one of the factors and you’re viewing ad groups, the ‘CPC’ will be ignored but the other aspects will still apply.

We all have many ways we like to slice and dice our campaigns or keywords – and now you can do so quickly and easily.

Intelligent Paid Search Management

We think there are many ways that paid search management software can transform the process of managing ppc accounts. The tools have to evolve beyond simply offering option-after-option and begin shaping the way the work is done.

We think both our best practices and the one-click segmentation features of ClickEquations V2 are great steps in that direction. Both start the shift towards ‘what you should do’ and ‘how you could do it’. For practitioners who take advantage of them, we believe they’re both time savers and clear ways to improve results.

Avinash has said that “Segmenting your data is the fastest way to finding actionable insights from your web analytics data.” You can read some of his thoughts on it here and here. We think segmenting your data is one of the best ways to prioritize too.

Spend some time in ClickEquations V2, and we think you’ll agree.

Google wants to make advertising easy. They describe AdWords in simple terms, they make setup quick and easy, and they provide simple reporting on the stuff that suggests progress.

But the gun has no safety.

AdWords makes it remarkably easy to do insanely stupid and wasteful things. Things they could easily prevent at the cost of simplicity for you and revenue for them.

Take content network advertising, for example.

The idea of bundled, co-mingled search network and content network advertising is crazy. The two have almost nothing in common. Mixing them assures poor and confusing results. And yet bundling is the system default.

So you should un-bundle.

Why Search is Not Content and Content Is Not Search

Google search and the search partners are search query based. Ad show when people execute specific searches matched to your ads via keywords and match types and quality scores and bids.

The content network is site targeted or contextual. Ads show when people are visiting a specific site or type of content, based on keywords and quality score and bids.

They keywords are different (one is an attempt to match queries, the other content), match types are different (content doesn’t have them), quality scores are calculated separately using different formulas, performance is wildly different (much lower CTRs on content networds in most cases), the types of ad copy that is effective is different, and on and on.

The fact that AdWords opts you into an automatically inappropriately managed advertising channel is astounding. It’s as if there were a ‘Waste 25% of my budget’ option. And they checked it for you by default.

Do not accept their kind offer.

The Content Network Is A Good Place To Advertise

None of this is to say that there is anything wrong with the content network. There was a few years ago, and Google has done a great job of improving it to the point where it is a viable and valuable advertising channel if appropriately managed.

But it has to be managed on its own terms, independantly of the search networks.

It works differently, had different options, and different success metrics. It’s a different advertising channel.

You should learn about the content network, allocate time to exploit it, and profit from it. But don’t get fooled into thinking that if you don’t have the time or knowledge to do so you can just tag it onto your search campaigns and get even marginal results. Do it right or don’t do it.

NOTE: Other than this one, the 21 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC are focused on the search networks. To learn more about the content networks, we recommend the book ‘Customers Now’ by David Szetela. (You can get a free ebook download, or order a hardcopy version.)

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

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Sunday morning seems a good time to practice what we preach.

Earlier today I was poking around in our own AdWords account, doing a little prep work for my Tuesday presentation on Quality Score. I created some new ClickEquations Analyst templates that analyze the CTR components of Quality Score – we’ll talk about these sometime in the future.

One of the elements I was looking at was the CTR of search campaigns. In particular, the idea struck me to compare the impression volume with the CTR to try and identify the weighted impact on Quality Score of letting low performing CTR keywords run.

In the course of my examination, it became clear that two of our own campaigns have the devilish combination of low Quality Score, low CTR, and high impression counts. Time for a little further investigation.

One of the things I found was that an experimental ad group built to play around with keywords concerning Match Type was doing particularly poorly. More specifically the broad match keyword ‘match type’ had huge impression count and a horrible click-through-rate.

That’s when I found it.

Look at this search query report for the keyword ‘match type’.

Google is doing a pretty poor job of matching the keyword ‘match type’. And we’ve been paying for it, click by click.

The assumption that people typing ‘math’ actually meant ‘match’ is particularly strange. Or do they think I meant to buy the word ‘Math Type’ and they’re correcting my typo? And why are the people who are doing those searches clicking on this text ad anyway? –>

In any case, the only search query worth having from the whole list is ‘match type’ itself.

Normally that would have been caught in the exact match version, but since this was an experiment I had been running the broad match all alone. Clearly that was a mistake. Given these results, I added the exact match version, and paused the broad match.

Looks like both query mining and building match type keyword traps really are good ideas.

And the word ‘match type’ is not a great example of the effective execution or use of broad match in AdWords.

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A few years ago when asked for the #1 tip to improve a campaign, I wrote that segregating brand keywords was the task that I thought nearly everyone should do, many haven’t done yet, and can offer huge benefits in any campaign.

As covered in the discussion of Secret Truth #3 and #4, when the keywords within an ad group or campaign have inconsistent business goals or performance profiles, the quality of your results suffer.

There are probably no keywords in your account that have as distinct business goals or performance profiles as brand keywords – which is why they really need to be isolated.

Should You Bid On Your Brand?

The wisdom or necessity of buying paid search on your brand keywords – where you should rank #1 (or at least) very high in the organic results, is often discussed. In the end, most decide that buying the paid search coverage is a good idea, even if you have multiple prominent organic links.

We agree that bidding on your core brand names and terms is worthwhile.

There are several reasons for this:

• If you don’t buy those links someone else will
• Many report a ‘brand halo’ effect in which the paid listings actually increase organic traffic
• There are people who click paid links over organic ones, for various reasons
• You’ve already spent a lot of money to build the reputation that generated the branded search. Paying a few cents for the ‘last mile’ of the click to actually get the visit is a prudent investment.
• It’s great to see huge CTR and conversion rates in your PPC account
• The huge CTR of your brand terms actually drives your account CTR history up, helping overall quality score

Types of Brand Keywords

The diversity of brand keywords can be surprising. But to really ‘answer the question’ (Secret Truth #1) it’s critical to figure out all the different ways your brand is being used by carefully examining your search queries (Secret Truth #2).

We typically see several types of brand keywords:

• Brand Pure Keywords
• Navigational Brand Keywords
• Brand Related Keywords
• Brand Plus Keywords

What we call ‘pure’ brand keywords are the most narrow and focused set. This includes the brand word or words themselves, mis-spelling and deviations, and not much else. These we isolate into their own ad group or even campaign.

The next set, and often largest by keyword count, are navigational keywords. The searcher is trying to find your company or even your website. Navigational keywords include ‘brand website’, ‘brand homepage’, ‘brand company’, ‘brand city-name’ and the all important ‘www.brand.com’ (yes, people google that) plus many others. All of these clearly navigational terms should be bundled into their own ad group.

Then come the brand related keywords. These include things like executive names, other terms and other phrases that may be connected with the brand. A lot of these will be developed as you query-mine the results you get from your initial broad match pure brand keywords.

Your business may have and need other clusters of brand keywords too. A business with a lot of retail locations would likely have a whole ad group full of ‘location and store locater’ words and phrases. There may need to be groups for your PR issues, your financial/investor issues, etc. Create as many as you need, and follow the ideas for campaign and ad group organization discussed in Secret Truths #3 and #4.

Brand Plus Keywords

The final set are those we call brand plus keywords. These include your brand plus category, product, or other keywords. These are the ones that are often mixed in with other non-brand keywords and that we’re most strongly recommending you separate out of your typical existing campaigns and ad groups.

Here’s the problem. Suppose you sell dog collars of your own making, and right now your dog collar ad group has the following keywords:

• dog collars
• puppy collars
• collars for dogs
• hemp dog collars
• MyBrand dog collars

Of course this is an over-simplified example and there would be many more keywords and perhaps spead over several ad groups. But the point is that if ‘MyBrand’ is the house brand item, that keyword should be put into it’s own ad group and we would strongly recommend moving it into the main brand keywords campaign, or more likely a separate brand-plus campaign.

The rational is the same as we’ve discussed for both campaign and ad group organization; the alignment between query and text ad is best served by a very specific kind of ad, and the numbers these brand-plus keywords produce will only confuse the performance and results when mixed with non brand keywords.

Obviously if you have tons of brands and categories, doing the separation can be a lot of work. As always, prioritize based on volume – get those brand-plus keywords that are attracting a lot of traffic moved into their own ad groups and if possible campaigns first. Finish the rest progressively over time.

Brands as Negative Keywords

When you’ve created nice brand focused campaigns and ad groups, your search query reports should show that the majority of queries the contain your brand keywords are matched to those ad groups. But there will be exceptions.

Every time a branded search query lands in one of your non-brand ad groups, take a look and see if you have a keywords that was targetted at that search query. If you don’t, add one.

Of course, if it’s a search query you don’t want, add it as a negative keyword to both the brand and non-brand campaign.

After query-mining for brand keywords in your non-brand account for a while (days to weeks, depending on your volume), when you’re confident that the keywords you’ve added to your brand focused campaigns are relatively complete and accurate, go ahead and add your brand keyword as a campaign negative to the non-branded campaigns.

This will assure that no branded queries are matched into those campaigns. They’ll be forced (more or less) to match into the brand focused campaigns you’ve created for that purpose. The users will see brand appropriate ads, they’ll be sent to brand appropriate landing pages, and your campaign and ad groups reports for both branded and non branded keywords will be more complete, consistent, actionable, and accurate.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Craig’s dug deep into AdWords and unearthed some important nuggets. They’re surprising, simply but eloquently described, and vital to your PPC advertising success.” – David Szetela – Owner and CEO, Clix Marketing’.

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Anyone who has managed a serious paid search campaign knows the work isn’t easy.

Eighteen months ago in a series of posts on this blog, I discussed some of the reasons why that’s true, namely a lack of clarity surrounding the data, difficulty in prioritizing opportunities and risks, and generally inefficient tools.

Not surprisingly, these issues have greatly influenced the capabilities we’ve been adding to the ClickEquations paid search platform.

This week we’re releasing a ClickEquations V2 which takes a giant step towards addressing the issue of prioritization.

What Should You Do Today?

Paid search provides, as our friend Avinash has called it, “more data than God intended us to have.” We manage huge campaigns in changing business and competitive environments, and generate hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of data every day. And there are dozens of variables that control the thousands upon thousands of keywords in our accounts.

So every day when you log into your accounts, your have to play detective. You have to sort through all the new data, to discover what is going on, and try to determine why. Of course, you’re not looking for just one thing, but have to keep in mind dozens or even hundreds of issues that could be ‘wrong’ in your account at that particular moment.

The reports aren’t going to tell you that anything is wrong. It’s up to you to notice that something is wrong, or could be improved.

Then you have to turn into a Doctor. You have to diagnose the problem and choose the correct remedy. The symptoms may not be clear and some of the alternatives may be risky.

And finally you must become the technician, implementating the prescribed solution – which could be as easy as a button click or a complex procedure with many steps and perhaps a lot of repetition.
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Sounds Like A Job For Software

Until now, paid search software really didn’t help with this problem. It collected data, presented it to you, and enabled you to make changes.

Everything in the middle – identifying, diagnosing, prescribing – was left up to you.

This has been a huge challenge. It’s hard to spot every problem ever time it appears. It’s hard to always know what to do. And sometimes when you know what to do it’s hard to implement it.

Shouldn’t your software help?

Best Practices in ClickEquations

The new automated best practices in ClickEquations tackle this problem. Now instead of conducting daily searches for every possible issue you might to prevent, or each opportunity you may wish to exploit, the software will do it for you.

You specify the conditions you want to watch out for – choosing from a list of ready-to-use best practices. ClickEquations will then monitor your account and point out, for every campaign, ad group, keyword, and text ad, every best practice violation as soon as it occurs.

You can then drill down on just the elements that need your attention with just a click. To help you understand just what the risk or opportunity is, and the types of solutions that are most likely to be appropriate, another click provides detailed descriptions and a list of recommended potential solutions or actions.

And finally (although this really isn’t a part of the best practices feature) we’ve made it much easier and more efficient to execute the kind of changes that correct at least some of these issues.

A New Relationship With Your Paid Search Software

The overall effect of our best practices feature is amazing. Now as you browse your account, you get pro-active suggestions for ways to improve your results.

When you log in each day, there is a suggested work list waiting for you. And when you polish those off you feel confident that your account is on the right track at least in terms of a pretty wide set of important issues.

There will still be much work left to do, but now you can spend your time and brain power on more advanced issues, creative solutions, and issues truly unique and strategic to your individual account.

A Journey Of A Thousand Paces

The best practices features in the ClickEquations V2 release define the direction for the next generation of paid search software. It’s time for software to not just enable paid search management, but actually add value and help us to intelligently and efficiently deliver great results.

The capabilities we’ve delivered are just the start of our vision for this type of paid search software. We’re calling it ClickEquations Adviser, and the capabilities we’ve just released will continue to expand and evolve.

Looking at the three issues described in those old blog posts, we think we’ve made some good progress:

• Clarity – The first releases of ClickEquations focused on delivering best-in-class data and reporting, and we believe that the issues of clarity are largely resolved.
• Priority – The new best practices features and new one-click segmentation capabilities (also included in this release) is a huge step towards making prioritization far easier than ever before.
• Efficiency – We’ve put in some great efficiency features – bulk and mass editing for example, but still think that a lot more can be in this area. Watch for some innovations in this area in future releases.

There is undoubtedly a lot more work to do. But paid search management is easier and more effective than it was just a year ago. The new release of ClickEquations is another important improvement. We think you’ll agree.

See For Yourself

We’ll be showing off our new features at SMX in Santa Clara this week, at OMMA in San Francisco in two weeks, and in New York at SES at the end of the month. Please join us if you can at one of these venues, or sign up for one of our weekly webinars to get a complete demonstration of ClickEquations.

We’ve written about the AdWords impression share metrics often in the past on this blog.

So rather than re-hashing or re-writing, we’ll suggest you go read our Impression Share Series to extend and amplify the comments made in the fifth Secret Truth.

Finished?

There isn’t much more to add. The one point worth clarifying or reiterating, is that Impression Share is worth reorganizing for. We talked about several rationals for creating focused campaign organization in the Secret Truth #4 post, and hinted at the Impression Share relationship.

Because Impression Share is reported only at the campaign level, it is always an average. Looking at the number for campaigns that contain keywords and ad groups with highly disparate performance, clarity of target, match type distribution, and other characteristics makes it a worthless and probably misleading number. In order to trust Impression Share, your campaign organization must be focused and internally consistent.

Maybe one day Google will share with us Impression Share at the ad group or even the keyword level. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Until then, to get the most out of impression share it the first trick is to monitor it closely, and the second is to make sure your campaigns are well organized. Actually all of the ideas presented in Secret Truths 2-8 and 14 can help you get the most from this great metric.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying on twitter: “Very, Very, Very nice e-book from @clickequations called ‘21 secrets to PPC’. Easy to read, and full of good and funny stuff! – @Eloi_Casali”

Download Your Copy Today
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Of the 21 Secret Truths in the book, #4 was in some ways the most difficult to write. It’s one of the most abstract ideas in the book, perhaps the least intuitive, and it really needed at least a couple of full-blown examples.

All of which made it tough just due to the space constraints available. The book was designed to be quick and easy to read, and every entry was allocated exactly one page. But on this one I really appreciate the chance to offer extended remarks and comments.

The idea is simple, if hard to compress into a single sentence: Campaigns don’t do anything to your account performance, they’re constructs that should make your reports more informative and actionable. As such, using them simply as the top level of a hierarchical logical organization of your keywords is a waste.

What Campaigns Do and Should Do

In our experience, campaigns are most typically used to define and create a categorical breakdown of an account. A clothing retailer would by default have a shoe campaign and a sox campaign and a hats campaign. Inside of those would be the associated ad groups.

The result of this is that when you look at campaign reports and performance – which you do all the time because both AdWords and 3rd party tools like ClickEquations naturally present the campaign level data to you quite prominently – you see the summary performance (impressions, clicks, revenue, costs) for the campaigns based on those groups.

Here’s the problem: Seeing the results rolled up based on those categorizations isn’t very useful.

Sure it seems nice to know that shoes has a 4% CTR and a 250% ROI while hats has a 5% CTR but only a 150% ROI. But is it really useful?

The problem is averages. What you see in these rolled up results, perfectly reasonably, are averages. On average in the shoes campaign the CTR was 4%. And as we’ll discuss in more detail in a later post, averages are the enemy of accuracy. They mask facts and trends by their very nature.

Average can be put to great use – they’re statistically useful. But they can be inappropriate too.

What’s hidden in typical categorical organization is the clarity you can get if you further break down campaigns based on other, additional, distinctions within your campaigns. Basically you want to think about the different types and classes of ad groups the campaigns contain, aspects that would cause dramatically different performance, and collect those types of ad groups into campaigns based on those similarities.

Breaking Campaigns Down

There are several types of ad groups that you might want to segregate. Ad groups that contain brand keywords are obvious. Brand keywords get vastly higher CTRs, better conversion rates, and often lower CPCs. If you have brand keywords mixed in your general campaigns, they’ll really distort the average numbers reported.

Often within different target product or offer segments in your businss you’ll have keywords that carry different business intents. You may have some keywords that bring in a lot of new customers, generate high traffic volumes, but aren’t very profitable. Call them loss leaders, or new client introducers, or just keywords aimed at revenue more than profit.

On the other hand, you likely (hopefully) have some keywords (well organized into tight ad groups!) that just kill it in terms of pure good old profit. They have your best conversion rates, highest average order values, and for them you manage very tighly to maximize these already good returns.

If stuffed within your shoes campaign are some ad groups that are high volume but marginally profitable, and others that are super profitable, doesn’t that doom the rolled up campaign results to be rather meaningless? What are they going to tell you?

By contrast, suppose you take very small number of mega-profitable ad groups out of the shoe campaign, and make a new campaign called ’shoes-high-margin’. Now every day/week/month, you can look at those campaign stats and quickly get an accurate idea of if that profit gravy train is on track. If there is a dip, you’ll see it quickly. If there is a surge, you’ll know that too and can respond with more budget or perhaps even more keywords.

Lousy performers need the same treatment. We all have keywords (and perhaps ad groups) that just aren’t doing well. Maybe we should kill them but just don’t have the heart. Maybe we’re working really hard to test better ad copy and tweak negatives and match types. In any case, for now they’re losers.

Mixed into our everyday campaigns, the losers hide in the shadows. We don’t clearly see how much they’re really costing, or how far below the averages they are. Often they live on for months and years. Drag them into their own campign, get forced to stare every month at $29,000 spend and $1213 revenue, and your motivation and decisions just might change.

Plus, the reporting on your core campaigns, minus these misfits, is much more accurate too.

Looking For Wow!

Hopefully this clarifies the point. If campaigns are simply logical categories they’re data is of limited use. If they’re grouped logically and by performance or at least goal then the numbers they produce are meaningful.

Here’s the real goal: You want to be able to see a number in your campaign report and say either WOW or OH SHIT. There should be numbers in those reports that have expected ranges and reasons behind them, and if they change you should be able to know that it’s a big deal.

If they’re all huge roll-up averages that jump around, or that stay constant because even huge swings within them are masked by other shifts elsewhere, there will never be and Wow or Oh Shit moments based on campaign reports.

And beyond saving you that little drama, it means that important things are happening in your campaigns, and you’re missing them.

We don’t want that.

There are two related topics: How to best actually reoganize campaigns, and the impact of Impression Share on the campaign organization decision. I’ll tackle the first one in a follow up post in the next few days, and talk more about Impression Share and in terms of campaign organization when that topic comes up in the natural sequence.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying on twitter: “Very, Very, Very nice e-book from @clickequations called ‘21 secrets to PPC’. Easy to read, and full of good and funny stuff! – @Eloi_Casali”

Download Your Copy Today
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We’ll be in Santa Clara next week – and we hope to see you.

It’ll be an exciting show with some major new ClickEquations news. If you’ll be there, please plan on stopping by our booth.

Beyond some killer new software features to show you, we’ll have a limited number of free printed copies of our new 21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC book.

Beyond the booth, here’s where you can catch us at SMX:

• Tuesday March 2nd @ 11:20AM - SMX Theater (Tradeshow Floor) – 10 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC
• Tuesday March 2nd @ 12:00PM - Craig Danuloff will host the ‘All Paid Search’ table at the Birds of a Feather Lunch
• Tuesday March 2nd @ 3:30PM - Alex Cohen on the Keyword Research: Beyond the OrdinaryPanel
• Weds March 3rd @ 10:20AM - SMX Theater (Tradeshow Floor) – 10 Best Practices for Better PPC Results
• Weds March 3rd @ 3:15PM - Craig Danuloff on the ‘Ask The Paid Search Buyer’ Panel

Hope to see you there!

This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to extend and expand on the content in our free ebook ‘21 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC’. Request your copy here.

Paid seach campaigns are organized into campaigns and ad groups. Why they’re organized and how they should be organized is something that doesn’t get discussed enough.

The secret to ad groups is hidden in its name. Ad groups are a way to organize text ads. If they were a way to organize keywords, they’d be called keyword groups!

Properly building ad groups is incredibly important. Yet it seams that most people spend far too little time designing and constructing their ad groups. This happens primarily because the goals aren’t clear.

The Goal of Ad Groups

The goal of an ad group is:

• To perfectly align questions (search queries) with answers (text ads).
• Every query that comes into an ad group should smack straight into some ad copy that directly and perfectly addresses its topics, issues, intent, and desires.
• It not good enough for all the keywords in an ad group to be similar or narrowly focused or contextually similar or anything else.
• If the people whose queries come into a group don’t see text ads that satisfy them, the ad group is a failure.

Rebuilding Ad Groups

It’s also rare to find paid search managers spending a lot of time re-organizing ad groups. Which is a mistake because taking what is learned from real-life data and experience and shifting things around is often the most effective way to jump start a campaign that is stuck with performance below your expectations.

Ad group reorganization doesn’t happen a lot in large part because it isn’t easy enough to reorganize within our tools. But the ‘clarity of vision’ problem applies here too. Without a clear set of organizational goals how can you know that something is wrong or how you should fix it?

There is only one legitimate way to analyze the success of an ad group: Take the list of search queries the ad group has attracted, say over the last 30 days. Put this list next to the text ad copy that has been shown to the people who executed those searches.

If you can’t look at any of the text ads on that list, and be completely comfortable that it is clearly and directly aimed at answering the question implied in any and every search query on the other list, then you have work to do to improve your ad groups.

A lot of that work involves adding and deleting keywords, shifting or duplicating match types, working on bidding and quality score, and other similar tasks. But none of these efforts can be fully or correctly completed if you don’t first commit to building ad groups around the ads they contain and not around the keywords they contain.

The Ads Are The Targets

This is the distinction that matters. Build ad groups around ads. Fit in keywords that attract compatible queries.

Ads are the target. Build a nice small target. Then hit it. Hit it as squarely and cleanly as possible. Don’t allow anything in that isn’t a bullseye.

There may be many great keywords that just don’t fit. You may have to add negatives to that particular ad group that are perfectly valid keywords elsewhere. That’s fine. You can build as many ad groups as you need to have each one be tight and focused. But if you allow unaligned queries into your ad group, the downhill spiral begins:

• Queries that don’t target the ad copy get impressions but not clicks.
• So CTRs drop
• And what may be perfectly good queries are under-served by inappropriate ads (ei they’re wasted)
• Quality score suffers for the keywords, target URLs, and overall account
• Money is wasted in the process, and cost rise in the future (due to lower quality score across the account)

If the search engines let you dynamically decide which ad to show based on the search query, you could build ad groups around keywords and then direct each person to a highly targeted text ad. But they don’t, so you have to work the other way around. Build highly targeted text ads then construct ad groups that only bring very specific people to them.

It’s easy to remember: they’re called ad groups.

What do you think?

This blog post is a companion to our free ebook ‘21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

It will be available for download later this month.

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