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”

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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.

Reserve Your Copy Today

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Related posts:

1. The Secret Truth Series: #1 – They Want Answers The first truth from our new ’21 Secret Truths of...
2. The Secret Truth Series #4 – Campaign Reports Of the 21 Secret Truths in the book, #4 was...
3. The Secret Truth Series #2 – Why Keywords Are Over-Rated This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to...

Keywords are a great example. As promoted by the search engines and most of those who talk about them, keywords are the center of paid search. Keywords define your targets and attract your prospects. Keywords take your bids, costs are hung on them, and they collect the statistics used to judge performance.

All of this is reasonable. And a few years ago when prices were lower, competition was relatively tame, and the resulting profits were high, it was good enough.

Not anymore.

What keywords really do is act like magnets. They attract people who execute searches based on certain search queries. The strength of their magnetism is based on the match types that are applied to them. Exact match keywords only attract search queries that are identical to the keywords, but the more prevalent phrase and broad match keywords attract – or might attract – a huge range of queries.

In the simple and traditional discussion of paid search, search queries do not exist. Keywords are their proxies. Keywords are as specific as the conversation gets.

In that version of the world, the focus is on keyword performance (such as click-through rates) and results (in things like return on ad spend). By looking at these numbers, people make important judgments and decisions. Ultimately keywords are deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

But while all this is happening, something much more important is going on, and being ignored. Before every click, the keyword is matched to a search query. Keywords that aren’t using exact match are seeing traffic from dozens or hundreds of different search queries.

For each keyword, some of these search queries deliver excellent performance and results while others are complete wastes of time and money.

By looking at these queries, and how they perform, our judgments and decisions can be far more accurate and effective. We can cut waste, double-down on winners, and even more importantly setup our campaigns and ad groups to much more effectively answer the questions that the searchers we’re paying for are actually asking.

That’s why search queries are far more important than keywords.

It’s easy to demonstrate why you have to look past keywords and focus on search queries.

• Suppose you have a keyword that’s performing terribly. It has very few clicks, a low quality score, and a terrible ROAS. Your inclination might be to pause or delete it right? But what if you looked at the search queries and found that out of 87 different queries you’ve paid for thus far, every single conversion came from just one variant – and that query seemed to convert every time it was clicked. You’d want to save that query wouldn’t you? Killing the keyword would have thrown that baby out with the bathwater.
  .
• Or suppose you have a keyword that is killing it. It has a huge CTR and is making tons of genuine profit. All’s well right? Until you look at the queries and find that there are ten or so relatively frequent queries, all of which share a common root phrase, that almost never convert. Adding that phrase as a negative would cut costs and boost profits even higher. Ignoring queries in that case is like a great team that allows one weak player to ride along and lower the stats. Why do that?
  .
• And lastly, much of what you’ll learn by putting search queries first isn’t that one keyword is good or bad, but that the questions being asked are not being well answered – the alignment of queries and ads (questions and answers) is off due to organizational problems in your campaigns. And when you fix these we’re not talking about boosting the performance of one or two keywords but rather the chance to radically shift (meaning improve) the performance of your entire account. But if you don’t look at the queries there is no way to know that they contain questions that aren’t being answered.

The only downside of moving from keyword management to search query management is that it takes time and effort. This is true. But it’s an iterative process, it can be managed on a clearly prioritized basis (ie you don’t have to do all of it at once), and the fact is that if you don’t do it you’re just wasting tons of money and foregoing a lot of sales and profit. There is no way around this.

If our job is to answer questions, then search queries have to become the center of our attention.

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.

Reserve Your Copy Today

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Related posts:

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2. The Secret Truth Series: #1 – They Want Answers The first truth from our new ’21 Secret Truths of...
3. Secret Truth #21: All Keywords Are Not Created Equal The ability to prioritize and focus is a key skill...

That post, entitled ‘They’re Searching For Answers’ introduced the idea that every search is a question, and text-ads are an attempt to answer those questions.

(We’ll wait while you go read it.)

This is not just our first ‘Secret Truth’ but a kind of a guiding principle behind the entire collection.

It’s important because it turns the focus around and clarifies the fact that users (prospects, customers, searchers, whatever you want to call them) are driving this process. It’s demand driven marketing. They’re in control. We’re here to satisfy them, and only get to stay in the game as long as they think we are or at least might satisfy them. Our role is to anticipate and fulfill their needs. We can’t manipulate them.

In addition to getting us out of a dominant mindset and into a subservient one, this idea is also critical because so much of how we organize, target, option, value, and otherwise manage our campaigns – as we’ll explain in the 20 Truths to follow – can be guided and judged by how well it helps us to better align our answers to their questions.

Nearly every choice you make in the configuration of your paid search campaigns either clarifies or distorts alignment.

• If you put a lot of keywords into an ad group, they attract a wide range of search queries and the alignment between any one query and the provided ad copy can suffer.
• Organize ad groups into campaigns in the wrong way, and the campaign-level numbers you see won’t tell you if things are aligned or not.
• Use a lot of broad match, alignment will range from perfect to extremely remote.
• Bid too low, and your competitors will out rank you (and sometimes show when you don’t) for the most aligned queries.
• Fail to geo-target adequately and you’ll align with the right queries but from the wrong people – same bad result.

So it helps to have this simple prime directive : target the questions you want to answer, and then answer them directly.

When this rule isn’t followed, a lot of innocent keywords, text-ads, and landing pages pay the price.

Consider one example:

• If the keyword is ‘snow plow’ running on broad match
• The search queries include many things like ‘who can plow the snow off my driveway in Allentown PA’
• The text ad copy says ‘J-Deere 150″ Plow Extensions for Your F-150″.

In this case the keyword is likely to have a terrible CTR and conversion rate. It might be judged a ‘bad keyword’ and paused or deleted.

But in-fact the problem is that we’re delivering answers that have nothing to do with the questions being targeted. What’s needed is more keyword negatives and probably a lot of keyword expansion (to grab all the words and phrases that broad match is eligible to capture in ways that we can organize and answer them far more accurately).

Poor results here are predictable. And the reason for them can clearly can be seen in the results. But many times we look at the metrics for our keywords, text-ads, and landing pages (not to mention campaigns and ad groups) and draw conclusions without taking the time to see if we were answering the question they were asking.

Paid search advertising is the process of paying to answer questions. It only sense to work very hard to answer them well.

Understanding that this is what we’re doing is the first step.

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.

Reserve Your Copy Today

Related posts:

1. The Secret Truth Series #2 – Why Keywords Are Over-Rated This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to...
2. The Secret Truth Series #3 – They’re Called Ad Groups This series of blog posts goes ‘behind the scenes’ to...
3. The Secret Truth Series #5 – Impression Share We’ve written about the AdWords impression share metrics often in...

But the truth is that keywords are just a means to an end; they’re little magnets sent out there to attract search queries. And if you’re only able to review reports and make decisions at a keyword level, you’re not getting a very accurate or informative picture of what’s really happening in your account – so you’re almost certainly making bad decisions and not optimizing your results.”

That’s a snipped of the Craig Danuloff’s interview with Josh Dreller, paid search columnist at Search Engine Land and VP at Fuor Digital, on the topic of query mining. He covers a broad range of questions:

• Where can an SEM pro go to find search query data?
• Why did you invest so much time into building query reports into ClickEquations?
• Why do you hate Broad Match so much?
• I’m supportive of your suggestion of an Include match type. Can you sum up your thoughts on this for the readers?
• What is the best way to organize search queries to gather insights for optimization?
• What are some best practices to utilize once you’ve analyzed the query data?

Check out the full article.

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This is a feature of the core ClickEquations reporting screen, and shows all queries from all search engines by keyword and match type.

There is a related ClickEquations Analyst Report that makes use of this data in a very powerful way.

It’s called the ‘Unique Queries Per Keyword’ report. It counts the number of different queries that the search engines are matching to each of your keywords, and presents them sorted by the number of queries.

On the list above for example, the keyword ‘dog remedy’ in Broad Match was matched by Google to 528 different search queries. Yowsa!

If a keyword is being matched to over 500 different search queries, two things are almost certainly true:

• There are some pretty unrelated search queries in there that have to be avoided with negatives
• There are dozens of new phrase and exact match keywords that need to be added to better attack these queries.

This of course is how we generally use the search query report, but with this prioritized view we can quickly find the keywords where keyword negatives and expansion is critically needed. Every negative we add saves us money. Every keyword we add in this way has multiple benefit, especially those using phrase and exact match types. Each can be expected to:

• Increase our Impression Share by expand the pool of queries to which we’ll be matched
• Improve Quality Score by by increasing relevance and increasing number of times query exactly matches keyword
• Enables us to bid to the value of each keyword rather than once for whole broad group
• If we do get increased Quality Score on specific Keywords, our CPC could/should be lower on those queries.

In summary, there are lots of advantages to a more detailed keyword build-out when it’s driven by actual queries not random speculation.

Finding Keyword Expansion Ideas
To find out which keywords we need to add to both our keyword and negative lists, we can jump back into the ClickEquations application and find all the queries that Google matched to ‘dog remedy’.

Likely negatives would be words for illnesses that we don’t sell product for – dysplasia, pancreatitis, rabies, etc. Areas for expansion are those which come up a lot – mange, itching, and vomiting seam like winners in this area – to name a few.

Highly specific words clarify intent – which gets a lot of press in the ‘long tail’ discussion of keyword expansion. The same is true on the negative side: highly specific words can verify incompatible intent.

Bulk Importing Keywords and Negatives
Since it looks like we may want to add a lot of new keywords and negatives, we can jump back into ClickEquations Analyst and pull the full query list into Excel, make a few edits, and then bulk import that edited list back into ClickEquations.

Squash The Broad Match
Our Match Type Keyword Trap white paper discusses how you should use match types to take control of your search queries back from the search engines.

Using the capabilities described above to quickly find the keywords where broad match (and to a lessor degree phrase match) is running out-of-control is a great first step towards taking back control, saving yourself some money, and expanding the reach of your account.

Like This Post? You can be a ClickEquations Facebook Fan! Just click in the widget in the far right column.

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Watch the search query webinar to learn:

• What search queries are
• Where to find search queries
• The best way to organize your search queries to identify opportunities to save money and increase conversions
• Actions you should take daily, weekly and monthly to profit from search queries

Links mentioned in the webinar:

• ClickEquations Analyst
• ClickEquations Analyst Templates
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
• Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Finding Synonyms for Low Volume Keywords

As you monitor your search queries, the actual words searchers type vs. the keywords you buy, you’ll find two types:

1. Winners – Search Queries that convert (or assist) profitably and may be worth promoting to Exact Match at a higher bid
2. Losers – Search Queries that generate clicks and cost without any value. They’re definite candidates for negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

You can get even more bang from your Winners and Losers by looking for synonyms with 2 free tools: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence and Google AdWords: Keyword Tool.

These data sets, however, are limited. The more niche your term, the harder it can be to find additional words. If you’re working in B2B or other low volume verticals, you’ll need a different tactic.

Enter: Google’s related searches.

Finding Long Tail Synonyms with Google’s Related Searches

At the end of some search results pages, Google presents a list of related terms to help searchers:

These lists can be a good source for synonyms for your niche terms. It’s tedious to scroll through the page. Instead, use Google’s Wonder Wheel option to speed up your research.

At the top of your search results, click “Show Options” (the plus sign). Then choose Wonder Wheel in the left nav.

The result is a hub and spoke graphic that shows you related queries. Now, you can conduct searches and see the gather synonyms more quickly:

For more tips, check our our free white papers and videos. Sign up for our free monthly Paid Search Professionals Newsletter.

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There are two changes this time:

• Quality score will now be ‘position adjusted’ to take into account the location of the text-ad when the click-through occurs. This makes it ‘more accurate’. Makes me wonder why this didn’t happen a long time ago. This increases the value of extensive text-ad testing.
• Quality score can now cause an ad to move above another ad it would normally rank below IF this jump pushes the ad to the top of the page (rather than the right edge). (That’s a bad quick summary, read the Google announce for the details.)

You can read some worthwhile thoughts here and here and here or here or here.

Beyond these details what strikes me is how important quality score has become to paid search management and results.

Quality score drives bid requirements, quality score drives ad position, quality score drives impression share, and now quality score drives the chance to leapfrog your way to the top center of search result pages.

What Do We Know About Quality Score?

Although quality score plays a central role in how your money is spent and made in Google Adwords, it is officially a ‘secret formula’.

Like PageRank on the SEO side, Google makes only vague pronouncements while pundits and practitioners share theories and recommendation endlessly – but nobody can tell you definitively how to maximize your quality score.

It still isn’t even that easy to see your quality score, although it is getting easier. Google recently changed the way they display quality score – giving it an integer value – but it’s still under a ‘work for it’ pop-up in the Adwords interface. On the positive front, they have finally added quality score to the API (thank you!) so third-party tools can begin to make use of it.

But also like PageRank the scores tend to clump around certain values, and the distinctions between close numbers aren’t obvious.

Also, and this is just a hunch, I’d bet nearly anything Google doesn’t maintain or use the number as an integer. So two keywords from two different bidders that both show a QS of ’7′ might in fact be one with a 7.0001 and another with a 7.9998.

Four Conclusions

1. Google has an awesome business. They sell a product with secret specifications which are subject to change, and charge whatever they want without even telling anyone why or how. Nobody but the Mafia selling protection services to local merchants ever got away with this before.
2. Advertisers have to really play the ‘chase the quality score ghost’ game. Obsess about CTR’s and align as many of the other known factors as possible. Live with the fact that you’ll waste time trying to please the QS algorithm because there’s no published list for how to get into quality-score-heaven.
3. Advertisers should continue to clammor for more openness from Google as to what counts, how much, when, and how we’re charged accordingly. Neither #1 or #2 should be true.
4. I need to spend a lot more time thinking and writing about Quality Score. It’s a big deal.

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2. More on Google Quality Score Update / Change Andrew Goodman is clearly one of the most informed and...
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They search because they want to learn about something. Or find out where something is. Or discover who has it or knows about it.

They may just be curious, or the question may have been provoked by some urgent problem.

The question could be simple or complex and the searcher might be sophisticated or incredibly naive.

Search Engines answer questions. That’s pretty much all they do.

Search results offer an ordered list of answers to the question the search engine thinks you’re asking.

Paid search advertising is your chance to raise your hand and let the searcher know that you think you have the answer to their question too.

In the next post we’ll discuss what it means to the organization of your campaigns to think of yourself as a professional answer provider.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

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The idea is to stop thinking about mechanical components like keywords and bids, and instead focus on a logical marketing progression.

We want the tools to support our work process instead of having to build a work process that serves the tools.

The First Step is Targeting

Targeting means showing your ads to the right people. Paid search ads are delivered as answers to questions. People type in a search query and you pay for the privilege of having your ad be one potential answer to that question.

So you must know:

• What questions do you want to answer?
• What answers do you plan on giving to those questions.

Campaigns, Ad-Groups, and Keywords are your targeting tools.

Keep in mind that they’re called ad-groups, not keyword-groups. The goal is to segregate keywords, controlled using the match-type option, so that all the queries attracted by a single ad-group are questions answered by the text-ads in the ad-group.

In other words, you want every searcher to see a a text-ad that is directly relevant to their search. To do that, you must organize your ad-groups around the search queries they attract, not the keywords they contain. Every search query that causes your text ads to be displayed, should be highly relevant to the text ad that is displayed.

Let’s illustrate with an example.

Supposed you knew that all of the following search queries would be coming into your account, and you could hand match them to appropriate text-ads before the results page was delivered to the searcher.

• Discount Dyson Vacuum
• Dyson Vacuum Features
• Dyson Vacuum Coupons
• Compare Dyson Vacuums
• Cheap Dyson Vacuum
• Dyson Extra Cyclone

Wouldn’t you want the 3 price-related queries to get a price focused text ad, and the three feature related queries to get a feature-related text ad? Doesn’t it make sense that this would produce the highest click-through-rates and the highest ROI?

Yes, of course.

This is why you have to think about queries not just keywords, and use ad-groups to target the groups of people you want to talk to.

The Second Step is Valuing

Once we’ve targeted the right people using different ad-groups, we can then look inside the ad-group and take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to place the same value on everyone in that group.

Match-Types, Negative Keywords, and Bids are some the core valuing tools.

Extending our previous example, suppose experience tells us that people who search for ‘Cheap Dyson Vacuum’ just don’t buy from us (we’re not that cheap). That has no value, so we add ‘cheap’ or ‘cheap dyson vacuum’ as a negative. But ‘Dyson Extra Cyclone’ is a very specific feature so people who search on that are far into the buying process, we see that query frequently with a high conversion rate. Make that an exact match and bid it up.

You get the idea. By correctly using these tools, watching our search queries and continually refining our campaigns, we can group queries within an ad-group, value them appropriately, and manage both budgets and returns.

The Third Step is Satisfying

People decide how well our paid search advertising does. They decide how to formulate queries which trigger our ads (or not) and they click (or don’t) and buy (or not).

Text-Ads, Landing Pages, and ultimately your offers, website, and checkout process are your satisfaction tools.

When we’re targeting accurately, and valuing properly, we have the ability to focus on satisfying those who see our ads and visit our site. Trying to do so before we’ve completed these steps means, by definition, that we’ve got too wide a range of people coming to really have a fair shot at measuring the results of any attempts at improvement.

There is little doubt that text-ad writing, let alone testing, is the paid search option that gets the least attention and effort as compared to its importance and potential impact. Rewriting a text ad and doubling performance – in terms of CTR which even if it does not improve conversion rate can proportionally increase revenue – is common. We’ve seen many ad re-writes produce 10x-20x CTR improvements. Try that with a better bid.

But writing is hard. Writing is subjective. Writing takes quite a lot of time. None of these make it less important.

All the same is true-er for landing pages, website experiences, and shopping carts. This all very hard, time consuming, and costly work. But it is ultimately directly responsible for the success or lack thereof of paid search campaigns. Even within whatever limitations exist, it should be considered, managed, and measured.

The Final Step is Understanding

Even in this greatly summarized view of the paid search process, there are a lot of moving parts. Each exists by the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds-of-thousands in typical campaigns. They occur tens-of-thousands of times every day as impression and click counts increment. And we have weeks and months of history for all of this to consider and trend.

Paid search can only be managed effectively if you can learn from this data – look into it and find information.

Website and Search Analytics are your tools for understanding.

This means knowing which metrics are important. And when trends are really trends. And how all the numbers affect each other.

It also means that you need the ability to get at the data that can inform you, and easily produce the reports and dashboards that will do so for both you and your colleages or managers.

The key is continuous improvement. Paid search campaigns are never perfect. And they exist in highly dynamic environments. Only through hard work to understand the campaign and know the best move to make next to improve it can you really drive great results.

Summary

The shift into the T-V-S-U mindset is a big one. It changes the process of managing paid search and the way you think about and use the options and tools the search engines provide. More importantly, it aligns your search and marketing goals, and makes it easier to prioritize your PPC efforts and measure your results along the way.

In future posts we’ll dig into each stage and step of this process in more detail. Have questions before then? I’d love to hear them, or your comments.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

Related posts:

1. Shifting PPC from Low To High Resolution Since the dawn of time, paid search has been conceived...
2. The Origin of High-Resolution PPC 21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC is our soon-to-be released...
3. Video: Quality Score in High Resolution The Search Engine Marketing Professional’s Organization (SEMPO) hosted us for...

That was a question asked of our panel as SES in San Jose last week.

My answer: Make sure your brand keywords are fully segregated from all others.

Brand keywords – any keyword with your company name or variations in them – have completely different cost and performance characteristics than category or other other generic or product specific keywords.

These differences completely confuse the reporting for any campaigns and Ad-Groups if they’re co-mingled.

Separating Keywords and Queries
The first step is easy – every keyword you buy, regardless of its Match Type, should be in an Ad-Group if not a Campaign with only other keywords that contain the Brand name too.

Preferably, the brand terms are bucketed, with the ‘Pure’ Brand keywords in one group (those that represent just the name and variations itself), the navigational versions in another (www.brand.com, brand homepage, etc.) and the Brand-Plus keywords (Brand Sweatpants, Brand Coupons, etc.) in yet another, and so on.

In these brand focused Ad-Groups, you have to use Broad and Advanced match very sparingly and carefully, and eventually almost entirely eliminate them. If you leave them, you’ll get too many non-brand queries matching and diluting the intent of these highly focused Ad-Groups.

The other side of this Broad/Advanced Match coin is that you’ll also want to add your brand as a negative in all the remaining non-branded Campaigns and Ad-Groups. Otherwise the engines will match brand-inclusive queries against your non-brand targeted keywords.

This can be and feel dangerous, if you’re not completely sure that your Brand campaigns are complete, bid properly, running the full range of Match-Types (with of course the Match Type Keyword Traps fully configured and loaded.)

It’s probably a good idea to skip this step of adding the brand as negatives in the non-branded campaigns for a few days to ensure that there aren’t certain query formulations that your new Brand targeted Campaigns are missing.

Watch the query reports carefully, and add variations to the brand campaigns, and ultimately more negatives to both the brand the non-brand campaigns.

The Payoff
Immediately upon starting this process, especially if your campaigns had brand terms and lots of broad match scattered throughout, you’ll see radical shifts in your search reports.

• You may be amazed how much revenue is coming from and and how little cost is going into your pure brand campaigns. That’s the good news.
• You may be shocked at how much money and how little revenue is coming from your now-strictly-non-brand ad-groups. That’s the bad news. Or the opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

In any case, you’ll have a new level of clarity about the performance and activity in your PPC campaigns.

Coming Up
I’ll share more thoughts on the execution of full brand segregation, and the implications of the changes it makes to your reported results, in future posts. This is another one that may take 3-4 posts to just scratch the surface of.

In the meantime, questions and comments are encouraged. Are your brand terms separated into ad-groups? Does that help you better understand the way your PPC budgets are spent? What problems have you seen trying to control brand via Match Types? Any other ideas?

Related posts:

1. Paid Search Clarity – Part I Yesterday I noted that paid search managers face three challenges...
2. The Dawn of Paid Search Without Keywords This is a repost of my monthly column from Search...
3. Paid Search Campaign Winners & Losers Suppose you had to quickly reduce your PPC spend. Where...

It’s an age-old question for paid search marketers.Traditionally ad-groups have been considered organizing baskets for keywords. All the variations on a particular keyword, and/or all the keywords driving to a particular product or product category, are often placed into a single ad-group.

It’s common to see campaign and ad-group structures which mirror product categories and sub-categories, for example.

When the question of ‘how many’ comes up, the answer is often given as a number. I’ve never understood this. Why does the number of keywords matter?

Even the Yahoo Smart Start Guide (PDF) suggests “While there isn’t a magic number of keywords to include, you may want to start with no more than 20 – paired with two or more ads – and adjust from there.”

Consider The Text-Ads

Here’s another way to think about it. What you’re really organizing with ad-groups is text-ads, not keywords.

Each text-ad in an ad-group should be a different attempt to answer the same questions, or attract people with the same interests. It doesn’t matter how many keywords you place in an ad-group as long as the queries each of them is likely to be matched with are all appropriately served by those ads.

You’re playing Carnac, writing answers to questions that are going to come along later. The keywords you put in that ad-group are your only chance to ensure that your answers are going to be relevant to their questions.

If there are 20 keywords then there are 20. If there are 100 then there are 100.

When To Split Ad-Groups

Leaving the numbers aside, there are two smart reasons to subdivide the keywords in an ad-group. Both are based on the idea of matching your text-ads more closely to the search queries and keywords.

One is to separate keywords by subject terminology – a focus primarily on nouns – so that the specific keywords are repeated in your text-ads and on your landing pages. This is done primarily in service to the gods (or slave drivers) of quality-score.

The other is to separate keywords by qualifiers – verbs, adjectives, or other modifiers. This is done primarily to better align your text-ads with the expressed or implied intent of the users. In most cases it also brings along the quality score benefit too.

Would you want to present the same text-ad to someone looking to ‘buy a house’ as someone trying to ‘sell a house’? How about someone wanting ‘bell bottom jeans’ vs one looking for ‘stone washed jeans’. ‘discount headphones’ vs ’3-driver stereo headphones’?

The more narrowly you can segment your user queries, which you control via keywords and match types, the better your click through and conversion rates will be.

Divide and Conquer

The topic of organizing campaigns is one I hope to cover extensively in the coming weeks. This post was inspired by one over at PPC Hero talking about the benefits of breaking down ad-groups.

Related posts:

1. The Myth of Single Keyword Ad Groups The idea of creating highly targeted ad groups, so that...
2. Keyword Zoom Takes You Inside Keyword Performance Even though we occasionally rail against them, keywords are functionally...
3. Tuning Match Type Keyword Traps NOTE: This is part of a post series. It’s available...