Google Adwords can be a trickly concept, with trickly quickly becoming scary when it’s your business’ money at stake. Here at Search Factory we’ve developed a brief guide to help ensure your account is structured in the most appropriate manner.

A solid layout is vital for any SEM initiative to be effective. A logical methodology to the organisation of ads and keywords provides compounding benefits; from the ability to manage, alter and target ads, through to boosting your quality score and reducing CPCs. For the purposes of this explanation, we’ll begin at the upper levels and work our way down.

Campaigns

At the top you have campaigns, and unless you are working zorb ball en Venta on a very small account you’d be remiss to have only one. There are a number of factors to consider when structuring your campaigns, including:

Location – If your business provides products/services nationally or internationally, then it’s sensical to create campaigns targeting different cities, states, regions and countries. This will result in similar keywords throughout different campaigns, but will give you the ability to write copy and incorporate geo-specific terms geared at the various locations your targeting.

Branded and Non Branded – Always ensure you have separate campaigns for your branded keywords. These terms should be visible 100% of the time, and receiving impressions 24/7. If brand terms are consistently competing with more expensive tactical keywords, they will often be limited by budget.

Website/Business Structure – By creating campaigns around specific products/services you provide, you’ll have keyword lists directly relating to ad copy, with ads correlating the relevant product/service pages on your site. This will facilitate control of budgets, bids etc., allowing tighter control across the various facets of your business.

Ad Groups

After you’ve created and structured your campaigns, Ad Groups are the next step. These can be looked at as containers for the keywords, ad copy and landing pages; and are instrumental in establishing a meaningful hierarchy to the account. Again, there are a number of points to consider when structuring your Ad Groups, including:

Too Many Keywords – Don’t let Ad Groups contain too many keywords! Many Search Engine Marketers allow this to happen, creating groups with hundreds or even thousands of terms. This not only detracts from your ability to collect granular data, but adversely impacts the relevancy of ads being delivered to consumers. Once an Ad Group incorporates too many keywords it loses its coherence and theme, which will only end up hurting your ROI.

Too Few Keywords – The reciprocal of the above is only having one or two keywords in each Ad Group when it’s prudent to have more. Generally this issue is an attempt to avoid the first problem, and whilst it does allow for groups to be tightly themed, it’s effectively shifting the burden from creating relevancy to assigning huge amounts of ad copies and landing pages for each term you’re targeting.

Integration & Consistency – Ultimately, any successful search engine marketer ensures they are striving to create a system grounded on integration and consistency. You need to continuously develop keyword groups, ad copy and landing pages tightly integrated with one another. Successfully doing so will create consistency, allowing you to directly cater for the searches used to reach your site. Often this requires a few months of research and testing, but the outlay is nearly always justified by the return.

The Benefits

By following the points above you’ll have an appropriately structured SEM account in no time. The best part is that a well-structured account provides lower costs (thanks to the quality score system) and more conversions (relevant ads convert better than generalised ones). So get optimising!