Paid Search Campaign Organization
For those of you who have dived into Google Adwords, and built Paid Search Campaigns, by now have realized that it can quickly become a daunting task. With all the features that are offered it can become time consuming and if not properly setup can be expensive while producing minimal return on ad spend (ROAS). Therefore, it is important to organize campaigns in a way that makes it easy to gather information. The four types of campaigns I will be referring to include Branded Search, Non-Branded Search, Shopping Campaigns and Retargeting.
Branded search relates to campaigns that have the companies name in it. These campaigns should typically produce the best results because it targets people who are proactively looking for your brand. Some people dispute creating branded campaigns since they already show up number one organically for branded terms but if you are able to tweak messages through paid ads on branded keywords then it can influence more clicks and drive better conversion rates which is why I would always bid on branded terms. When setting these campaigns up, make sure you name the campaign with "Branded_Campaign Name". You will also want to take advantage of all the different match types for your keywords which I will discuss in a new blog post.
Non-Branded search campaigns are more difficult to convert because you are catching people higher in the sales funnel who might not already know who you are as a business. These campaigns should start with "NB_Campaign Name" therefore, anything with a "NB_" in front of the name will automatically be identified as a Non-Branded search campaign. This will help with filtering searches so that you can report campaign types collectively. It is important to keyword harvest converting keywords from dynamic search ads if you are an e-commerce company so that your Non-Branded campaign structure is based off converting keywords from dynamic search ads.
Shopping campaigns or Product Listing Ads are for companies that sell products online, e-commerce companies. These campaigns should drive a lot of new traffic to the site, similar to Non-Branded search campaigns. When creating these campaigns make sure to label them "PLA_Campaign Name" and you can create them based off your data feed custom labels such as by price, by best selling products, by brand and so on. This will also involve a product data feed
that can be built in a data feed management tool such as DataFeed Watch and you will need to familiarize yourself with Google Merchant Center in order to manage errors within the data feed. There are also other features that can improve these PLA ads such as adding special offers in the data feed and promotions feature in Google Merchant Center.
Retargeting is a pretty cool campaign type that should be implemented, especially for companies that have longer sales cycles. These campaigns should be named "Retargeting_Campaign Name" so they can easily be identified from other types of campaigns. These campaigns will allow customers who have previously been to your site to return from banner ads or text ads that can be found on the Google Display Network & Search Network. It is important to familiarize your self with the different kinds of audiences you can create based off visitors to the website so that you can create messaging based off what they did on the website. For instance, if someone abandons their cart versus check outs then you will want to show them different ads with messages that relate more to which behavior relates to them.
Labeling campaigns in the proper format will make your life a lot easier once you start creating more and more campaigns. As the number of campaigns increase the complexity of organization increases which is why it is essential to set them up in a structured format so that they can be consolidated easily for segmented reporting by campaign type. It will also allow you to maneuver more strategically within Adwords and make importing into Bing Ads more efficient if you decide to expand into other Paid Search platforms.
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