Even the House Google Built Needs a Good Foundation – CPC Part 1

Challenge:  How do I get started with AdWords?

If you are just getting started or looking at optimizing your ad words campaign, the first step is to review the structure of your account.  Pay per click advertising is built upon relevance.  The reason that Google achieved dominance as a search engine is because their results were more frequently relevant than the competition. This emphasis on relevance carries through to the structure of your ad words campaign.  Your ads need to show up on searches that are directly relevant for your search offering.  The first step in achieving relevance starts with the structure of your account.

Campaigns set the boundaries within your account.  Budgets, geography & language settings, and traffic distribution all are set on the campaign level.  Within a campaign, you can create one or more ad groups, which are used to segment out groups of keywords and ads.  Each ad group should be a focus area for relevancy so that ad text can be linked to the keywords within an ad group.  Bidding happens on the ad group and keyword level, allowing you to group keywords that might be more or less expensive for easier tracking.  Negative keywords and sites can be added at either the campaign or ad group level depending on the amount of fine tuning you’d like to provide.  Any tracking URLs can be placed within ads, thus targeting the ad group level, or on individual keywords. 

So what do you place at the campaign versus the ad group level.  Google has a great posting that explains these tradeoffs. While it is difficult to later make structural shifts between ad groups and campaigns, it is not impossible – so don’t stress out.  But do think about what tests you may want to run or budgets you may want to set to help guide your decision.  There is also a graphical depiction of this structure .  As a final thought, you may also want to consider using different campaigns to manage Google’s Content Network (discussed in another post) compared to traditional Google search results.

Lesson: Review the structure of your account to make sure you have aligned to the needs of your target audience.

Special thanks to Lindsey Walsh for her assistance with this post.  You can contact Lindsey at: contact@searchengineppc.com.