Adwords Explained - Page 4 - Adwords campaign structure

The best structure for your Adwords Account

Google organises its Adwords system into the following hierarchical structure:

> Account
> Campaign > Ad Group > Advertisements & Keywords
> Campaign > Ad Group > Advertisements & Keywords
                  > Ad Group > Advertisements & Keywords

Google allow control of various Adwords targeting features at different levels within this structure. The most important of these are as follows:

Controlled at the Account level:

• Billing & contact information

Controlled at the Campaign level:

• Geographic Territory (USA, UK, Australia etc, or even finer targeting in some jurisdictions)
• Search Partner inclusion (whether to only show your ads on the Google search engine itself, or to also show these ads on other search engine sites that are “powered by” Google)
• Content Network inclusions (sometimes referred to as the “AdSense” network, Google allows ads to be served from their service to any other persons website – this is explained in more detail later in this document)
• The time of day when ad campaigns are enabled

Controlled at the Ad Group level:

• Individual keywords against which your Ad will be served (each Ad group may have many keywords associated with it)
• Individual Advertisements which will be displayed ie your Ads (ie each Ad group may have one or many separate advertisements)

Many people starting out simply setup a single campaign and a single ad group. While this is useful for a smaller business, only promoting a single product to a single geographic territory to a single target customer group - even then, it should be viewed as a starting point only.

At some point you are likely to want to test aspects of your campaign and answer questions such as:

• “Do the customers who click on my Ad from the Google search engine buy my products more often then those who click on my Ad when its viewed on a content partner website?”
• “Do I achieve a higher click thru rate in focusing my advertisements on target Customer X or on target Customer Y?”
• “Does this wording on my advertisement work more effectively than another alternate advertisement wording?”

Organising your account into separate Campaigns or separate Ad Groups allows you to then compare them side by side to find answers to these questions. This is likely to be important sooner or later if you are to maximise your bang for Ad-buck.

Categorise & Analyse – Adwords Mantra

One of the most fundamental drivers of success using Adwords is comparing the results between different Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords and Advertisements. Above all other tips and tricks that the professionals may offer, your ability to organise your Account into a structure that allows effective testing of different approaches, and to compare the conversion rates and cost/conversion will deliver the most important improvements.

When to create a new or separate Campaign

Setting up a separate campaign is important if you want to test variation between different aspects of your advertising campaigns that are controlled at the Campaign level. While this is somewhat self evident, it can get lost in the detail of all your setup activities. Therefore before you dive in too far, spare a thought for whether you need to:

• Use separate campaigns to compare results between geographies.
• Use separate campaigns to compare results between Search engine targeting and Ads targeted at the Google “Content Network”
• Use separate campaigns to setup different ads targeted at different times of day (ie separate ads for weekdays vs weekends).

This then allows you to compare results side by side and analyse which campaign is delivering a higher Click Thru Rate, and/or a lower cost/conversion allowing you to either achieve a higher ad position or to lower your bids and achieve more clicks for your ad buck.

When to create a new or separate Ad Group

Each Ad Group is able to have multiple advertisements associated with it. This allows you to setup a group of keywords, and then target these with one or many advertisements. The number of times the ad is served, and the resulting CTR is reported against each separate advertisement allowing you to measure the results of each advertisement separately.

Ad Groups are a useful way to separate logical “themes” of keyword groupings. For example, for a vacuum cleaner company, one keyword group could be targeted at sales of vacuum cleaners, and another keyword group could be targeted at selling accessories. Separate Ad Groups could be setup targeting industrial / commercial customers and another for residential / consumer customers. This allows advertising wording and keywords used to better target the needs of these different groups, and allows separate measurement and monitoring of performance of these.

Page 5....Supply and demand of ad impressions.