Improving Ad Quality, Part IV

Structure Matters

By now you’ve started to see how your campaigns work with the new ranking model, and hopefully you’re seeing some positive results. We’ve previously talked about ways to help improve your ads so that they perform better under the new ranking model–using the Insert Keyword feature and Ad Testing are two examples.

How you structure your account can impact your ads’ performance. For example, you may want different campaigns for your brand keywords and your product keywords because you may want to track budgets separately. Or you may want to set up campaigns for specific geographies using geo-targeting or holiday campaigns using the scheduling feature. (Note that most accounts are limited to 20 campaigns.)

In general, the structure of your ad groups can help improve the relevance? of your ads to the search terms for which they may be displayed. There are a number of ways to do this, but here are three things that you may want to consider:

Categorize
Ad groups should be thought of as groups of keywords that are related to each other. The closer you can group your keywords together, the more specific you can be with the ads that display with those keywords.  Obviously there is a tradeoff here between specificity and efficiency of management, but generally, the more specific you can get with your groupings of ads and their relevant keywords, the better performance you should achieve.

Isolate and Protect Value
Not all of your keywords should be considered equal. If you were to take all of your keywords, gather their performance over a month and rank them by whichever metric was most important to you (impressions, clicks, conversions, revenue, etc.) you should see definite patterns and differences.

In general, you may find that roughly 10 percent of your keywords account for 90 percent of the value you’re measuring. It’s a classic rule of thumb in the search world. This isn’t to say that the other 90 percent of keywords are useless, just that those 10 percent are probably super important. 

Protect this extraordinary value and isolate these keywords into their own ad groups. This way you can take total control of the messages you are communicating to these searchers. You can test ads specifically for these keywords, not muddy the waters in any way, and could see improvements in your ad quality.

Think of the Customer Experience
There’s a path that most customers take when making a purchase decision. First, they seek out the options available to them. Next, they weigh those options. And finally, they make a decision to make a specific purchase.

If you want to get really sophisticated with your account structure, you can start to take advantage of this “buying cycle.” Group your keywords (still by category) into ad groups that are associated with where customers are in their decision-making processes.  In general, keywords with more impressions are more geared toward “attention,” whereas more specific keywords are closer to the purchase action. Once you set this up, you can then alter the creative in your ads to focus on bringing them down the path for your particular product.

Remember, structure does matter. How you link your ads with your keywords may have a significant impact on their overall performance and ultimately, with our new system, the economics of your account. 

View previous posts in this series:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

—Michael Egan, Senior Director, Content Solutions