From the Ground Up

Building Your Yahoo! Search Marketing Account

It’s a mystery why the Great Pyramid of Giza is the only structure of the original Seven Wonders of the World that still stands today. Scholars assume that it’s due to its sturdy architecture, but no one knows for sure the actual construction methods that were used to build it.

You may not know much about building your search marketing account, either. But unlike the pyramids, the methods for structuring your search marketing account don’t have to remain a mystery.

Your account is made up of up to 20 campaigns, your campaigns are made up of ad groups, and your ad groups are made up of ads and keywords. What you do at each level matters. Let’s start at the base of your paid search pyramid and work our way up.

Keywords
You can put up to 1,000 keywords in a single ad group  – but you wouldn’t want to. The more keywords in an ad group, the less likely they are to be relevant to each other. It also makes writing ads a lot harder. For easier account management, we recommend:

• Using around 20 keywords in each ad group
• Using click-through rate to determine poor-performing keywords that can be moved into other ad groups.

Don’t put the same keywords in multiple ad groups within your campaigns.  This will cause those keywords to compete with each other, and only one can be displayed in a single set of search results. There are two exceptions:

• When creating a geo-targeted campaign and a non-geo-targeted campaign.
• Within seasonal campaigns targeted for specific holidays, such as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.

Ad Groups
A well-organized ad group links similar keywords to relevant ads.  When structuring your ad groups, the following tips can help you get better results as you learn what’s working and what’s not:

• Organizing related keywords in your ad groups makes it easier to create more ads that will perform well for each keyword.
• When you’ve identified keywords that aren’t performing well, move these poor performers into their own ad group (making sure they stay as relevant to each other as possible) and price them accordingly. This helps to maintain the ad quality associated with your better-performing keywords.
• Write ads that fit the keywords in your ad group, and test them to see which ads work the best.

Campaigns
So, when do you need to set up a new campaign, as opposed to simply making another ad group? You should create separate campaigns for ads that:

• Target specific geographic areas
• Have goals with specific budgets
• Need to be scheduled with specific beginning and ending dates
• Use the Content Match tactic for ad distribution.

The pyramids weren’t built overnight, and your account structure won’t be either. But stone by stone, with constant attention, you can construct a solid ad organization that will stand the test of time.

–Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Photo credit By Nina Aldin Thune