Whenever people ask me, “What’s wrong with my Google AdWords campaign?” I always ask
same thing: “How is your campaign organized?”Mostly I’m met with blank stares. “Organized?” is usual answer, “You mean AdWords campaign? I never really thought about it.”
See, most of time when I’m asked that question, people expect me to tell them about some miracle, magical, secret ‘trick’ that will send money pouring in. They don’t realize that basic mundane task of organizing a campaign is often most critical to determining its success.
Most people pick a product to promote, throw together a few catchy-sounding ads (well, at least catchy-sounding to them), and grab up 600 – 1000 keywords that might be in some small way related to product, and just… let it go.
I’m not pointing any fingers here. I did same thing when I started, and since I was ‘lucky’ right off bat and made a $1500 profit first month I figured, “Boy, I’m a genius! I’ve got this Google thing whipped!”
Unfortunately I didn’t organize correctly (or at all). My plan was: get a whole bunch of keywords, no matter how loosely related, and put my ad in front of as many eyeballs as possible. As a result my click-through rates were abominable, and Google would slow my ad campaigns a lot. Sometimes more than three times a day. What I didn’t know was that through some basic organization I could have enhanced my campaign’s effectiveness and nearly doubled my profits. And as an added bonus, I would put Google on my side instead of against me. It could have saved me a lot of grief if I’d only organized my campaigns first.
So let’s take a look at best way to organize.
AdWords is divided into campaigns, and subdivided into Adgroups.
Each campaign can be set to market to a specific audience, and each campaign has its daily budget. The audience is important because there are some products you can only market in U.S., and others you can only market in U.K. The daily budget is important because… well, it’s daily budget. (By way, I recommend setting budget as high as possible; more clicks you get, more accurate your data will be.)
But it’s at Adgroup level that truly savvy marketer can get best results from AdWords. Most people only have one Adgroup per product, with way more keywords than is wise.
The better approach is to have not one Adgroup per product, but many, each organized around a different ‘theme’, and each designed to speak to a different audience. Choose keywords carefully for each Adgroup, and design ads that include those keywords. Remember that any time an ad displays exact words a searcher typed in his search, Google shows those words in bold… thus ensuring that ads that have carefully chosen keywords will get better clickthrough ratios.
