Managing your Google Ads account structure can be a hassle. It’s hard to find time to both optimize your PPC account and stay on top of all the current trends and new products that Google has released. Not to worry.
We believe that anything can be taught and mastered if you drill down into the fundamentals and focus on the what is driving your business forward. Bells and whistles are nice, but if the foundation isn’t set for success, then it will be hard to fully capitalize on all the fun that pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has to offer.
This is why our main focus when picking up a new account is to help establish a clean, scalable Google Ads account structure that makes harvesting search success easy.
Here are 4 key reasons why we think establishing a clean Google Ads account structure is a critical first step towards building a more profitable PPC program:
- Proper spend allocation to the most efficient keywords
- Ability to scale
- Quality Score optimization
- Control over monthly performance
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Let’s start with #1:
#1: PROPER SPEND ALLOCATION TO THE MOST EFFICIENT KEYWORDS
Most account’s have a handful of keywords that drive a majority of their business conversions/sales. The key here is to identify which keywords are driving those conversions in order to isolate them in a way that will help deliver consistent monthly results.
A quick way to identify these keywords is to pull a keyword report and conduct an 80/20 analysis. From there, you may find out that approximately 20% of your keywords are driving 80% of your business conversions.
The absolute numbers may vary from business to business, but the 80/20 rule is a helpful guide to quickly find what keywords matter most to your business and its goals.
To find your top keywords navigate to the keywords tab in your Google Ads account, select a date range with a large enough sample size (30-90 days is a good place to start), and export the data into a CSV file.
Old Google Ads version:
New Google Ads version:
Once you’ve downloaded your keyword data into a CSV file, then you can sort the keywords by the conversion column and insert a percent of total calculation to find the approximated 20% of keywords driving 80% of conversions.
Here’s an example screenshot of what that might look like with mock data:
Step #1 will be to breakout the top converters into their own unique campaigns or ad groups based on the theme of the keyword and potentially their specific Google Ads match types in order to bid them more appropriately to what’s actually driving your business profit.
From:
Ad Group A
To:
Ad Group A
Ad Group B
Ad Group C
This leads us to #2:
#2: ABILITY TO SCALE
Now that you’ve cleaned up your Google Ads account structure to be tightly focused on specific themes, it’s time to scale.
A quick way to do this is to run a search term report to find the specific search terms that your keywords are triggering and converting on. You can find the Search Terms report under the Keywords tab, then click Search Terms.
Once you run the search term report, you may find keywords such as “womens tennis shoes” or “light womens tennis shoes” are being grouped under your broader phrase match “tennis shoes.”
You’ll want to break these out as well and repeat step #1 to ensure you are pushing your advertising dollars to the most profitable keywords without sacrificing volume.
Once you have established clean campaign and ad group structures it will be much easier to tackle #3:
#3: QUALITY SCORE OPTIMIZATION
An issue that we sometimes find in a less optimized Google Ads account is the use of 100’s of keywords in a single ad group.
This causes higher costs-per-click (CPC’s), lower ad click-through-rates (CTR’s), and higher costs-per-acquisitions (CPA’s) because the ad creatives are not tightly focused on each keyword that is participating in the auction.
Here’s an example of what that might look like:
Ad:
Keywords:
Here’s an example of a more optimized ad group:
Ad:
Keywords:
Quality Score is one of the most important metrics Google provides us with to determine how our keyword quality is stacking up and is made up of 3 main components:
- Ad copy relevance
- Landing page experience
- Expected Click-through-rate (CTR)
We have seen the largest jumps in Quality Score when we:
- Isolated our top keywords into their own campaign and ad groups
- Wrote ads that included the target keywords (ad copy relevance)
- Continually a/b tested the ad copy for improved CTR performance (expected CTR)
- Sent them to the most relevant landing page (landing page experience) that we could find
Lastly, #4:
#4: CONTROL OVER MONTHLY PERFORMANCE
If you are a Google Ads account manager or simply a business owner who shares metrics with key stakeholders, then you’ve probably heard the age old question of, “What’s changed from month to month that led to a drop or hopefully upturn (shameless brand drop) in performance?”
The easy and maybe best answer is, “I don’t know, but let me get back to you.”
The problem that we often see is that spend is being allocated too aggressively to keywords where performance is more sporadic such as in phrase and modified broad keywords. Then, when performance changes it’s hard to say what specifically drove the delta month over month.
If you have established a clean account structure, then it will be much easier to run a keyword report in the reporting tab of Google Ads to find out where you drop or increase in conversions came from.
From there you’ll be able to isolate the 1-2 keywords that drove the largest change and pin-point what happened.
You may find a number of things:
- Average position changed due to a new competitor entering the market and bidding aggressively
- Misallocation of spend to newly launched keywords that stole impressions and volume from your top converting keyword
- Average CPC change due to a bid modifier change you made at the campaign level
- Lower click volume due to the introduction of a new, lower performing ad
The key is to be able to pin-point to the best of your ability what drove the change and then communicate and how you aim to address the issue to those involved.
There are a number of ways to setup a clean Google Ads account structure, but we’ve found continual success when we isolated spend to the most efficient keywords, setup the campaigns, ad groups and keywords for proper keyword mining and growth, improved our quality scores, and consistently reported on what’s changed and adapted to the market.
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Continue Reading: A SIMPLE GUIDE TO PROPERLY MAP YOUR GOOGLE ADS MATCH TYPES