The following post shows the benefits of search campaign restructuring and offers tips on how to restructure your campaigns. It was written by Vividh Chaudhary, a Business Analyst at Efficient Frontier.
Organize, Organize, Organize
Account organization is one of the most overlooked aspects of search engine marketing. We have all heard that search engines reward intelligent campaign organization, but the benefits go beyond that. When I get a new client account to manage, the first thing I examine is how the campaign is organized.
Why Organize Campaigns
1. Organizing your accounts boosts performance
Improve Quality Score. Search engines reward organized accounts by improving their quality score and discounting CPC. Why is that? We all know how much search engines value user experience. When users conduct a search, they are more likely to click on relevant ads. If an ad group contains similarly themed keywords, the ad copy can represent those keywords more accurately and is more likely to get clicks.
More clicks mean more money for the search engines and thus they can afford to discount the CPC. It is a win-win situation for everyone. Searchers have a better experience, search engines make more money and the advertiser gets more targeted traffic at cheaper rate.
Improve Content Targeting. Campaign organization is also highly beneficial for content targeting. The bidding for content placement happens at the ad group level and not the keyword level. If keywords belonging to multiple categories are grouped together in one ad group, search engine algorithm can get confused and the ads would get placed at irrelevant web pages. Consider restructuring your poorly performing content campaigns before turning them off.
2. Organization brings efficiency to campaign management
Spend Management. If you want to promote a certain product, you can easily allocate more funds to that product campaign if your campaigns are organized by product type. Similarly, if the product goes out of stock, you can easily pause the entire campaign without having to pause individual keywords.
Tracking and Analysis. If the account performance goes up or down you can quickly and easily identify the source of performance shift if the campaigns are well organized.
How to Organize Campaigns
Create campaigns and ad groups such that they represent a theme and group Keywords by product type, searcher profile (age, gender etc.) or any other factor important for your business. Each ad group should be a collection of close variations of keywords and the ad copy should represent those keywords.
Campaign Organization Example
Consider this example of a poorly structured retail SEM account. The account has just one campaign for all the product categories namely video games, books, television, digital cameras and others. Within that campaign each product category has just one ad group and thus, every game from Xbox 360 to Nintendo Wii has to be advertised with just one generic ad copy.
There is an instant restructuring opportunity here. I would recommend creating separate
campaigns by product categories, which would enable separating video games, 
books and other product types into their own campaigns. By doing so, products like Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii would have their own ad groups and much more accurate and targeted ad copy describing the product.
Such an exercise can bring an immediate lift to the campaign performance and in similar cases we have seen 5-10% ROI lift within one month for no change in ad spend.
However, it is important to note that when you move keywords or ad groups across campaigns or add new keywords, ad groups or campaigns to an existing account, the account can experience a short term loss in history and the quality score. But as a search marketer you shouldn’t be afraid of this short term penalization as the long term gains like quality score improvement, better content performance and a more efficient campaign management far outdo the short term losses.
As a Business Analyst at Efficient Frontier, Vividh manages client advertising campaign strategies and performs data analysis to manage and grow client accounts. He holds a MS degree in Management Science from Stanford and a B. Tech from India Institute of Technology.
Comments