Digital Marketing and Search Engine Marketing Blog

Organizing your account lets you better track the outcome of your advertising effort. Before getting started with your first campaign you should keep your business goal in mind. Although there are many ways to organize an AdWords account, this post explains some best practices any new advertisers can easily follow.

It is advised to organize your campaigns and Adgroups as you build them. Reorganising is tedious, kills your time and you may also happen to lose your previous data which affects your ad’s performance.

The topmost level is your account followed by the campaigns, Adgroups.

Account Level

In the account level you can choose your preferred payment method, you can see your transaction history, you can invite, manage and see who can access your AdWords account, and you can link other Google accounts to bring valuable data that can be used to optimize your campaigns effectively.

Campaign Level

Choose the campaign type and give it a meaningful name. Example, if you are creating a search network campaign for a specific location with broad match modifier keywords, then you can name the campaign as “Search Network | Your Location | BMM”. Keep using this naming system, so that you don’t get confused somewhere down the line and you can easily filter out the campaigns when using AdWords interface and AdWords Editor in the future.

Create new campaign, only when you need to use different sets of campaign settings. For Example, if you want to set different budget for different location, then create campaigns targeting different locations with the daily budget you want to spend on those locations.

Create a new campaign for top selling or discount products so that you can modify your ads accordingly.

Ad Group Level

An ideal campaign should have several ad groups with 10 to 15 tightly themed keywords. An ideal ad group should have a narrow theme with ad copies relevant to the keywords and the landing page.

Use Google AdWords keyword Planner Tool to find all the possible relevant keywords for your business. Then work on it manually to group the keywords such that the ad groups in the campaign represent the structure or the category of your website or the landing page. Writing Ads that contain keywords in the headline will increase the Click Through Rate of that ad. An ideal ad group should have more than 3 ads with catchy headline, strong message, features of your products, discounts if any and a compelling call-to-action.

Once you start running the campaign set the ads to rotate evenly to find out the performance of each ad.

Follow these basic steps and start exploring into AdWords.

In a recent blog post, Google has announced a new feature “AdWords Campaign Groups”. This has made grouping, monitoring and reporting of campaigns that are aligned to similar goals, easier.

Consider you have 2 search campaigns, 1 display campaign and 2 video campaigns for a particular product launch and you have a fixed cost per acquisition. Before the availability of campaign grouping, the only way to monitor and compare the performance of these campaigns against a set performance target is to download the data and create a pivot table in Excel. Now, adding these campaigns to a campaign group will provide the consolidated data across the selected campaigns. Visual target tracking and performance forecasts are also available.

Campaign Groups are easily accessible from the left side bar in the AdWords interface.

Creating a campaign group is a straight forward approach. There are 3 simple fields that have to be filled out.

• Name of the campaign group
• Add campaigns to the group
• Set performance target

Name the campaign group descriptively if you intend to create a good number of campaign groups. This will help in easy identification later. Adding campaigns to the group is very easy in the interface. You just have to select the campaigns that need to be grouped.

Now, it’s the time to set performance target. You can select either clicks or conversions. Let’s set clicks target. Now there is an optional date range field. If it’s not filled, clicks target and spend target fields are greyed out. To enable performance forecasts and visual target tracking, these fields need to be filled.

Setting Conversion target also follows the same approach except that average CPA target and conversion target fields needs to be filled. It should be noted that both click and conversion target cannot be set for the same date range. A workaround for this would be to create 2 separate campaign groups, one with click target and another with conversion target.

How and When Can You Use AdWords Campaign Groups?

• You have campaigns running in different networks but aligned to same goal.
• You have a number of campaigns targeting the holiday season.
• You have campaigns that target products that are costly when compared to other products.
• You need to group campaigns that promote products within same subcategory.
• You’re not a big lover of Excel and would prefer visualizing the data within the AdWords interface.

Have you started using campaign groups? Do you find it useful? Please feel free to comment!