PPC Tips (Pay-Per-Click Tips)

Reorganizing Your Accounts

Most PPC campaigns tend to slow down over the summer months, when more people are on vacation or outside and away from the computer. But don't let the heat dazzle you: this is the perfect time to take a good look at your PPC accounts and reorganize them before the fall (back-to-school) and holiday seasons begin.

Reorganizing your accounts can be very beneficial for your PPC campaigns, allowing you to optimize your account more efficiently and helping to improve results. There are several areas on which you should focus your efforts:

• Ad groups with too many keywords

• Campaigns with too many ad groups

• Breaking out content match.

Reorganizing these three areas will help streamline your account, and lay out a blueprint for new keywords as well as make room for them.

1. First, start by looking for ad groups with a large number of keywords in them: ad groups with over 150 keywords.

   1. Look through the keywords in these large ad groups and break them out into smaller ad groups based on their similarities.

   2. Try to stay under 100 keywords per ad group, which will allow you to easily look through your keywords and help make changes more quickly.

   3. Having smaller, more focused ad groups also allows you to better tailor your creative, which can help improve your click-through rates and conversions.

2. Next, look at the number of ad groups in each campaign. If you have a lot of heavy-spending ad groups under one campaign, you need to break these out.

   1. Budget, ad serving, match type and geo-targeting limitations or rules can only be assigned at the campaign level, making it important that you have your heavy-spending ad groups spread out through several campaigns.

   2. This allows you to better allocate your budget to top-performing keywords as well as set different rules for different campaigns, improving your campaign results, and ensuring that top keywords always have the budget they need.

3. Finally, breaking out your content match is a critical piece of good account management. For years, this option was not available; now that it is, you should take full advantage of it. Start off by taking a good look at which ad groups content match actually works for; it may not be any of (or only) your brand-ad groups. This will help save you time and money by turning off content match for the ad groups that have not delivered any results over the last year. Breaking out content match is very easy:

   1. First you want to turn off content match for all your current ad groups.

   2. Next, you will make duplicates of the ad groups you want to break out for content match; they will have the same keywords and ad copy as the current ad groups.

   3. Set up new campaigns specifically for content match and label them with "Content" in the title to differentiate them, and then place the duplicate ad groups in these new campaigns accordingly.

   4. Finally, you need to go into your campaign setting and turn on content match for these new campaigns, make sure the search networks are turned off and only content match is turned on. Content match is a tricky animal to tame, so breaking it out gives you a lot better insight into what works and what doesn't.

These three simple reorganizing task are perfect for the summer lull and will help you keep your accounts better organized moving forward, saving you time and money down the road.
Be sure to take your time and structure your accounts properly, so you do have a solid foundation to build off of!