As I was restructuring a friend and client’s Adwords campaign, I suddenly thought:

“Am I an anal, picky sod that needs to get out more?”

The answer is a matter of opinion (especially about getting out more).

The question however, and the thoughts that threw it up, are far more interesting (and profitable). Here’s how it began…

The reason I felt like such an uber nerd was to do with Adwords account structure (Yep, that’s account structure. Not campaign or adgroup structure).

You see in the last year or so, I’ve changed how I organise an Adwords account and frankly, it’s made some clients pretty good money (a few hundred grand). So I thought I’d share what I’ve discovered here to help you turn a few quid as well.

So before we begin, here’s the arbitrary disclaimer:

What I’m about to tell you isn’t a step-by-step “I’ll hold your hand” blueprint.

This is the 50,000ft strategic view of your Adwords account and how to make Google love it.

For this post, I’ll stick to Adwords in general, avoid getting tied up in specifics and assume you have a good working knowledge of Adwords Editor, Excel etc.

(If you’re a beginner, you may be better skipping this post and hang on for some “newbie” posts I’m cooking up.)

….

So let’s kick off with explaining why I’m so weird about account structure with…

The Secret to Guaranteed Success with Adwords

How many times you heard that old chestnut?

If you’ve been in online marketing for a while (especially the “make money” end of it), you may think the “secret” to Adwords success is a complete load of bollocks that’s used to sell $97 eBooks – and I tend to agree.

However, there does appear to be a secret to making Adwords work – or should I say a *knack*.

You see it’s not a *really* secret, but it might as well be. It seems everyone’s talking about Adwords tricks and hacks to make a quick buck, while totally missing the big picture.

So much so that the one vital element is largely ignored.

GOOGLE LOVES RELEVANCY

(Write it on your hand, stick a post-it note on your monitor, or bang your head against the wall while repeating it as a mantra until you start hallucinating, whatever you like — just for-goodness-sake remember it.)

So why am I talking about what Google loves, when this post is all about campaign and account structure?

Well, relevancy is why Google does what it does.

It’s why it puts so much weight on click through rate and quality score. It’s why it’s “slapped” its advertisers so many times. It’s all part of Google’s master plan to show super relevant ads every time (or most of the time) somebody searches on Google.

You see, Google’s main interest – believe it or not – is not getting your advertising money. In fact, they couldn’t care less about whether you are a customer of theirs or not.

Nope… the thing that they are truly obsessed about, the thing that keeps them up at night; is getting and retaining *users*. That’s people who search on Google. That’s your customers, my customers, and everybody else’s customers.

“But why?” you ask…

Ok. The reason why Google is so popular is because they produce the most useful and relevant search results around. Google realise that if their results ever become irrelevant, not useful, or at least less relevant than their closest competitor, they are going to lose users.

And if they lose users, they lose eyeballs on their ads. And less clicks on their ads, means less revenue — which as we all know it’s not a good thing at all.

As you can see, it’s in Google’s best interests to make their search results (which includes all of their ads) as relevant and as useful as possible for the user.

So now you know how Google thinks, you can now use it to your advantage.

Remember, Google wants relevant search results. If we help them with that, we’ll probably do well into the bargain.

So now you may be wondering… what does relevancy mean in the eyes of Google?

Well, it’s not what you and I think it is, generally speaking. When Google says “relevance”, they mean “absolutely so damn anally relevant, you won’t quite believe it the first time you hear it” kind of relevance.

Want to know how damn relevant? He’s an example:

(Side note: I always used the example “blue widgets”. I don’t know why. It seems to be an industry norm when talking about Adwords keywords. If anybody can think of any other keyword examples that aren’t too industry specific, please send them in on a postcard)

So, let’s say you’re selling these now famous blue widgets.

The average and uninitiated Adwords user would usually choose some variations of keyword “blue widgets”, put them inside one ad group, and write one “catch all” ad. Then when somebody clicks on this ad, they would be taken to the website’s homepage which would contain links to the blue widgets section.

To the untrained Adwords user that seems perfectly reasonable. Outside the realm of Google, this does seem reasonably relevant. But it’s nowhere near what Google wants from you as an advertiser.

This is what Google means by “relevance”:

For each keyword (in this case blue widgets), we’d have an ad that talked about that keyword specifically. There would be no other keywords in this ad group. Then when somebody clicked on this highly specific ad, they would be taken to a landing page that talks about this exact keyword in more detail.

Here’s a little diagram:

The same would be true for every single keyword you are using.

It sounds insane doesn’t it?

Yes, but it’s true.

(Another side note: Sometimes you can get away with being less relevant than this, especially if your ad has a significantly higher click through rate than your competitors. I, however, find this to be a rather risky strategy — and would rather “dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s”, especially in competitive markets. That way, a high click through rate is a fantastic bonus, but your marketing success doesn’t depend on it.)

Anyway, relevancy in detail is another topic for another day, but I still wanted to let you know how important it is as it’ll prepare you for the account structure strategy.

Today I want to show you how I structure my accounts so that they are as relevant as possible, yet wastage is minimal as well as cost per click.

Here’s the super-quick summary:

The trick is to run exact, phrase and broad variations of the same campaign.

(If you want to know what the hell broad, phrase and exact match types are all about – as well as negative keywords – mosey on over to Google’s help section here.)

That’s it. Now here are the details:

Say we were running our fictitious campaign called “blue widgets”. We would have three variations of this campaign. We’d have:

blue widgets (broad)
blue widgets (phrase)
blue widgets (exact)

The broad campaign would contain broad match types of all the keywords, the phrase campaign will have phrase keywords and the exact campaign will have exact keywords.

As well as this, every ad group within the campaign will contain negative versions of the other match type.

For example:

The ad group called, let’s say, ‘threaded blue widgets’ in the broad campaign would contain the positive keyword “threaded blue widgets” as a broad match type. And it would also contain the negative phrase match version of the same keyword (-”threaded blue widgets”).

This prevents the ad for the broad match keyword being triggered for a phrase match search query.

For example:

If someone searches for “threaded blue widgets in New York”, our broad match ad would not trigger. This is because we are bidding on the phrase match version of “threaded blue widgets” and our broad match version contains the phrase as a negative too.

However, if someone searched for say “blue threaded widgets in New York”, our broad match ad would trigger.

This is important, because now we have our campaigns separated into match types, we have control over our exact cost per click and daily budget for each match type. (And it stops Google sodding around and showing broad match when phrase match would do – and cost us less)

So now if we set our exact version of the campaign to a higher cost per click than the phrase version, and the phrase version to a higher cost per click on the broad, we are effectively forcing Google to show our exact match ads wherever possible, our phrase match ads as a second choice, and our broad match ads as a last resort.

This is how it ought to be with Google Adwords – without resorting to these tactics.

However in the last year or so, Google has had a nasty habit of showing our broad match version of an ad (which is usually more expensive, and less relevant) as opposed to our exact match version. This method gets around that problem nicely.

Here’s a quick diagram that probably explains it far better than I ever could:

If you are familiar with Adwords editor and Excel spreadsheets, it’s pretty straightforward to separate out your current campaigns into broad, phrase and exact variations. And believe me, it’s very worthwhile.

I said it at the start of the post, and I’ll say it again here: this stuff isn’t for beginners.

If you are a beginner, here are a few takeaways you can use — even if you don’t implement the whole lot…

Number one: remember Google loves relevancy. Not just a little bit of relevancy, but super duper relevancy. (That means matching your keyword to your ad and landing page as closely as humanly possible.)

Number two: Google has been acting sneaky recently. Unless you know what you’re doing (e.g. you understand all of this post and can implement all), avoid broad match — and to some extent phrase match — as much as you can. Stick to exact match keywords, keep everything nice and relevant, and you’ll be absolutely fine.

So even though I may appear to be overly picky about campaign structure, it works. It stops Google pulling a fast one when we’re not looking – and it beef’s up our quality score as well.

Give it a try if you know what you’re doing.

If you don’t, get comfortable using Adwords Editor and Excel to manipulate your Adwords account, then give it a try when you feel more confident. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Til next time…

~George

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