Structuring a PPC account

Articles about Paid Search usually focus on bid management, copy development, landing page optimization or keyword selection. I’d like to discuss a often overlooked, but equally important, component of every paid search program...the structure.

I will write about Google and the options they give to structure your program. Google has three levels to their structure - the account, campaign, ad group and keyword. An account is allowed 25 campaigns, 2000 ad groups per campaign and 2000 keywords per ad group or about 50000 keywords per account.

The account is the highest level of the structure. It contains contact information, billing information access to administrative settings.

At the campaign level you can manage daily budgets, geo-targeting, end dates and language preference. The best way to organize your account is to create a campaign for each category of product or service you offer. If you sell apparel you may have three campaigns - womens, mens, and childrens. But, more likely you will want to take advantage of the 25 campaigns and get a more granular - womens tops, womens bottoms, womens shoes, mens tops, mens bottoms, mens shoes, childrens tops, childrens bottoms and childrens shoes. Let your internal categorizations and budget drive your decisions for campaigns.

Ad groups are a set of keywords grouped by theme. The key to good ad groups is that they be very specific. Ads (copy) and landing page are assigned at the ad group level. If you are selling similar products with different unique selling points, such as products of different quality and price, you will definitely want to have a different marketing message in the copy and probably deliver the shopper to different landing pages. This will allow more options for testing, better visibility into performance and help find opportunities for expansion for your business. HINT: Logically naming ad groups will help you and others quickly read, understand and prepare reports of results.

By properly structuring your account you can better manage your budget, have more precision with your marketing message,increase relevance which will improve the quality score, thereby lowering costs.