4% of Survey Respondents Indicate Keeping Campaigns Organized is Their Biggest Challenge

Ahhh yes. The age old problem of organization. We all suffer from this affliction in one way or another. So many campaigns, ad groups, keywords and changes. How on earth are we to keep track of it all?

The bad news is that there is no one size fits all solution to this challenge. Your personality type will require a different method of campaign organization to suit your individual needs and preferences.

The good news is, there are some basic fundamentals that can help you make order of the chaos, no matter your organizational preferences.

 

“The best solution to campaign organization is a mix of best practices and your own personal organizational style. Find the mix that works best for you and stick with it”

 

Reducing the Clutter

If you are looking for campaign organization suggestions from Google no doubt you’ve read their recommendation to group related keyword sets into Ad Groups in the same campaign. There are good reasons they recommend this method, but we format our campaign structures differently, for one important reason.

Google requires advertisers to assign budgets at the campaign level. This means if you have multiple ad groups in a campaign, some of which do well, and some that need improvement, you have no way to subdivide your budget between the two. Google will spend your budget they way it sees fit between all the ad groups. As such we typically limit our campaigns to one ad group per, unless there is a compelling or handy reason not to.

One side effect of this is much cleaner campaign organization. We don’t have to dig into campaigns to find an ad group we want to look at or modify. It creates a flatter structure and allows us to see all campaigns at a glance in the user interface. If you find yourself drowning in ad groups, or you want to have more granular control over your ad spend, we recommend you use this practice.

 

Keep Your Keyword Sets Clean

The generally accepted practice of keeping keywords groupings limited is a positive practice. But what happens when you are using 3 or 4 match types for each keyword in your campaign? Well, things can get pretty unwieldy trying to manage it all.

The tips we’ll share with you may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times we see them ignored.

• Isolate broad match keywords into their own campaigns. We don’t recommend using them unless they can prove their worth. This is how you can find out if they are indeed worth the investment and keep any quality score issues from effecting the rest of your campaign’s keywords.
• Isolate or remove low quality score keywords. Maybe they can be improved, maybe not. Either way, they shouldn’t bring down a strong campaign.
• Remove high spend low converting keywords. Your spend will be more efficient and productive.
• Segment keywords for further specificity and relevance. The better your quality score and ad rank, the less you pay for better positions. This is how you get there.

 

Consider a Campaign Naming Nomenclature

Campaign organization isn’t only important for management in the Google interface. It’s also important for matching up your Google campaigns with any campaigns you are setting up in your CRM or marketing automation tool like Hubspot.

Consider using naming conventions to help. For example, we used to assign any Google campaign a number starting with 1065, then append that with the campaign information. 1065EF would be a Google equipment financing campaign. For Bing we used 810EF. No matter what platform or software we were using, we knew exactly what we were looking at using these codes.

 

Where Do I Go From Here?

What we’ve covered here is the just the tip of the iceberg. If you are looking for more detailed strategies for organizing your campaigns consider purchasing our affordable advanced guides. Each is chock full of the tips, tricks and strategies we employ to build successful programs for clients all over the country. Take the lessons we’ve learned and put them into practice to bring your paid search marketing program to the next level.

Think you might need more help? Why not reach out for a consultation with our resident paid search marketing consultants so we can review your specific needs and challenges and provide the solutions you need to move forward.

It is possible to solve your campaign organization issues, and we are happy to help any way we can.

As a onetime special, we are offering you 25% off of any of our advanced guides if you make your purchase in the next 5 days. Simply use coupon code DIAGNOSTIC25 during checkout.

Solving your prospect conversion issue should be your biggest priority and I hope we’ve helped set you on a path to success.