PPC Guide: How to structure search campaigns |

This is the section on campaign structure in our PPC Guide.

Campaign structure is one of the most critical pieces of a successful PPC effort. There are numerous ways to consider structuring your campaigns.

Below is a simple view of the structure and content of a PPC account (Fig. 16). Each account will hold multiple campaigns. Each Search text ad campaign then has multiple ad groups. Ad groups house your keywords and the ads related to those keywords.

Fig 16 Basic Adwords Campaign Structure — Fig. 16 Basic PPC account structure hierarchy.

There are best practices advertisers should follow when setting up a paid search campaign structure:

Create a separate Search campaign for brand keywords. Your brand campaign(s) will perform quite differently from your non-brand campaigns because these users are already familiar with your company, products or services at some level. You’ll want to be able to budget, manage and report on brand separately from non-brand.
- Be sure to add your brand keywords as negative keywords in your non-brand campaigns to ensure all brand traffic goes through your brand campaign.
Don’t target more than one network in one campaign. These days we have to qualify this a bit. This recommendation applies to standard Search campaigns. Newer campaign types — Smart, Local, Discovery, etc. — that automatically serve ads across multiple properties and there is no way to separate them. In a standard Search campaign, however, you want to uncheck the option to have ads served on the Display Network.
Create a campaign structure that will support your goals. Your non-brand campaigns might be organized based on your sales funnel stages, conversion action type, product or service type, geographic targets etc. The key is to map out a structure that maps to your goals and business objectives.
Settle on a naming convention that will be clear to anyone managing the campaigns now and in the future. Map this out in a spreadsheet that is available to everyone on the team.
Have enough budget to sustain your campaigns throughout the day.

PPC budget estimating

Budgets are set at the campaign level, though there is also a Shared Budgets option which disperses a daily budget across a set of campaigns. You want to have enough budget to ensure your ads are eligible to run throughout the day or times of day you set for them.

The Keyword Planner tools in Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads provide an estimated cost-per-click (CPC) for keywords related to your business. These can help you get a directional sense of how much budget you’ll need to meet your goals.

The Keyword Planner in Google Ads is available from the Tool icon in the upper right navigation.

Fig. 17 Keyword Plan Overview In AdWords 800x515 — Fig. 17 – To aid in budget estimating, the keyword planners can give you a sense of the click volume and CPCs you might expect from a set of keywords.

Ad groups

Campaigns are made up of one or more ad groups. Ad groups are just that: groups of ads that are targeted to a set of related keywords.

This helps you group related keywords and write ads around a common theme. Each ad also includes the landing page you want to take users to after they click.

Just as you’ll want to map out your campaign structure, it’s critically important to chart your ad group structure with the keywords you want to target and exclude, several versions of ad copy and the landing pages that best relate to the keywords. Each ad group should be connected to the goal of the campaign.

The keywords should be themed, and the ad copy should then be closely related to the keywords in the ad group and properly reflect the intent of those search queries. This is critical for achieving high Quality Scores.

For example, a retailer that sells several different types of shoes would not want to have “high heels” and “running shoes” in the same ad group. They’d want to write distinct ad copy for each of those products. And they’ll want people who search for “high heels” to land on a page of high heels and people who search “running shoes” to land on a page featuring the running shoes they offer.

Search term reports

Once your campaigns have run for a time, you’ll be able to see exactly which search terms triggered your ads.

Search term reports help you see whether your keywords are grouped properly, if there are keywords you can add to the group or add as negative keywords, and if you should further segment keywords into multiple ad groups and write ad copy more tailored to those groups.

Set up a regular schedule to review these reports to add target and negative keywords to your ad groups or campaigns.

Text ad copy

Text ads consist of two headlines, a description, display URL paths, destination URL and ad extensions. Below is the new text ad template in Google Ads (Fig. 18).