The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

One of the hardest things to figure out as a new Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertiser is how to organize your accounts.  Implementing the right account structure will improve the quality of your campaign, but just as importantly, it will make it easier for you to manage.  This can be somewhat confusing: ads are associated with keywords and grouped into ad groups, and ad groups in turn are grouped into campaigns.  But what should motivate your grouping choices?

First, you only need multiple campaigns if you have want to run different sets of ads on different budgets, or with different langauge settings. Only make divisions at the campaign level if you need to separate out separate units by language or budget.  Otherwise, all of your divisions should be at the ad group level. (For more information on creating multiple campaigns, see the series of tutorials on “Structuring Your Account” in the SEM Concept Tutorial section of Clickable University.)

The ad group is the central unit of a PPC account. When you plan an account, you should begin by determining which ad groups you want to have.  In general, having a few large ad groups is easier to set up, but the disadvantage is that you will have a diverse set of keywords in a single ad group and you won’t be able to write ad text that is uniquely relevant to the user's searches.  In contrast, having a greater number of small ad groups allows you to group keywords into tight semantic clusters of very similar words and write ads that are very specific to that topic.  The downside, of course, is that this is more effort, and involves writing more ads.

So, you have to find a balance between specificity and time savings.  A good rule of thumb is that for every distinct landing page that you want to use, you should have a separate ad group that contains keywords and ads that are specific to that page. However, many PPC advertisers do not have very content-rich sites. If you are limited to just a few viable landing pages, you may want to make even more fine-grained distinctions among your keywords. In this case, divide your keywords up into small semantic groups around specific topics, and then write ads that are specifically relevant to each topic.

Ehren, Clickable SEM Guru

(Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus will post a search marketing tip to the Clickable Community Blog.)

In recent months, Google has made significant changes to the algorithm it uses to calculate Quality Score

Google just announced a new policy about display URLs that will go into effect this week. As Emel Mutlu