Posted By
Wesley Picotte on 11/20/2009
Paid search management and search engine marketing don't require advanced degrees, but managing your paid search investment effectively can be tricky, especially when your campaign leverages a robust keyword portfolio. This surely is how search engine marketing agencies—and jobs like mine—can even exist.
Even the experts focus on fundamentals first before developing more advanced management strategies, though, and that's what this series of posts focuses on: three simple steps you can take towards improving your paid search campaign's performance. In this post, I describe a straightforward way to better manage your paid search budget and the rationale for adopting this technique.
When undertaking a new paid search effort, dividing a single campaign into multiple ad groups is a very natural approach. This represents the fundamental structure for paid search campaigns, in fact, and it can work well enough. However, a difficulty with this configuration is that the exposure received by any of your terms, relative to the rest of your campaign, is dictated by external search volume. That's just fine when your moneymakers happen to be generic, oft-searched terms, but this is very rarely the case.
Since daily budgets are assigned at the campaign level (not the ad group level), holding your keywords in a single bucket leaves you with two choices: let external search behavior govern where your paid search budget goes or remove such terms from the campaign.
The latter choice isn't viable from my perspective since, using generic, high volume terms as an example, you should derive some bottom-line value from them. Their real strength is brand exposure, especially with purchase funnels that require multiple searches. Therefore, campaign segmentation is the way…and it's easy!
To illustrate, assume you operate an e-commerce camera Web site and manage a PPC campaign with three ad groups, one each for digital cameras, film cameras, and video cameras. By using these as the foundation for new campaigns—thus expanding from one campaign to three—you create the ability to assign budgets commensurate with contribution to your bottom line. In other words, you create the ability to maximize exposure on your most valuable terms while closely regulating exposure on others.
To be sure, there are many other factors to consider when optimizing an investment in paid search, such as your site's ability to actually convert traffic into sales (or leads, phone calls, whatever), but that's a different subject for another day. Regardless of your site's sophistication or your appetite to contemplate such things, taking the basic steps outlined above will immediately provide greater control over your paid search investment.
Tags: Paid Search, Media Planning & Buying
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