seotworank: Using Paid Search Campaigns Correctly to Build Your Online Business

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Using Paid Search Campaigns Correctly to Build Your Online Business

by Mike Fleming

Last week, we talked about PPC trick #1 to building your online business for the long-term - using keywords correctly. This week, let's talk about another "trick of the trade" that will also help on the way to this goal.

Trick #2 - Using Campaigns Correctly

As the number of targeting options for PPC increases, so do the creative ways in which you can organize your campaigns to get the maximum effectiveness out of them. As I mentioned last week, for example, you can create a "fishing" campaign and a "bucket" campaign in order to separately control budgeting, bidding and other targeting options to focus your efforts on dominating the locations (search queries) that really put food on the table.

The first thing we have to think about when deciding how to use each campaign is what the goals of each of them are. As you move into being an advanced PPC manager, you will start to be able to use campaigns not just for the macro-goal of making sales and money, but for more micro-goals within each campaign that will contribute to making the lasting impact of the macro-goal bigger, better and more stable. So, instead of just one goal (making leads, sales or whatever), your account may look like this...

Campaign #1 - Find search queries that work for my business

Campaign #2 - Maximize search queries that have worked for my business

Campaign #3 - Make search queries that aren't working for my business, but should be, work for my business.

Why would you do this? Again, it's to make obtaining the different micro-goals that contribute to your macro-goal (making money) more efficient. How do they become more efficient? By utilizing the different features available for ad serving that are built for the different purposes. Here's a couple examples of what I mean...

Keyword Match Types

For example, the different keyword match types serve different purposes. Broad match is a net that goes out and catches fish (search queries) to advertise on. Then, you can see if these fish are worth keeping. Phrase match is more like a fishing pole with specific bait on it to catch more specific kinds of fish. But, still a fishing tool. Exact match is the fish. It's the exact fish in the Search Engine Sea.

Bidding

For fishing campaigns, the point is to go out and catch search queries to decide if they're keepers or not. So, you want to maximize the amount of search queries and clicks that you get on those search queries. Remember, this campaign is not directly about ROI or profit. Thankfully, AdWords has a bidding option called "Automatic Bidding" that serves just this purpose. When you set your campaign on this bidding option, the AdWords system will maximize the amount of clicks it can get for your set budget. By doing this, you are most efficiently accomplishing your goal for the campaign, which is finding search queries that will work for your business.

Then, once you find the search queries that work for you, you want to then bid differently because the purpose now changes. It's now about maximizing ROI or profit. Different purposes, different bidding options; so different campaign. In our "bucket" campaign, we'll use Maximum CPC bidding or Conversion Optimizer (designed for those purposes) to test what bid levels will accomplish this while increasing performance through optimization.

So, here's a very simple general layout of how campaigns could be organized differently because of their differing purposes...

There are many more features that make creating campaigns with different purposes possible. It's up to you to learn them and then get creative as to how they will help your account. But hopefully, above and beyond the specifics, the couple of examples I've given here will enlighten you to the ways in which you can be creative with targeting/organizing your account to more efficiently accomplish long-term growth.

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