The structure of your Google Ads account is hugely important.
If you get it wrong, you will cost yourself enquiries and sales… and your ‘cost per sale’ for the ones you do get will be much, much higher than it needs to be!
You will essentially fall victim to the infamous ‘Google stupidity tax’ where you pay much, much more than necessary, for mediocre results… and who wants mediocre?
So pretty bloody important then!
I’ve previously covered the need for comprehensive keyword research. Once completed, these keywords can be exported to a spreadsheet, moved around and categorised to mirror the structure you will have within your actual Google Ads account.
Campaigns
Now, the structure of your account will be somewhat dictated by the click budget you have to spend. If you are spending just £10 per day, you will need to have fewer Campaigns than if you were spending £100 per day.
This is because daily budget caps are assigned at Campaign level. If you run too many Campaigns, and can only assign them each £0.50 per day budget, they won’t have enough room to breathe.
The great thing about Google Ads is when you see a particular keyword or device performing well, you can then split that particular element out and give it more daily budget… once it has started to prove itself.
OK, let’s say we have a double glazing company. We want our Campaigns to follow a theme, so we can see at a high level, the performance of each theme (area of business) in terms of conversions and cost per conversion.
So, in our case we might have a Campaign for Windows, another for Front Doors and another for Conservatories.
Ad Groups
Within each Campaign, you will have multiple Ad Groups related to the theme of the Campaign. So, in the Front Doors Campaign, you might have Ad Groups such as ‘uPVC doors’ ‘composite doors’ ‘wooden doors’ etc. All Door related.
Keywords
These Ad Groups will now house the keywords relating to the theme of the Ad Group so the ‘uPVC doors’ Ad Group will contain the keywords [upvc doors] in the Exact match type and “upvc doors” in the Phrase match type.
Depending on daily budget, you may also include +upvc +doors on the Modified Broad match type to give greater scope to match to other search terms variants.
Ads
Ads are created within Ad Groups, so if we have a nice granular structure to our account, we know the exact keyword that will trigger each of our Ads. This means our Ad can be all about the keyword our prospect has searched, making it highly compelling to click!
We also set the destination URL (the web page we send people to) at Ad level. This means, those prospects of ours looking for upvc doors will go straight to our upvc doors page.
It’s important to run two to three Ads per Ad Group for split testing purposes. The Ads shouldn’t all be wildly different, they should in-fact be pretty similar, but with one subtle change. So, one might have a different headline than your first piece of copy. The other might have the same headline but a different Call To Action.
The reason for keeping the changes subtle is for when we review the success of our Ads. What made the most successful Ads so successful? If the headline, description and call to action on each Ad was different, we wouldn’t know.
Big Brownie Points
So right there, we are giving ourselves the best chance of earning some big Google brownie points! You see, you get rewarded by Google for providing highly relevant content to their users.
High Click Through Rates (CTR) and Quality Scores provide a big signal as to an advertiser’s relevance, and both of these metrics will be covered by piecing together the perfect user journey.
From keyword searched, to Ad seen (offering exactly what they want), to landing page with information specific to the search.
Now, I appreciate this isn’t easy. Putting single keywords in multiple match types, into hundreds of Ad Groups is about as much fun as a trip to the dentist, but it is, “doing the hard work to make the sale easy”…
Click Budget
Last word on click budget. If you do have a restricted budget for the size of your marketplace, for service-based businesses, it makes sense to concentrate budget as local as possible first, then widen as necessary, if budget allows.
For national businesses, targeting locations where the largest percentage of their customers come from would be a good alternative.
In the example of our Double Glazing company, we might be willing to travel 50 miles to do a job but if we can spend all of our daily budget within 15 miles, we will normally see a higher conversion rate on our leads because we are so local to our customer and competition is reduced.
We will also benefit by saving both time and money travelling further afield to carry out jobs. Maybe, we can now do two or three jobs in a day? What would that do for our profits?
Now it starts to get exciting!
If you would like any further help or support on this subject or with your Google Ads in general, I would be delighted to carry out a full Performance Review for you and unearth the hidden treasure in YOUR Google Ads account for free!
Would like a FREE Performance Review of your Google or Facebook Ads activity, from a multi-award-winning expert?
We’ll give you good, honest feedback on your paid ads performance, including what’s good, what’s not so good and the untapped potential in your account, to get more customers each day/week/month… without spending a penny more on clicks!
Just call us on 01420 408054 or email Steve on steve@pixal.co.uk