Part 2: Setting Up the Campaigns and Ad Groups

October 4, 2011, Marketing Sherpa published a graph to illustrate the results of a study, which compares the degree of difficulty of various pay per click ad management tactics with the level of effectiveness of the tactics. We will refer to this chart throughout the series with an explanation of how the tactics we discuss are accomplished and why they are effective.

Step 1: Organizing Campaigns and Ad Groups

Far to the right (very difficult) and high on the chart (very effective) there is a large (very popular) sphere labeled “Highly targeted ad groups.” What PPC professionals have found is that it is well worth the time and effort to organize the account carefully into campaigns and ad groups that are highly targeted.

We advocate setting up an outline for the organization, with campaigns as the top level and ad groups as the secondary level. For an ecommerce website, this should not be difficult because your online store is probably already organized into categories, possibly sub-categories and products. Let’s take a women’s apparel store as an example.

Looking at the online store you find the following major categories:

• Shirts and Blouses
• Tees and Camis
• Sweaters
• Dresses
• Suits
• Pants
• Skirts
• Jackets
• Accessories

But there are a variety of products within each of these categories, so you can create product sub-categories as follows:

• Shirts and Blouses
• Classic Shirts
• Blouses
• Tunics
• Tees and Camis
• T-shirts
• Shells
• Camis
• Sweaters and Knits
• Pullovers
• Cardigans
• Shawls

and so on, until you have categories and sub categories for every department of the online store.

Of course, there may be special categories, such as “New Arrivals” and “Best Sellers” to work into the schema.

At this point you have your basic organization for your Campaigns and Ad Groups. It would be possible to organize your ad groups to the product level, but that may not be time worth spent. Better to experiment with that tactic later when we get into the discussion of optimizing landing pages.

The next step will be choosing the keywords for your ad groups.