The first thing we look at when opening the Google or Yahoo accounts for new clients how well the current campaigns and ad-groups are organized. We want to know if the keywords are logically divided into ad-groups, and the ad-groups are logically divided into campaigns.

Organization matters because these structures determine how text-ads are matched to keywords, how budget is allocated, and the default breakdowns you’ll get in reports to analyze performance.

It can be difficult or impossible to recover from a bad campaign organization. Ad-groups full of dissimilar keywords mean that your text-ads don’t directly target your keywords which usually drives down both click-through and conversion rates.

More importantly, when ad-groups contain keywords with too wide a range of performance characteristics – such as a bunch of words which average click-through-rates in the 2-4% range and then a couple of outliers with high volume and CTRs over 20% – your ad-group summary reports are going to be full of misleading (and therefore useless) numbers.

Mind Your Brand Terms

As we looked into the campaigns for OnlyNaturalPet.com we quickly saw the most common of all organizational errors; brand terms scattered everywhere. ‘Brand terms’ in this case refers to keywords which include the company name or variants, such as ‘onlynaturalpets’, ‘only natural pet store’, ‘onlynaturalpet.com’ etc.

There was an existing dedicated ad-group for branded terms, but it was part of a campaign full of all kinds of other non-brand focused ad-groups. And many of the core brand terms were repeated in several other ad-groups both alone (duplicating keywords already existing in the branded ad-group) or within other phrases (‘only natural pets dog food’).

These branded phrases trounced all others in terms of both click-through rates and conversion rates – running between 2 and 50x higher. Imagine the impact these were having on the campaign and ad-group results as reported within both the engines (Adwords etc.) and Omniture SearchCenter.

We defined a new ‘branded terms only’ campaign, created ad-groups within that campaign for the core branded terms ‘only natural pet store’ etc. and others for groups of words which use the brand name along with category and product terms. All relevant keywords and phrases were removed from any other campaigns and ad-groups and placed into this new brand-focused structure.

The impact was seen immediately. Just yesterday one of the product focused ad-groups that previously contained a smattering of ONP brand terms, reported a conversion rate nearly 50% lower than it did for the same timeframe three weeks ago.

This gives us a far better picture of the value of this ad-group in its true ability to drive revenue. It improves our ability to compare ad-groups on their own merits because the brand influence has been removed.

Synonyms Are Different

We also found cases where keyword lists had been well expanded to include common synonyms and related terms, but some of those deserved their own ad-groups and didn’t have them. The word ‘organic’ for example, is an important (and probably distinct) adjunct to the word ‘natural’ when you’re talking about dog food.

And someone searching for organic dog food would have a higher chance of clicking on a text ad that used the word ‘organic’ than one using the word ‘natural’. Or so we believe, and so these words have been moved into their own ad-groups and tests are underway to compare their performance in the new configuration. More about our findings in a future post.

Overall Campaign Assessment

Beyond the branding issues and some cases where there seemed to be a logical case for breaking one ad-group into two or three, our findings in the Only Natural Pet Store campaigns were pretty good. They had already segregated their content network campaigns from those running on the main search engines, isolated terms with geographic keywords, and separated ad-groups into major campaign sections such covering different business/inventory areas such medical, food, dogs, cats, etc.

With comfort in the basic organization, we’ll next take a closer look at the keywords and match types that fill all these ad-groups.

This post is part of a case-study series on the Commerce360 management of paid search campaigns for onlynaturalpets.com. It is being done with the kind permission of Only Natural Pet Store, and some data has been changed to keep PetSmart guessing. For your convenience, we’re keeping a list of all posts in the series.