Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of PPC accounts, and what never ceases to amaze me is how the same mistakes are being made time and time again, even by some of the biggest agencies in the country.

I’ve always maintained that PPC is easy, and that if you do it correctly, it doesn’t really take all that much time to get great results.

So what I’ve decided to do is to put together ten pieces of advice that I would offer to anybody managing an Adwords account. This isn’t a ‘how to do PPC’ manual, rather it’s a set of guidelines for somebody that’s managing an account, and isn’t sure how to get its performance moving in the right direction. This blog post will feature the first five pieces of advice, so watch out for my next blog post with the final five recommendations!

1. Start Simple

If you are building an account from scratch, there’s a real temptation to produce a keyword list with thousands of keywords split across hundreds of Ad Groups, and dozens of campaigns. You may want to try out the Display Network, some Interest Targeting, advertising on You Tube, possibly a bit of Remarketing, and so on…

Slow down there! The more complex an account is, the more time and effort it will take to optimise its performance. Build a relatively simply account structure with an easily manageable number of keywords and Ad Groups, and get that working properly first. Once your main campaign is performing well, you can introduce additional levels of complexity one at a time.

Just bid on the keywords that you are confident will deliver good results, don’t worry too much about the long tail, and use Phrase Matching or Modified Broad Matching to pick up other relevant searches.

Run search query reports to pick up new keywords with enough traffic to justify their inclusion (if it’s unlikely to get another click this month, it’s not worth worrying about), or exclusion (again, only worthwhile if people are likely to search for things containing that word regularly).

Regarding negative keywords, don’t include search queries as negatives if you can avoid it – use single words where possible. If you don’t sell red widgets, don’t include [red widgets] as a negative – you’ll still appear for cheap red widgets, red widget and red widgets uk. Instead, include ‘red’ as a negative keyword.

Also, decide whether negative keywords are appropriate just for the Ad Group, or for the whole campaign. If you only sell widgets, ‘red’ should be added at campaign level (that way, you don’t need to add it to your ‘cheap widgets’ Ad Group), but if you also sell thingies, including red ones. It needs to be applied at keyword level. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to manage your keyword list if you split them like this…

2. Be Organised

One of the biggest frustrations that I have when I review a potential client’s account is when I’m confronted with chaos. Whilst I have nothing against chaos per se, it has no place in an Adwords account. An organised structure isn’t just important for optimising your account, it’s absolutely essential.

What additional value do you get from having 100 campaigns in your account? It’s not essential to do this in order to report on performance – if you consider your Ad Group names carefully, you can still reflect multiple levels of structure easily enough (with a bit of Excel jiggery-pokery).

For example, if you want to report on different types of clothing, but also on brands, you may have a campaign for each brand, with an Ad Group for each type of clothing, or vice-versa. However, simply labelling your Ad Groups like this:

Nike – Shoes

Adidas – Shoes

Nike – Tops

Reebok – Tops

Etc.

…will allow you to report on brands or clothing types easily.

There’s no disadvantage to doing this, and there are a number of advantages. Firstly, you have fewer campaigns, so you don’t have to split your budget into as many pieces. I reviewed a campaign recently that had a daily budget of more than £10,000, but there were so many campaigns that some had a daily budget of just £2. Clearly, the risk of running out of budget in this case was high, despite the overall budget being more than adequate. The more campaigns you have, the more likely you are to run out of money on one campaign, whilst others carry a surplus.

Keywords are also easier to manage. If you find that people are searching for ‘nike training shoes,’ you can easily add ‘reebok training shoes,’ ‘adidas training shoes’ etc. to the appropriate Ad Groups as well in seconds. Similarly, adding negative keywords is simple.

More than anything else, it’s important that your Ad Groups and Campaigns don’t overlap. The same search query shouldn’t be able to trigger adverts from two different Ad Groups or campaigns. If it can, then it becomes difficult to tailor your advert message to the search, and it’s impossible to adjust bids effectively – all that’s liable to happen if you reduce a bid is that you’ll push clicks into a different Ad Group.

This is a common problem, particularly where people use generic Ad Groups. There’s nothing wrong in the above structure in having Ad Groups for generic (non-branded) clothing and footwear searches – but assuming that you are using Phrase or Broad Match, you need to include the various brands (Nike, Adidas etc) as negative keywords. Similarly, if you have a generic Nike Ad Group, you will need to include the product types as negative keywords. Otherwise, if somebody searches for Nike Trainers, they are in danger of seeing a generic advert for Nike, or one for trainers, rather than a specific Nike Trainers Ad Group.

3. Be Relevant

In the last point, I highlighted that if somebody searches for Nike Trainers, you want to ensure that you show an advert for Nike Trainers, not a generic Nike or Trainers advert. There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, obviously people are more likely to believe that you sell what they are looking for if your advert says that you do. Secondly, you can choose a more appropriate landing page. As a result, you can potentially increase click through rate and conversion rate.

Consider the simple account structure that you started out with from my first point. By gradually expanding out your keyword list over time, and segmenting Ad Groups when you find groups of keywords that indicate a different type of searcher (maybe from adjectives that they use, like cheap or luxury, or from conversion rate), perhaps some keywords clearly perform better than others. Even from click through rate, maybe your advert is speaking more clearly to some people than others; you can then improve the relevance of your adverts, as well as tailoring your bids.

4. Bid To Your Objective

I really hope that you understand exactly what you are trying to achieve with your account. It needs to be very clearly defined and measurable not just overall, but at the level at which you manage your bids (Ad Group level, in the main part, if you’ve got any sense!).

Why do you need to be able to see the performance at Ad Group level if you are adjusting your bids at Ad Group level? Well,  how are you going to know which bids to increase or decrease, if you have no idea which Ad Groups are delivering sales or leads or whatever you want?

Ideally, your objective should be as close to the business’s objective as possible. If they are trying to maximise profit, and you know revenue and their margin on that revenue, at Ad Group level, then you can optimise on contribution to profit. You can work out how much they make from a click via an Ad Group, and adjust the bids based on this to maximise their profitability. If you don’t have their margin data, then you should be looking to maximise revenue. If you don’t know the order value, then maximise sales volumes. If you can’t track actual sales (possible if payments are processed on a third-party website), then maximise shopping baskets created.

Whatever your objective is, you should set your bids solely with this in mind. It doesn’t matter if that means that some searches show your adverts, whilst others show you in tenth. You should try to get the same return on investment on every Ad Group (or keyword, if you insist on trying to optimise at that level).

5. Don’t Run Out Of Money

Often the biggest mistake that advertisers make is to run out of budget before the end of the day. If you run out of budget by lunchtime, you’re sabotaging your account. Think about it. What happens if you halve your bids? Your adverts appear lower, you get a much lower click through rate, and your budget lasts until the end of the day. But if you’re still spending the same amount, and you’ve halved your cost per click, you’ve doubled your clicks, and conversions, and revenue. Your profit goes through the ceiling, and you’ve not had to do any work to achieve it.

In order to maximise the number of conversions that you get for your budget, it should just run out as the day ends. In practice, this is impossible to achieve due to random variation, but since Google allows you to overspend some days to compensate for days when you underspend, you should be able to get close…

Check your lost impression share (budget) at campaign level. If any campaign is running out of budget every day, either move some from a campaign with a surplus, or reduce the bids.

I hope you’ve learned something and stay tuned for recommendations six to ten in my next blog post! In the meantime, please feel free to leave comments or questions below or on Twitter - @CustardMite.