Optimizing AdWords Campaigns – A New Strategus Blog Series

Starting this month, we’ll be diving into optimizing AdWords campaigns, and the in’s and out’s of the AdWords platform to effectively produce results that you desire. Each post hereafter will focus on how to optimize individual metrics and how they affect one another.

Before a campaign is launched there are what I like to call pre-optimizations that we can put into place so that campaigns are running cost effectively from the beginning.

To achieve pre-optimizations, we’ll conduct the following during a paid search account build.
1. Ensure a proper account structure, where we have multiple campaigns with limited ad groups within each campaign, and with limited keywords within each ad group.
a. Spreading out our keywords and ad group in this way improves our ability to be nimble in our optimizations and prevents a certain ad group or keyword from engulfing an individual campaign’s spend.
2. Ensure the account structure follows AdWord’s best practices for increased quality score and ad rank, where we have multiple campaigns with limited ad groups with limited keywords (<10), where keywords have a consistent theme that is cohesive with the ads in that ad group and the landing pages the ads point to. Here's an example of what an adwords account structure should look like.

3. Setting up an account structure that focuses on ad rank (which is different from ad position), ensures we will achieve high quality scores, and affordable and relevant traffic for our campaigns.
4. During a campaign build utilize the right match types and negative keywords to drive the right traffic and prevent other traffic from getting in.

During a campaign’s lifetime, there are many levels to optimizing, as there are many metrics that can be influenced to achieve a client’s goals. Each metric is influential to one-another in some way, and making changes to affect one metric can have unforeseen outcomes, good or bad. Only experience can help you make predictions during optimization, and even the most experienced paid search optimizers experience unforeseen performance shifts. In our next post we’ll cover how to optimize for Impressions. Stay tuned!