Optimizing AdWords Campaigns and Ad Groups

Overview of Optimizing Campaigns and Ad Groups

Maintaining organized campaigns and ad groups is important to the performance of your account. Organization helps you achieve your advertising goals, make edits quickly, and target your ads appropriately. By creating well-structured campaigns by theme or product, you'll gain more than just an account that's easy to manage and keep organized.

 You'll also have sets of ads and keywords that are directly related to each other, which helps to improve your Quality Score and to keep your costs low.

A good campaign structure also allows you to:

• Determine which ads are generating the best traffic and conversions (like sales or leads)
• Monitor changes easily
• Have better control over budget and costs
• Easily locate specific keywords
• Easily manage and edit your campaigns

When organizing your account, keep these strategies in mind:

• Organize your campaigns by topic. A well-structured campaign consists of tightly-themed ad groups focusing on just one product or service you offer. Create separate campaigns for each of your product lines, brands, or types of services or offerings. Each ad group should contain specific keyword lists that relate directly to the associated ad texts. When each group of keywords, ads, and landing pages all focus on the same specific theme, your advertising will be much more targeted and effective.

• Target the right languages and locations. Target your audience appropriately by choosing languages and locations that relate to your business. If you target multiple countries, try creating a separate campaign for each country.

• Create highly specific ad groups. Just like with your campaigns, build your ad groups around a single product or service. Group your keywords and placements into related themes. By doing this, you can create ads that directly match what terms a user is searching for and that lead to a landing page promoting exactly what you're selling.

• Avoid duplicate keywords across ad groups. Google shows only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword, so there's no need to include duplicate keywords across ad groups or campaigns. Identical keywords will compete against each other, and the better-performing keyword triggers your ad.

Regardless of how you choose to structure your account, it's important to remain flexible in your strategy -- the structure you first envision when you begin may need further refining as you continue to optimize.