SEM Intermediate Series: Keyword Organization Best Practices

This is the 10^th post in the SEM Intermediate Series, a collection of posts intended for search engine marketing professionals looking for guidance in monitoring and adjusting the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of a PPC campaign. This series is a continuation of the SEM Beginner Series.

When launching or re-structuring campaigns, it's important to ensure you have the best keyword set to align with your account and campaign objectives. While keyword research can sometimes be time consuming, using best practices from launch will help you be consistently successful. As a search account manager, I've seen hundreds of advertisers' accounts and helped to optimize account structure, most of which has resulted in greater return on investment (ROI), so it's well worth the effort. Today, I will be sharing best practices to help you succeed when going live and/or restructuring your adCenter account.

Campaign Structure
Let's apply campaign organization best practices to the example of a Chicago sporting goods store by the name of "Adventure Works" (referred to going forward as "AW", not a real advertiser). This advertiser wants to promote its World Cup soccer merchandise for all 32 teams, including the United States, and wants to have the ability to set campaign budgets based on team, as AW has different quantities of merchandise in-stock per team. To achieve the desired campaign objectives, AW should create one unique campaign for each country, totaling 32 campaigns. The advertiser should also create a brand only campaign to bid on variations of "Adventure Works" to call audience attention to their brand and increase brand-awareness. Another best practice for AW will be to create a local non-brand campaign with geo-modified keywords such as "chicago sports store", "chicago world cup" and "Chicago soccer", allowing them to appear on the results page for local customers. This combined approach allows AW to be agile in the marketplace, and pause campaigns as appropriate when running out of specific team merchandise. They can also pause non-team specific campaigns when all World Cup soccer merchandise has been sold.

Ad Group & Keyword Structure
Now that we've structured campaigns to meet specific objectives, it's time to structure ad groups. AW offers a variety of merchandise. For this example, let's focus on hats. AW offers mainly ball-caps and winter hats that are team specific. By using Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to research top keywords, AW can group keywords into sizes per hat type. AW can also create and include a non-size related ad group per campaign. This will allow AW to write specific ad copy per ad group, ensuring a high keyword-to-ad copy relevancy (by specifying the hat type and size in the ad copy). Here is what the ad group structure (with an example keyword in parenthesis) would look like.

- Baseball Hats - S (small baseball hats)

- Baseball Hats - M (medium baseball hats)

- Baseball Hats - L (large baseball hats)

- Baseball Hats - XL (extra-large baseball hats)

- Winter Hats - S (small winter hats)

- Winter Hats - M (medium winter hats)

- Winter Hats - L (large winter hats)

- Winter Hats - XL (extra-large winter hats)

- Baseball Hats - General (b hats)

- Winter Hats - General (winter hats)

Typically, we recommend a maximum of 20 keywords per ad group. This best practice will result in higher CTR due to increased keyword-ad relevancy as mentioned above. Microsoft adCenter also allows you to target your audience geographically and/or demographically at the campaign or ad group level. These options help you achieve your desired audience to maximize ROI. For today's example, we will not be applying any targeting as we want to maximize our traffic volume and potential merchandise sales.

Ads Structure
I like to refer to ads as a sales pitch for a searcher. Creating descriptive ads that are relevant to a user's query drives clicks to your website. Microsoft adCenter's algorithms use many factors when determining ad position, including bids and CTR as well as other historical performance factors. Building strong CTR for your ads typically results in paying less per click over time compared to your competitors, who have lower CTR.

To build strong ad performance, we recommend having no more than 2-3 ads per ad group. The more granular you can get with keyword categorization and ad copy, the higher your chances of success. For example, when bidding on the keyword "baseball hat", you should include the phrase "baseball hats" in your ad copy as well as a strong call to action - using words such as "buy" or "shop". This helps your potential customer to relate to the ad and increase your keyword-ad performance.

If you created a "hats" ad group and only included "hats" in your ad copy when a searcher is searching for "baseball hats", the user may be more likely to click on an ad that specifically calls out "baseball hats". A great workaround for this is to utilize dynamic keyword insertion.

Best Practices
In summary, use the following best practices when determining your account/campaign structure to achieve success and scalability:

- Align campaign structure to account/campaign objectives.

- Group related keywords into common categories that can be used to properly structure your ad groups.

- Be specific in ad copy using related keywords; example: include "winter hats" for a winter hats ad group.

- Best practice: 20 Keywords maximum per ad group; thus increasing keyword-ad combo relevancy and performance.

- Best practice: 2-3 ads per ad group with minimum one static ad.

We also recommend leveraging the keyword categorization and monetization reports found in Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to group keywords and bid appropriately for maximum performance.

Additional information on this time saving tool and a link to download it can be found at the Learning Center. 

What methods and best practices do you use for keyword categorization? Feel free to add comments and share your best practices!

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