SES London Day 2: #PPC Campaign Structure Tips from #seslondon

On Wednesday I had the chance to share my thoughts at SES London on PPC Campaign Architecture. For those of you running PPC at a large-scale, with tens or hundreds of thousands of keywords, getting the architecture right is essential, and will provide the framework for your campaigns’ future success.

The three characteristics of a scalable structure

When thinking about designing your campaigns, I like to think about creating a ‘scalable structure’.  A scalable structure has three characteristics.  Firstly, it must be able to scale up to 100% coverage of whatever your website sells now, or in the future.  Second it must allow you to update the campaigns frequently, accurately and easily. Finally, it must allow you to deliver the very best ad copy and landing page to whatever search query triggers on of your listings.

Let product & stock inventory plus consumer search behaviour be at the core of your campaign structure 

When thinking about the components of a campaign, it’s natural to start with your product or stock inventory.  Every category, sub-category, SKU and modifier needs to be accounted for.  But also how consumers search too must be considered (for example, whether price, urgency or service are important and included in a search query).  Bring those together and you can start to build your structure.  So if you’re a travel advertiser, you will probably want a geographically dominant structure, with campaigns such as ‘London|Westminster|Hotels’ and adgroups like ‘Cheap|4 star’ and ‘Landmarks|Victoria Station’.  Note by using delimiters in campaign and adgroup names you can create a virtual directory structure through a naming convention.  And note how descriptive those names are to someone who’s not familiar to the account. Campaign names such as ‘Top Performers’ or ‘High Volume’ are subjective, misleading and to be avoided.  Keywords such as ‘hotels near Victoria Station’ and ‘cheap 4 star hotels in Westminister’ have a natural and obvious home.  Extremely detailed and relevant ad copy can be created alongside.

Note that to do this at scale, you’ll certainly need to deploy technology to help you build out campaigns, and keep them up-to-date.  Product catalogues and price points change daily, and you won’t be able to administrate that by hand.

Setting up campaigns to enable smartphone and tablet search success 

Increasingly, the growth of smartphones and tablets also means we need to create campaign structures that can get more out of these different devices.  Smartphone and tablet sales are forecast to outstrip desktop and laptop this year and beyond, so there importance will only increase.  Research Efficient Frontier issued last year states that US search advertisers will be spending up to 22% of their budget on smartphones and tablets by the end of 2012. 

It’s also interesting to see how the traffic converts too.  A study by Adobe about tablet traffic to retail sites demonstrates that conversion rates were close to that of desktop, whereas Average Order Value was around 20% higher than desktop.

Fortunately, both adCenter and AdWords offer excellent targeting options to build campaigns specifically for non-desktop traffic.  There’s a temptation to try to triplicate your existing campaigns – resist it!  Instead, be guided by the volume of impressions, clicks and conversions you’re already getting when deciding which campaigns to create.  Ad copy should also be customised for each device to make it most appropriate (for example, you may want to promote an app, instead of sending people directly to a site).  All brands should be serious too about the on-site experience for mobile visitors and have a dedicated mobile site.  But don’t send tablet visitors to a mobile site – tablet browsers are more than capable of loading your usual desktop site.

To summarise, getting the right architecture is essential if you want to successfully manage a large scale, rapidly changing search campaigns.  The importance of that only increases as it become necessary to customise campaigns depending on the search device too.