Campaigns are the highest level of structure available in search engine marketing. Why do you need them – why do you need any structure at all? The answer is, relevance… the relevance of your ad creatives to your keywords drives clicks, and the relevance of your landing pages to your ads drives conversions. Of course strong calls to action, persuasive copy and other factors also help drive clicks and conversions, but without relevance these other factors don’t matter.

So how do you decide how to group keywords and ad creatives into different SEM campaigns? To achieve relevance, create different campaigns for each broad product class you offer. For example, if you sell photo/video consumer electronics you might have one campaign for digital cameras, and another for camcorders. Within each campaign, you can then create ad groups with related sets of keywords. For example, the digital camera campaign might have different ad groups for lenses as opposed to complete cameras.

Beyond broad product classes, how else should you separate campaigns? Continuing with the example above, do you only have two campaigns, one for digital cameras and one for camcorders? No, you’ll want to have more than just two campaigns…but how do you separate them? One way is to create different campaigns based on the different campaign settings that are available. Google’s campaign settings are: end dates, daily budget, network distribution preferences (content versus search), and targeting your audience by geographic location and language. Here are four other ways you can separate your campaigns based on these settings:

1. Separate campaigns based on start and end dates.

Assuming you have any kind of seasonality in your business, you can enable different creatives and different offers for the same keywords by season. For example, you may have a Valentine's Day campaign that adds Valentine-themed wording to your creatives.

You may also want to enable different keywords depending on the season. For example, you might not keep any snow shovels in stock in the summer, so you won’t want to be bidding on any snow shovel related keywords in the summer months.

2. Create separate campaigns with different budget levels.

Separating campaigns by budget allows you to achieve the most basic level of that Holy Grail in online marketing – optimization – specifically budget optimization where you spend more money on winners, and less money on losers. This most basic level of optimization yields huge improvements in your paid search revenues and profits, and is a core reason why to do paid search: because you can measure what works and allocate more budget to what works. What does this mean? It means assigning ad groups to campaigns based on the ad group’s profitability, however you are measuring it (i.e. return on ad spend, cost per lead, etc.).

For example, have three campaigns: one for most profitable, one for least profitable, one for the rest. By assigning all your most profitable ad groups to one campaign, you can then set the budget the highest for your most profitable campaigns. Similarly, by assigning all your least profitable ad groups to one campaign, you can set a lower budget for those and spend less on them.

3. Split your product class campaigns based on network distribution preferences.

• Split campaigns into separate ones for content and search networks. Why? The networks perform very differently (particularly for clickthrough rate and cost per click), so it will be easier to judge performance of each network when they are in separate campaigns.


• Use different keywords for each network. In the search network, your creative will appear for each keyword you bid on, whereas on the content network the search engines look at a list of keywords in an ad group to get an idea of a an ad group theme, then show your creative for content that matches that theme. Because you are only using keywords to create a theme, you might use general words which do not convert for search, but help determine a theme.


• Use different creatives for intent-based advertising (search) versus interruptive advertising (content). That’s because users are in very different mindsets when searching or reading, and different creatives resonate with different mindsets. Taking this into account, you may even want to create different campaigns for content network 'tests' and content network 'winners', and use the test campaigns to find which content sites work for you, and move the successful ones to the winner campaign so you can make sure your creatives will continue to appear on those sites – don’t trust the search engines to keep showing your creatives on your best sites.

4. Create different campaigns for different geographic locations and languages.

For geographic targeting, you might want different creatives that: drive people to local stores, tie into local campaigns in other media, or use different slang/wording. Similarly for language targeting, bilingual speakers who use non-standard language settings might be more responsive to different keywords and creatives than people who only speak one language.

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About the Author

Daryl Michalik is a product manager responsible for Lyris HQ Search Marketing and client services. He has over 6 years of experience in online marketing and Web analytics, plus a background in strategic marketing, financial analysis and product marketing.

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