In the online marketing field, search engine optimization (SEO) is generally seen as a rather wild and wooly world with unclear rules, sluggish control, and fuzzy results, while pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is viewed as being much easier to manage.

With PPC there is a sense of having your hands firmly on the controls. Here you have the ability to dial in your traffic and tweak your results.

While there is validity to this perception, anyone who has managed a significant PPC campaign knows that keeping it organized and running at peak efficiency is no picnic either. In many ways, PPC campaigns can be just as complex as SEO. While the AdWords algorithm for determining ad positions may not be quite as shrouded in mystery as the organic algorithm, several factors must be considered, including:

• The maximum cost per click (CPC) bid
• The click-through rate (CTR) on the ad
• The relevance of the ad to the keyword
• The relevance of the landing page to the keyword and the ad
• The load time of the landing page
• Other landing page "quality" factors
• Historical performance of the keyword, ad, ad group, campaign, and account

And these are just the surface-level criteria! When you begin studying your campaign performance in Google AdWords you soon get the sense that there are other factors at play.

Combine this complexity with the fact that you are working with hundreds or thousands of keywords, (exploring the possible permutations of your keywords is a great way to grasp the concept of "infinity"), as well as multiple text ads, and you begin to realize that PPC is every bit as involved as SEO.

But unlike SEO, with PPC you've got real cash on the line. Get sloppy and you could end up spending a boatload of money with little to show for it. The importance of staying on top of your PPC campaigns can’t be overstated. With that in mind, here are eight tips to help you tame the Google Beast and bend it to your will. (Most of these tips apply to Yahoo and Microsoft as well, but this article s focused on Google AdWords).

1. Organize campaigns around concepts.

Google created the [Campaigns > Ad Group > Keywords] structure for the purpose of organizing what they knew would be a wide range of keywords for most advertisers. Yet we’ve seen many AdWords users who don’t use this structure as intended.

You should create multiple campaigns that are oriented to very specific concepts related to your business. For example, if you're managing the Web site Top 5 Flicks [www.top5flicks.com/] you might want to organize your campaigns into genres such as "Action", "Comedy", and "Drama". If you sell and rent videos, you might want to organize your campaigns that way too. Or you might even want to combine these concepts and have campaigns such as "Action Rental", "Action Sale", "Comedy Rental", etc. Don’t hesitate to create multiple campaigns because, when you get to the ad group level, you’ll be glad you did.

But first, a few more tips about organizing at the campaign level.

2. Separate campaigns for content and search networks.

If you set a campaign to run on both the Search and Content networks you have just made your ability to track performance much more difficult. Why? Because the clicking behavior of visitors from the search and content networks are radically different from each other.

First, you can expect the CTR for search ads to be something like 100 times the rate of content ads. So you may get an average CTR of 2.00% from your search ads and 0.02% from your content ads. Combine these into the same campaign and your overall campaign CTR may be something like 0.95% which doesn’t tell you anything.

Another key reason not to combine these ads into the same campaign is because the visitor behavior tends to be quite different between these networks. Visitors from search ads tend to be much more purposeful - actively looking for what you are selling. Visitors from content ads tend to be more impulse clickers and may be less likely to convert.

Not surprisingly, the CPC from content ads tends to be much lower than search clicks. So with content and search combined, not only is your CTR all muddled up, but so is your cost information. You’ll find yourself wasting time in a vain attempt to understand just what the data is telling you.

The answer is simply to create two separate campaigns. Based on the "Top 5 Flicks" example let’s say you want to generate traffic for the "Action movies" category. Create two campaigns: one named "Action movies - Search" and the other "Action movies - Content", and check the corresponding network for each of these campaigns. Now you can track these campaigns separately and clearly and see the difference in performance between the networks.

3. Separate campaigns for fat head and long tail keywords.

Having created two ads for the search and content networks, you may want to take a further step and create a separate search campaign for your "fat head" and "long tail" keywords. You'll find that a relatively few keywords will generate the majority of your traffic. And because they are high volume, they will generally be more expensive as well. So you really need to stay on top of these particular keywords. But you shouldn’t neglect your long tail keywords because, even though the traffic they generate is more sporadic, they may have higher click-through and/or conversion rates and therefore be very cost effective.

So using this method you would now have the following campaigns:

• Action movies - Content
• Action movies - Search (Top Keywords)
• Action movies - Search (Long Tail)

By putting your popular keywords in a separate campaign you can more easily focus on that campaign on a regular basis without having to wade through the masses of long tail keywords. Of course, you'll still want to peruse those long tail ad groups but since there is less money on the line you can deal with them on a less frequent basis.

4. Filter Campaign Summary by network.

A dropdown control in the upper-right corner of the Campaign Summary allows you to display only traffic from the Search network, only the Content network, both Search and Content separately, or both Search and Content combined (the Summary view). Because you have defined your campaigns to break out the search and content traffic, you can view this report in the Summary view and still be able to see all your content and search traffic separately.

You can also sort the Campaign Summary on various columns to reveal the areas on which you need to concentrate. If you sort this report by cost and you don’t see all you’re "Top Keywords" campaigns clustered toward the top, then you should check out your long tail campaigns to see what important keywords have not been identified. Sort the column by CTR and you may see the long tail keywords near the top while the "Content" campaigns cluster at the bottom. If you don't, you’ll want to take a closer look because there’s probably room for improvement.

The idea here is to give yourself the data you need to triage your ad groups because, as we will see in Part 2, you don't want to just go meandering through your ad groups aimlessly - you may never return!

Conclusion

Laying the proper foundation for your campaigns is essential to optimizing your keyword and ad performance. Even if you've already created several campaigns without using these techniques, you should get started on laying this new foundation right away. You may want to restructure your existing campaigns or build a brand new set of campaigns from scratch. But as long as you're running with poorly designed campaigns you'll continue to get a blurry picture of your performance, waste time trying to manage your account, and pay more for your clicks. In Part 2 we will dive deeper into the ad words and learn how to manage your keywords and ads more efficiently.

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About The Author

Dane Christensen is the SEM Manager for Lyris. He is responsible for optimizing the company's PPC bid management across seven different search engines.

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