Search: How to Approach it?

In my previous post, I covered the fundamentals of Search. Here, I'll dive in a bit deeper and shed some insight on some of the tactics I use to create campaigns that produce results.

Like with all things new and unfamiliar, Search can be a bit daunting when you want to roll up your sleeves and get started. Worry not, for I am here to make the process as painless as possible : ) First, let's familiarize ourselves with some of the terminology.

For starters, let's look at the basic account structure. There is a hierarchy which basically consists of this:

Account
Campaign
Ad Group
Keywords

Now let's observe each one further.

To make sense of this structure, let me use a company that we are all familiar with: Amazon. Now that we have a client, this should be a bit clearer.

Since Amazon carries pretty much everything, we'll pick one category to use as our "Account". I'm a tech lover so let's use Electronics as our Account. Now that we have our Account name, the rest should fall into place. For Campaigns, we can use a couple of the different categories within the site; I'll use TVs and Computers for simplicity's sake. So now that we have our two Campaigns, "TVs" and "Computers", we can move on to Ad Groups. Although a hierarchy, it makes sense to actually build out your keyword list first. Google has a Keyword Tool that gives you a list of keywords which you can get by providing a link (i.e., Amazon Electronics) or by providing a list of keywords which the tool will provide additional variations of. So if you type in "tv", it may give "sony tv", "lcd tv", etc. This tool is free so if you are interested in checking it out then give it a stab. After you have your keywords, you can then place them into Ad Groups. My word of advice: have as many Ad Groups as possible (each search engine has its own quota). Why? Because you want your keywords to all be similar so that your Ads (I'll get into that a little later) will be relevant to every keyword. Here are my sample keywords to help illustrate:

lcd tv
sony lcd tv
sony bravia tv
52" sony bravia lcd tv

I would not place ANY of these keywords in the same Ad Group because they are all separate products despite their commonality of being lcd tvs. Here is how I would designate these keywords to Ad Groups.

		Ad Group
lcd tv		lcd tv
sony lcd tv		lcd tv - sony
sony bravia tv		lcd tv - sony - bravia
52" sony bravia lcd tv		lcd tv - sony - bravia - 52

This way, you can make the most targeted Ad Copy (I'll explain why that's important in a future post). I want to also clarify that I wouldn't put only one keyword per Ad Group; I would put concatenations of those terms in those Ad Groups. For example, in the "lcd tv" Ad Group, I'd also throw in keywords like "buy lcd tv", "lcd tv deals", etc; I would also use the same method for the other ad groups. Regarding Ads, keep in mind that they are on the Ad Group level and not the Keyword level (except on Ask.com). Therefore, if you have 1,000 Ad Groups, you need at least 1,000 Ads. Don't let that number frighten you as creating ads is a simple task once you master a few Excel tricks. Here is an example of what one of the ads would look like in the "lcd tv - sony - bravia" Ad Group:

Sony Bravia TV
Get Great Deals on Sony Bravia
LCD TVs at Amazon.
Amazon.com

As you can see, the ad has the keyword in both the title and in the description and by having an ad that is relevant to ALL the keywords in an Ad Group, your Quality Score increases. Ad relevance is one of the factors that determine quality score and here are the other factors. I won't go into depth as to what the quality score is now but in short, it is what determines how much you will have to pay per click. So what you want to aim for is the highest quality score possible so that you pay the least per click and can get the best position as possible.

So now that we've established the basic framework of what a typical Search account looks like, I feel comfortable rolling up my sleeves and going into some of the nitty gritty details. I'll prevent information overload so will briefly touch upon some of the other key aspects that one needs to be aware of when launching a Search marketing campaign.

One thing to keep in mind is your budget. You shouldn't be disheartened if your company doesn't have an Amazon-esque budget to spend on your Search campaigns. With proper consulting, you can get the most out of your Search dollars. When deciding how much to allocate to each campaign, think of the popularity of the category. Let's say in addition to TVs and Computers, I had another campaign for Networking (i.e., cables, storage, etc.). This isn't as popular as TVs and Computers so it wouldn't make sense to allocate to the three campaigns with an even split of the budget; giving TVs and Computers 40% each and Networking 20% would make more sense. Keep in mind that this isn't a rule set in stone and you should move money and allocate towards performance a few days/week after a campaign has launched. So for example, if I see that my TV campaign is performing much better than I predicted, I'd shift more dollars from either of the two lesser performing ones.

Everything in this post gives a fundamental look at how a Search campaign should be set up. Of course, there are so many other facets to it, but I'll save those for other posts : ) I hope this was informative and if your company is looking to venture into Search then at least this is something you can relay to your marketing team to teach them the basics.