Using Account Organization to Spend PPC Dollars More Intelligently - Part 1

Most of the PPC accounts I look at do not take advantage of all of the different options that AdWords offers to organize your account for maximum success. Most of them simply organize their campaigns based upon keywords. They'll separate keywords into separate campaigns just because they're different keywords. Or, they'll keep all different kinds of keywords for all different kinds of products with all different kinds of marketing goals in the same campaign. But, AdWords has given us the flexibility to have much more control over how we are spending our money so that every dollar can be maximized.

First, your account should be organized based upon your marketing objectives. Therefore, before you create your campaigns (or if they've been running for a while now), lay out specifically what it is you're are trying to accomplish.

Whatever, as long as it's specific. Once you've effectively laid out your marketing objectives, they should guide you into how to organize your campaigns and ad groups in your account. If you have different products that require different budgets and have different product margins, conversion rates, sales cycles, etc., then you want to organize them into different campaigns so that you can control what is essentially different "markets" in your business.

For example, if a cruise company is selling different types of cruises all around the world, they might be targeting people in the United States looking for Caribbean cruises as well as people looking for Arctic cruises. Let's say the average Caribbean cruise sale is $2000 and they make a profit margin of 20% and the average Arctic cruise sale is $8000 and they make the same 20% profit margin. And let's say that each distinct landing page has the same conversion rate of 2%.

If this is the case, then the profit per click (visitor) that the cruise company makes for the Caribbean cruise is $8 ($2000 x 20% x 2 / 100) and for the Arctic cruise it's $32 ($8000 x 20% x 2 / 100). If they have the same amount of tickets available to sell for Caribbean cruises as Arctic cruises, they are going to want to have a much bigger budget for the Arctic cruises. Since they make more for every cruise sold, they'll be willing to spend more for visitors.

Controlling the amount of money that is spent on each product type is a good reason to separate these distinct products into distinct campaigns and is just one of the options that AdWords has available to control how your ads are delivered and at what cost.

In my next post, we'll be looking at more of the options that AdWords offers to allow complete control over keeping your PPC dollars spent intelligently in relation to your marketing objectives.
May 27, 2010