The building of a perfect campaign structure to silo inbound SEM traffic by match-type to meet your ROAS goals requires some new strategies after updates with Google Ads and Bing Ads. Ted Ives and Adam Seybold offered insights into how to handle these issues during their SMX West session.
Adam Seybold opened the session with an examination into the relevancy and context in search. His account structure strategy for success includes:
- Contextually relevant search advertising
- Minimizing disconnect between user search and advertising content
- Leveraging growth with hyper-focused bidding strategies
Context: To drive results we need to have the correct relevancy to the content that we’re serving to an individual. Audience context matters just as much as search-term context. He shared a location-relevant search example that walked through the difference between searching to book a hotel room when you’re planning on traveling to a city, if you live in the city, versus if you are already in the city.
Living in San Jose: Search for info on hotels
Planning Travel to San Jose: Researching
Travel to San Jose: In need hotel in the city
The summation is that a user’s location in their own purchase journey impacts campaign performance. It can show how close they are to making the decision and you can optimize your bids and campaigns on that.
Minimizing disconnect: He walked through an example search result for someone searching for a navy blue t-shirt and maroon shirts showed up in the result. The way to resolve this is to organize your account not just by groups but by intent.
What not to do: Using a category example, we don’t want to see chocolate cake if we are looking for ice cream.
Single keyword Ad Group not optimal structure example:
All of these variations shouldn’t necessarily be in one group, but instead, be goal-oriented.
Better structured Ad Group example:
Adam spoke about the iceberg effect when it comes to search term density. The relationship between search terms matter, the closer the terms are related, and the smaller the list, the better results.
Focused growth:
To structure for success you have to have a more blended model.
Create a separate Ad Group for the broader terms when you are focused on volume or exploring new variations and add the exact match as a negative. This keeps the high performing exact match in a separate Ad Group.
Recommendation: Review any branded campaign builds.
The intent of the brand search varies, and structuring your account accordingly can improve ROI.
Next, Ted Ives from SEM Copilot discussed the philosophies behind organizing your campaign structure. Some of the reasons we’ve used match types in the past don’t work in the new landscape.
The first thing you need to know about optimizing keywords and match types is having the right keywords to begin with. Comprehensive research is key, but also allowing for broad modifiers to help pull in other relevant keywords is impactful.
Ted’s tips for keyword research:
- Take 8-10 bigrams
- Visit top ranking pages
- Identify other high-frequency terms using keyword density tools
- Combine all unigrams found backward and forward
- Use Google Suggest to find complete queries from these
- Combine most important bigrams with commercial terms
- Run original set through the AdWords Keyword Planner
- Then when you’re all done, use the Keyword Planner to get volumes
Some of Ted’s philosophies:
- Quality score: If you’re going for volume, you’re bound to have some lower quality scores. But you should definitely pause or address your 1s and 2s.
- Match types: Use them all, except for broad
The new world of match types
- Use them all (except for broad)
- Reload keywords back into the system as exact match
- Bid exact match higher but it’s fine to keep them in the same groups as others
- Isolate your exact keywords that are top performing and converting.
In the new account structure world you have two options: The funnel approach or the category approach
B2C funnel organization example:
B2B funnel organization example:
If you can’t organize by funnel because of company or client reporting needs, you can still organize by service or category.
Insights
- Consider the funnel approach to research and organize keywords
- Break out high-volume queries with exact match Ad Groups
- Consider whether it’s wiser to use category approach to “talk the lingo” of others
In conclusion, according to Ted, if you have an account that’s 12 years old you should just rebuild it because that is older than his car.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Amanda Farley is a partner at (SS Digital Media) in Metro Detroit, where she leads operations and strategic planning. With nearly 10 years in the search industry, she uses her experiences to lead digital strategy for enterprise-level brands and companies. Her integrated campaign strategies have earned her and her agency national and local recognition and awards. She’s passionate about growing her teams, clients, and local communities. Outside of the office, Amanda enjoys regularly speaking at local and national conferences, including SMX, FoundConf, HeroConf as well as PRSA and Detroit Women in Digital events.