Campaign strategies can be difficult to wrap your head around, but there’s a new way of thinking that will help your bottom line and turn your account inside out. This new strategy allows you to separate your high-value, high-performance keywords (exacts) from your test and growth keywords (modified broad).  This paid search campaign strategy is called the “broad-exact structure”.

Broad Campaigns

Purpose

Broad campaigns cover a wide spectrum of the sales funnel and allows for the broad match to pick up new search queries that can be incorporated into more specified exact campaigns.

Implementation

The first step is to create modified broad versions of our keywords. This will allow us to test and find converting search terms to put into exact matches, but also not allow the search engines to match our keywords to all types of variants. Instead, it keeps those variations to close synonyms, misspellings, phrases and mixed phrases (where the keywords may just be in a different order than what is in the account, but all words are accounted for). These keywords are tightly themed like the exact matches so that our ads are as closely relevant as possible to the keyword and the landing page.

Exact Campaigns

Purpose

Exact campaigns cover the narrow end of the sales funnel. The purposes of the exact groups are to bring in specific, ready-to-convert traffic without having to test these keywords. Exact campaigns and ad groups usually have lower CPCs (cost per clicks) and higher CTRs (click through rates) because the keywords, ad copy and landing pages used are very specific.

Implementation

If you have an account already, use the current converting, best performing keywords and find the actual searches from the “Search Terms” report and create exact matches from them. These will all be placed in specific, narrow ad groups so that the ad copy can be as precise to the keyword and landing page as possible.

Campaign Strategy

Depending on budget, there are two ways of arranging our ad groups. One is by overall theme with both broad and exact ad groups together in one campaign, or two, grouping by theme and match type. This means there would be a broad campaign and an exact campaign with the same naming convention before either “broad” or “exact”. Each campaign, would then, only house the broad or exact ad group versions of that theme in order to best optimize the campaigns.  For instance, this makes it easer to add negative keywords and keeping track of our negatives without them accidentally being added to the exact campaigns. It also makes it easier to optimize budgets and bids.

Negative Keywords

Once the campaigns have been set up, we can take all of our exact matched keywords and turn them into negatives in the broad campaigns at the campaign level. (If we have a mixed campaign, we add in the exact negatives at the ad group level, only to the broad groups. This takes out any cannibalization or competition between the broad and exact keywords and allows for us to test using the broads while catching our high converting terms in exact, which again, usually, cost less, have a higher CTR and have a higher conversion rate.

Campaign Optimization

Lastly, as converted terms come through the modified broad match keywords, by using the search reports, we can add those terms as exacts in either a current exact group, if it matches the other terms, or create a new group. Then, making sure those new terms are re-added to the broad groups as negatives. To learn more about using the search terms report with this campaign strategy, read Nick’s blog post on “Improving AdWords ROI with Search Terms Report“.

Performance

This paid search campaign strategy, when implemented properly, can have a huge impact on account performance and overall strategy. Using this approach, we have seen on average, a 30% improvement in performance.

PPC campaign and account structure strategy will be a part of my presentation at Hero Conf on April 28 as I participate on “The Right Approach: Building Great B2B Accounts” panel.