How to structure your Google AdWords account

Jan.19.2009 Hints & Tips

If you have ever set up an AdWords account and been overwhelmed by the stats or found it difficult to understand what they are telling you, it may be down to the way you have set up your account rather than what it is saying.

A well thought out Google AdWords account benefits from improved quality score (QS), lower bid prices, higher ad positions and more effective reporting/ analysis.

A Google AdWords account has four levels:
1. Account
2. Campaign
3. Ad Group
4. Keyword

How you structure each level at the set up stage will impact on both your account performance and the ease at which you can analyse results. It will also remove the often tedious and lengthy process of having to restructure the account further down the line.

How to structure the account
Campaign: A product or service
Ad Group: Search themes surrounding the campaign
Keyword: The keywords associated with the ad group theme

For example, if we apply this to Heart Internet…

Campaign: Domain names
Ad Group: Cheap domain name
Keyword: ‘Cheap domain’; ‘cheap domain names’; ‘cheap domain UK’

We would then run an advert tailored to the ad group/ keyword. For example, if someone searched for “Cheap domain names”, our advert would be as follows…

Cheap Domain Names
Domain names only £2.59/year
.com only £4.99. Register now
INSTAHost /cheap-domain

Why structure the account that way?
1. Increased relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group (QS benefit)

2. Increased relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query (QS benefit)

3. Adverts tailored to the keyword see a major increase in click through rate

4. Easier to adjust bids and distribute budgets to the keywords that are the strong performers

5. It is easy to run reports at each level without unrelated products or keywords skewing the numbers

6. Conversion tracking cost per acquisition statistics are clean at each level (e.g. if we had grouped ‘cheap domain’ keywords with ‘bulk domain names’ at the ad group level the conversion figure doesn’t tell us which generated the most sales)

7. It informs your SEO efforts through the impressions metric (i.e. which keywords are the most popular?)

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