Structure

How you structure your ad account, campaigns and ad groups plays an outsized role in how your account can be managed and will perform. 

 There is something to be said for elegance. There’s a lot going on in PPC accounts, and the less unnecessary balls we have to juggle, the more PPC specialists will be focused on driving performance instead of...not driving performance. I tend to ‘frontload’ some of this work by building my campaigns out a bit more granularly than most. For example, let’s say I want to get more leads with display campaigns. I always, always, always keep display retargeting separate from display prospecting (AKA everything that isn’t retargeting). Why? Magnitude. Look at how many display cookies are on your retargeting lists. Compare that with the amount of cookies in the ‘similar to’ lists of those same retargeting lists. For most advertisers, the ‘similar to’ lists are orders of magnitude larger. And Google’s in-market audiences are even bigger than the ‘similar to’ lists. And the affinity audiences are even larger than those!

It all comes down to supply. The more cookies there are, the more people that can be shown ads. With more people, Google is more able to be more discerning in who gets shown that ad. You’re probably paying for display clicks (although paying for impressions and conversions can both be advantageous and deserve their own discussion), but Google is paying for those impressions, and normally only gets ad revenue for clicks (yes, all bids are converted to CPM bids on display, but I’m talking revenue for Google, not comparative display bids). So Google is therefore incentivized to show ads to people that are more likely to click...and therefore make Google more money. With more people to sort through, and legions of info on each of those people, Google can self-optimize more. So if you have display retargeting audiences in the same campaign as VASTLY larger display prospecting audiences, those prospecting audiences will probably get most of that campaign’s budget. I have seen so many retargeting lists fail to reach the majority of their cookies because they were getting screwed by much larger prospecting lists in the same campaign. The solution? Retargeting and prospecting must be kept separate, always and forever. So give retargeting its own campaign, and more than enough budget, and a frequency cap that’s conservative enough to not annoy your prospects.

 For prospecting, I tend to split campaigns up by targeting types. There tends to be large differences in the amount of people that a given topic or affinity or in-market audience will reach. While I’m often cool with having different audience types in the same campaign, I don’t like mixing topics and audiences, because the audiences tend to starve out the topics. 

So let’s say you have 3 topics you’d like to target. To start, it probably makes sense to make 1 topics campaign, with 1 ad group for each topic. I like to name my ad groups after what they’re targeting, because I find that it saves me time on ‘what was this targeting again?’ and I can just see at a glance what it is. If you’re just advertising for your own business, you probably won’t run into this problem...but if you manage lots of campaigns, every unnecessary distraction you can eliminate will help keep your eye on the prize.