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Web Manager at Perricone MD
28 June 2011 13:05pm
Hi,
Our adwords campaign so far has been handled by an agency employed by our USA based Head Office and looks to be slightly neglected...
I wanted to reorganise everything into a cascading system of campaigns that mirrors our website heirarchy - brand, category or product. So when someone searches for only our company name the ad directs them to the homepage.
If they should then add a category to that search (e.g. [Perricone Cleansers] as we are a skin care brand) the ad would direct them to the Cleanser category page showing all the cleansers.
If they should then search for an individual product (e.g. [Perricone Nutritive Cleanser]) they would then land on that specific product page.
To do this the brand only campaign would need to include negative keywords from the entire category and products campaign and the category campaign would need negative keywords from only the products campaign. I hope that made sense!
Just wondering if this is fairly standard and are there any pitfalls to look out for? Also, is there an easy way to perhaps automate it so that any time I add a keyword to the low level category, it automatically adds it as a negative to the levels above?
I've not really been able to find much on adwords hierarchy or strategies other than the basic "make sure your landing page is relevant" etc.
Web Manager at Perricone MD
28 June 2011 16:00pm
Of course, do I need to use negative keywords at all or will Google know which ad to display?
Managing Director at indiumonline
30 June 2011 15:26pm
Hi Jonny,
The secret to success with adwords is for each adgroup to to have a tightly connected group of keywords, with adtext that relatest to the subject of the group of keywords, and that links to a page related to the subject of the group of keywords.
So... you're definately thinking along the right tracks.
Negative keywords will be really important for you, to make sure that your ad doesn't get shown when people are searching for things that are totally irrelevant. Eg if you only sell products for women you want to make sure you've got lots of male gender negative keywords.
But you really shouldn't need to create a negative of everything else in the brand campaign. (and there's no automatic way to allocate one campaign's keyword to be a negative somewhere else). 2 reason why you shouldn't need to do this:
1. Google gives each keyword you add a Quality Score. Quality Score's rate how relevant a keyword is based on various factors. In this case what that means is that if someone searches on "perricone foundation spf30" the keywords in your foundation spf30 adgroup will have a much better QS than those in the brand adgroup - so google will show the 'right' ad for you.
2. If you're really worried about it, and don't feel leaving it to google is safe enough, then the easiest way to control what searches see your brand ads would be only put EXACT terms in the adgroups that point to the homepage. You can set up 3 types of keyword in Adwords:
- broad - the ad might show for anything vaguely related to your keywords. Eg if the keyword were "search marketing", you might appear for "seo".
- phrase - the ad might show for any search which contains your phrase. So if you set up "search marketing" as a phrase, a search for "search marketing uk" may see your ad
- exact - the ad will only show for searches on the exact keywords you enter. so if you set up [search marketing] ONLY searches for "search marketing" will get your ads.
I hope that helps - if you've any other questions do let me know.
Chloe
www.indiumwebmanagement.co.uk
01865339470
chloe at indiumwm.com
As far as I know there's no automatic way to
Web Manager at Perricone MD
01 July 2011 17:20pm
Hi Chloe,
Thanks for this.
Re point 1, I thought that this would happen, but when I ran a test for a product ad group it was still poaching the ad from the level above.
e.g. the search was "perricone no foundation"
but the keyword "perricone" was matched, rather than "perricone no foundation".
The existing ad group for keyword "perricone" has a quality score of 10, but I would have thought that it would still have gone for the exact match?
As the product ad group that contains "perricone no foundation" is new its score is still in the middle, so I'm a bit confused as to whether Google will continue to show the high scoring ad over the one that is clearly more relevant?
Have you come across this before?
Managing Director at indiumonline
05 July 2011 09:56am
Hi Jonny,
Yes, I have come across that before.
What you need to do is to watch the performance of the ads / keywords to see how the conversions are.
Only once you know what the actual performance (in terms of sales) is will you be able to work out which is actually best for you.
And it will take Google a little while to bed in.
Chloe
Director at Browser Media
05 July 2011 12:08pm
Hi Jonny,
As Chloë says, you are doing exactly the right thing in terms of having a granular structure to the account and trying to marry up specific searches (via keywords you target) to specific sections of the site (via appropriate landing pages).
In the ideal world, Google 'should' work out the most appropriate ad to show, but we don't live in the ideal world and the problems you are having are certainly not uncommon in my experience.
The same is true for organic search, you can often go to great lengths to optimise internal pages only to see the homepage outrank those pages for searches which would be much better served by the internal pages.
I suspect that you may have restructured the account and left the original 'perricone' keyword running? In that case, I would expect that the higher quality score is simply a result of its history, as you suggest.
If someone was looking for 'perricone no foundation', you would expect an ad that targets that specific product to perform better than a generic, brand ad. The problem, of course, is that you will only ever have one ad from the account shown and you will not benefit from the expected increased CTR if the generic ad is showing.
Fortunately, only BeautyBay really appear to be targeting the specific product (when I have just been looking at it) and you have done exactly what we would recommend and make it clear that you ARE Perricone by using the 'official site' approach in the ad copy, so I don't think it is going to be too painful at the moment, but still very frustrating.
Whilst adwords is clearly a potent platform, there are frustrations that should ideally be resolved (probably our biggest gripe remains the dreaded 'low volume' keywords that we were writing about back in 2008 - http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/2008/12/18/fundamental-flaw-in-google-adwords-platform/).
In the short term, I would suggest trying exact match on most of the keywords (just make sure that you have an expansive keyword list) or use phrase match and run very regular search query reports to work out what actual searches are triggering the ad impressions and use that to define negative keywords to try to sculpture the ads that are shown for particular search terms.
So far as I know, there is no automated way to add negatives whenever you create new long tail keywords, but you may find that some of bid management software suites allow you to do this.
Sorry not to have a miracle cure, but you are definitely approaching it in the right way. It does take more time and effort, but it is worth it and you will ultimately be rewarded for the well planned account structure.
It still amazes me how many PPC campaigns are managed poorly... It can make us look like wizards as we can improve performance dramatically by applying some fundamental best practice techniques, so I do believe that you will see a marked improvement.
Good luck with it and I am sure everyone on this forum will be interested to hear your progress.
Joe
Web Manager at Perricone MD
08 July 2011 14:03pm
Thanks both for taking the time to give such fantastic replies and advice.
I'm now in the process of setting all this up in full so hopefully I will be able to come back with some good results to share!
Didn't realise about the low search results issue. What is that about? Even 1 click could be a sale and at the end of the day, its money that could have been in Google's pocket??
Director at Browser Media
08 July 2011 14:26pm
Hi Johnny,
I would agree with you that the low search volume issue is non-sensical, but a cynic may just suggest that Google will actually make more money from advertisers having to go too broad on their searches... Not good for accuracy of search results and user experience, but not bad for Google's coffers.
I hope all goes well with the restructure and do post back with findings.
Have a great weekend,
Joe