Marketing Tells — Order Please. Organize your Google & Bing search ad…
By: Inbar Fischer
Tags: Online Marketing, Marketing, Bing Ads, Google Ads, PPC Marketing

Organize your Google & Bing search ad accounts to get the data you need to generate the profit & sales you desire 💲🚀

Working on Google and Bing search ad accounts was essentially all about finding a good enough way for organizing thousands of KWs, so I could make a good use of my time to squeeze the potential of these campaigns and look for some more KWs, ads and ways to improve ROI, increase leads and profit.

Structure changes can cost you time and money. New structures can take time to apply if you recreating an existing account with campaigns that need to be changed gently. This mission includes pausing campaigns and restarting them. Working with non manual bidding methods require you to regain leads on manual bidding before making the switch.

So, why would you take the time and risk to organize your accounts?

# 1 Organized accounts are essential to derive accurate insights and optimization actions

It is not certain you get the optimization actions your campaigns need out of something that lives in a chaotic surrounding.

Probably the most common PPC account structure

Don’t confuse surface organizational structures with order. Google algorithms do make sure you buy the media from the best place for Google to generate its revenue — where the bid and CTR feat. But that doesn’t guarantee it’s going to buy it always from the same campaign, Can you think why?

There can be interactions overtime, especially when implementing optimization actions and when there are market changes, optimization work can become trickier. For example, buying the same keyword(KW) from more than one place, or buying broad KWs that attract your Exact ones as well.

This doesn’t sound like a real issue when you have a small amount of KWs or campaigns, but once you have thousands of them, it can get pretty messy and tricky to manage optimally.

# 2 Organized accounts derive more profit

It’s surely possible to run chaotic, or at least not very organized accounts and make profit.

But how would you know you did what you could to get the most out of your portfolio?

Think of Google Ads accounts as the platform to generate your sales and profit. A messy account is really not where you want to put your money, or your clients money at. As a media buyer, you want to be able to tell yourself where you put your dollar at, and what was its ROI. If you run on a BMM/Broad keyword but never make sure to put an Exact negative keyword where necessary, you don’t guarantee your money went exactly where you intended to. This can get more trickier when you start explore and test bidding methods. Another example is buying keywords from specific search engines on Bing without follow ups. Campaign restriction could end up limiting revenue potential on the long run.

An organized account should make sense budget wise

An organized account should first be the place for your keywords to thrive. You don’t want to put all your KWs in one campaign with one budget. Remember budgets are set on campaign level. Also, you would probably want to separate keywords based on their bidding methods. This way, your KWs get the space they need and you get control — which enables you to make better decisions when your campaigns are running. For example, you could open more budget for a specific campaign or restrict a broad one. You can also choose when and where to run the specific campaign. That gives you more control and versatility.

Sometimes it’s useful to launch a campaign for specific theme and sub theme, as this way you can set a more specific bid, ad etc., which can save you some cost, and you get a better CTR.

Although it’s tempting, you can’t win when you’re dealing with more campaigns than you can swallow. You don’t want to end up with hundreds of campaigns in each account— as it gets more complex to give each and every one of them the attention they need. Especially when you are not using automated tools to perform account operations that help stay up to date. Even if you do use such tools, it is of utmost importance to arrange the account in a way for these tools to reach the right conclusions for you. It doesn’t mean you need to give each and every one of your campaigns the same amount of love. Not all campaigns were born equal. Still, make sure you pay attention to those ‘in the middle’ campaigns that all together have a nice piece of your portfolio. Don’t confuse revenue with profit.

# 3 Organized accounts allow you to be more creative and experimental in a market where everyone imitates everyone

An organized account structure is what allows you not only to check more accurately and easily the performance and make better optimization decisions, they also allow you to check room for improvement. It’s easier and makes it more accurate to find areas for growth when accounts are organized.

How do you grow your activity? by implying tests. In order to run a test and make some conclusions — weather to keep it running or pause it — you want to make sure there's a good enough environment and conditions for testing it. This means you want to avoid interactions with other campaigns — make sure you don’t buy keywords from more than one place, and if so, be aware of that and have a good reason to do so. An important thing when running a test is to make sure you follow its performance and that you don’t forget about it, sounds silly but it can happen when you have ton of work to do and many accounts to manage. I found that naming conventions for tests as well, helped me to follow changes, if extracting labels on the Pivot doc wasn’t an option. Every test should has it’s end time, in order for it to be a test. When you have an organized account you can much easier try out new copies for your ads, and follow changes every day gets easier and quicker.

How can you organize your accounts to get the best out of them?

There are several diverse factors an online marketer should take in account when creating and managing ad accounts. Such as business decisions, product needs, clients, end users, ad copies, ad platform restrictions, etc. Having a perfect account structure is not probably possible, as it’s always a matter of what factor you put higher in the hierarchy. Therefore, make sure to have a good enough account structure that is stable and doesn’t change with every decision making. Don’t get too confuse — the key for good solutions is simplicity.

If you got the chance to create a new fresh account, that would be the best. Recreating account structure on the same account can be quite a long mission to accomplish, since you don’t want to disturb the activity at once. You want to take the time and make it smart. There are also some benefits of organizing the same account as it has its saved data. You can quickly change bidding methods and you won’t have to wait for campaigns to collect their clicks, leads and further data.

Take the time to think about the structure of your accounts, as keeping recreating account structures and making these kind of changes cost you time and money. Ask yourself — how and when am I going to check campaigns? Are there going to be many campaigns there? Is this an important account, or is it an account that runs in the background? What’s going to be the bidding type? How do I want to split the bidding strategy among campaigns?

What would be a good enough structure?

There is more than one way to organize online marketing accounts. Make sure you know the rules of the game you play, each ad platform has it’s own. Use these restrictions to help you generate your profit and leads.

Although online marketing can be an ongoing and experimental kind of work, you want to make sure you plan forward, so you can dedicate your time to apply real time optimizations and find places for growth, easily and quickly.

When you reorganize or create an account make sure to end up with:

✔ ️ a structure that gives you control over the money you invest — budgets as well as bidding methods. Remember budgets are set on campaign level (Google & Bing Ads — Search).

✔ ️ a structure that gives Google/Bing algorithms the data (that you aware) they need to operate the best. Don’t put unrelated keywords on one campaign and run it on target CPA, this won’t be very informative for the algorithm to give you back leads.

✔ a structure where you can make tests easily to find new areas for growth. Remember, a test is not really a test if you forget about it or it interacts with other keywords on your portfolio.

✔ a structure that let you work easily and smoothly, make sure you have the time to explore your competitors, new ad copies and keywords, regularly.

✔ a structure that fits the way you explore results. If you use Excel Pivot table for example, you should be aware more of the way you can group campaigns by. Give informative names or make a good use of labels, if can be extracted.