When starting a journey with Google Ads campaigns, you may come across a plethora of complexities. However, formulating a campaign structure maintains order and paves the way for building a more efficient Paid Media plan. Effective structuring of ad campaigns is crucial as it serves as the foundation for your strategy.
Here, you will learn the methodologies to start a successful Google Ads campaign structure.
Advantages of a Google Ads campaign structure
But what do you mean by an ad campaign structure anyway? Well, this is the blueprint of your account, highlighting the setup of campaigns, ad groups, specific keywords, ads and landing pages. This format helps you define your goals and determine distinct parameters for each ad. The number of ads required depends on the number of products or services you are marketing, the targeting of your groups, the destination locations and the platforms you intend to use to advertise.
When set up correctly, the framework encourages the development of a robust digital advertising strategy. An influential campaign structure:
- Increases campaign organization
- Contributes to a higher quality score
- Keeps campaigns relevant to a search
- Drives an efficient budget plan
- Provides guidance for ad copy creation
- Simplifies analytics reviews for strategy
How to organize your Google Ads and PPC campaigns
The more precise your structure, the more powerful the effect each ad will have on your target audience. Campaign structure helps you simplify your efforts and focus on a clear goal, aimed at a specific group. This allows you to develop multiple ads designed to address various aspects of your marketing strategy.
Choosing your Google Ads budget
Allocating a budget can be challenging, especially for beginners. Most businesses start small to gauge the process before starting large-scale campaigns. However, this can make it difficult to achieve consistent results due to the trial and error nature of the process. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to exhaust your entire budget prematurely on unsuccessful campaigns….
1. Defining objectives
You should start by defining your main goals. These can include goals such as: lead generation, cost per acquisition (CPA), increasing brand awareness, email sign-ups or increasing conversions.
2. Keyword analysis
The initial step in identifying keywords is to understand what your audience is searching for. You can start preliminary keyword research by utilizing Google Trends. Try combinations consisting of location, commercial keywords such as “discount”, “buy now”, “sale”, “compare” and search phrases such as “best tips for” and “how to”. Compile a list of subjects you would like to rank for, forming basic categories under which more targeted keywords will be grouped. These generic keywords are likely to be difficult to rank for and quite expensive, but will be useful in the next phase.
3. Implementation of the Keyword Planner
By leveraging Google’s Keyword Planner tool, you can discover relevant related keywords, search volume, cost per click (CPC), competition value and page bid prices. Understanding the cost of your target keywords is essential for you to set a realistic budget for PPC campaigns. Use the category keywords you identified earlier to help choose suitable related keywords for your ads. Ideally, you will discover relevant keywords that are low cost but have a high search volume. This is often the case with very specifically focused keywords.
4. Determine the keyword budget
To set your budget, you need to identify the keyword’s cost per click (CPC), your website’s conversion rate and your customer’s average lifetime value (LTV). Your website conversion rate will tell you how much traffic you need to acquire a customer. Multiply your conversion rate by the cost per click to get the cost per acquisition (CPA). This number needs to be considerably lower than the lifetime value (LTV) of the customer to ensure fiscal prudence.
Characterization of Google Ads PPC campaigns
Now that you’ve identified viable keywords for your initial Google Ads campaigns, you can start designing your structure. Regardless of how you set up your structure, make sure your names remain consistent throughout the structure for clarity.
1. Campaigns
These are the first series of overarching groups, typically categorized by product type, location, and target demographic, among others. These are the broad categories that ad groups adhere to. Broadly speaking, if you have products aimed at women and completely different ones for men, you can create “Men” and “Women” as the main campaigns. Alternatively, if you offer two distinct product types (e.g. clothing and footwear), use them as campaigns, with the specific products being differentiated further down.
2. Ad groups
Determine precisely which products or services you will advertise in campaigns. If a company has “Cosmetics Store” as a campaign, they might classify “Hair Products” and “Skin Products” as ad groups. This helps you specify which keywords will be included in certain ad groups.
3. Keywords
Create a list of relevant and cost-effective keywords, deciding which ones are best for each ad group.
4. Negative keywords
Identify the exclusion keywords you want to implement to enhance relevant lead targeting. This will block undesirable traffic and guide desirable traffic to the appropriate destination.
5. Testing of ads
The initial batch of ads for each ad group and keywords serves as a litmus test for you to understand your target audience. Before you even run your ads, you may want to test your concepts with a sample audience. Alternatively, you can run an ad split test (A/B test) to determine which one is more successful in driving traffic to the landing page. The goal is to thoroughly test your theories before spending the bulk of your budget.
6. Landing pages
Make sure you have pages designed specifically to meet the expectation of the leads who click on your ad. The message should be aligned with the ad the visitor clicked on, as this is what resonated with them. The landing page should conform to the campaign objective and ask for a call-to-action (CTA). It is often more effective to guide your visitors through the buyer’s journey because they are not ready to convert. Consequently, not all landing pages will necessarily direct you directly to sales. Your landing page may ask for contact information, offer some value (such as an e-book), or direct them to a page that facilitates their progress to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
Ideal Google Ads campaign structure
When creating your structure, you may want to consider a few key focuses.
- Website structure: To minimize upfront costs, you can utilize already established landing pages. Make sure your ad text aligns with the associated landing page and fits the specific ad group.
- Products/services: Your products can be categorized by brand names, sizes, cost, etc. These differences can be used to specifically target a certain audience group.
- Location: Yes, locations can help create targeted keywords that are more cost-effective due to reduced competition. You would likely have landing pages for each location to enhance targeting and possibly use already established landing pages. Targeting your ads in regions is also beneficial for setting separate budgets for each location.
- Seasonality: Advertising based on seasons or holidays varies with the time of year. You may also have specific company occasions to celebrate or product launches to advertise. Consider how this will influence your ad text and keywords.
Take advantage of ad extensions
Extensions can be included in the ad to promote specific interactions beneficial to your campaign. This increases the appeal of your ad and expands its presence on the search page. Extensions can be used to incorporate location details, leverage specific on-page navigation options, and more. Some of the most common ad extensions include:
- Site link extensions
- Call extensions
- Messaging extensions
- Structured snippet extension
- Location extension
- Promotion extension
- Application extension
Some of these can be particularly useful for increasing the impact of searches without clicks. If a search user looks for local services that you offer, having location extensions in your ad can make it easier for them to immediately recognize your business as a nearby option.
How to create the best Google ad
Several small details influence how well your ad performs. That’s why marketers often use A/B testing to determine which elements will change the appeal factor for your audience. The best PPC ad will target qualified leads and deliver a high click-through rate (CTR).
To create a successful ad, you must
- Specify your target audience
- Select the right keywords
- Respect character limits
- Focus on relevance
- Use the appropriate extensions
- Redirect to a relevant landing page
- Formulating an effective ad strategy
From structuring to writing your ads, there is a great deal of knowledge to take in when establishing an effective strategy for PPC and Google Ads. Super Plural can help you get results through tailored ad campaigns, rigorous A/B testing and continuous strategy optimization.
Are you looking for strategic paid advertising?
At Super Plural, our Paid Media experts have decades of experience with Google Ads Campaigns, perfecting campaigns, testing and generating results for our clientele.
Our marketing clients have seen, on average, a 75% increase in conversions over the last year.
As a Google Partner, we are a top ranking Paid Media agency. We manage your paid media in-house, giving you transparency throughout the process. If you’re ready to refine your advertising, contact us today.
