Adwords Campaign - Advice Please?

Hi Everyone

I've took over an account for a client where the structure of the account could have been better in the way it was setup. I found some ad groups had a multiple different match types contained in the same ad group with exact, broad and modified broad match keywords being used. Even though the ad group was getting reasonable amount of conversions for the previous month, I decided to split this out and put the better performing keywords into their own campaign along with separate campaigns split by different match types and shared the same budget between them.

I found that the conversions dropped significally the month after when i had split the account by campaign (BMM) and campaign (exact), so i panicked and decided to pause the new campaigns and revert back to the existing one.

Q. Is this because the history on the better performing ad groups and keywords have been paused and you have started fresh with a new set so it takes a while for the conversions to start building up again
or

Q. Should you never touch a campaign where it is performing well and just expand on it with additional keywords.

Any help would be appreciated from the master jedis of the Adwords World.

Paul

 

Hi Paul,

From our resident PPC man Martyn, though who by no means resembles a master Jedi (more Yoda!):

If it converts it should convert regardless as to when its set up i.e. it shouldn't take time for conversions to build up.

Its one of those things really, you either leave it and see how the new way converts over a longer period, or you revert and make changes... but with a new client it would definitely be a bit of tricky situation! Worth doing a bit of wider analysis maybe to see if there could have been any other factors affecting the conversion.

I would personally leave the performing campaign as it is and monitor what is converting and what is not converting. Then potentially remove keywords that are not converting and put these into a new campaign more aimed around those terms.

 

Thank you Martyn (PPC) Yoda! I really appreciate your input on this one and i will learn from changing the structure of the account too quickly. I did find as they had lots of keywords in one ad group with exact, broad and modified broad match, that any other campaigns created more tightly focused ad groups with one match type being used that Google preferred to show the other keywords because of the broad match keywords containing more or less the same keywords.

I have one more question to ask you... have you ever come across a situation where some product brand terms are not being shown on the search network because it prefers to show the PLAs instead?

 

Hello Paul,

To your first question, I think Martyn is right. I've never seen an instance where time had any effect on a single keyword conversion rate besides seasonality and even that was more volume than conversion rate. It is always other factors. One thing to note is that if this previous campaign was mostly broad matched I'd check out the quality of leads your client used to get. I've worked with a planters company that had a similar problem. What we found was they were casting a huge net over many unrelated keywords and the vast majority of their conversions were irrelevant to them. When we took it on the conversion rate plummeted but the quality of each lead sky rocketed.

To your second question, if they are in the same account then I have seen it. I think it is an effort from Google to ensure one company is not able to show two paid ads under a single search. Having said that I have seen general paid search ads and PLA's from the same company in a search result before.

 

Hi Mark - thank you for taking the time to reply to my question. Yes, i agree with what you have said and it could have been one of those months where conversions had dipped for whatever reason. I found we had a good number of conversions when we set the date to the last 30 days (from May to April), but when we set the date to this month, i found the conversions had dropped. I have read various ways of re-structuring an account and instead of leaving the keywords which were converting in their own ad group, i thought i would put them into their own ad group under their own campaign which didn't seem to work. Glad i have managed to get a good answer to my second question and glad that there are people out there willing to share their PPC wisdom .

 

If all you did was move adgroups around and the keywords and ads didn't change then I guarantee your restructuring didn't cause this.

 

Hi Mark - Yes all i did was re-structure the account and use them same keywords which converted last month. Thank you for your help on this.

 

Hi Paul, sorry for delayed reply, been away.

Agree with Mark on your latest question, does make a lot of sense.

And glad you managed to get some good answers to your questions

 

You need to have 100% Crystal Clear knowledge about Broad Type, Exact Type and other keywords. Combination of these elements with your Daily Budget and CPC is what decides the outcome of your success on Adwords. There are no fixed rules here. You have to use your experience to resolve such issue.

 

Separate keywords according to their match types and then try to run the campaign. I am sure you will see some good results. Hopefully

 

for Indian users, what is the expected Adword coupon?

 

As far as I know it doesn't change based on your location, Google changes it across the board depending on how hard they are trying to promote AdWords.

 

If your campaign is performing well, then you need not make changes for some time, however, you can add good performing keywords if necessary

 

Hi Paul - When you change a campaign structure you have to ensure that keywords and ad copies data should be slightly modified and is it worth important for you to modify a good converting campaign upto that extent. Your first question is your answer. Yes, past campaigns history plays important role in this. There are campaign level and ad group level quality scores also that are not seen in adwords (we can only see keywords level quality score) and are used internally by adwords for its algorithms. Doing big changes instantly in good converting campaigns is not advisable at all. It can surely downgrade your conversion rate.

For e.g a keyword is converting well in an ad group and it has achieved good CTR and Quality Score. Then you decide to pause that keyword because you are restructuring the campaigns and put that keyword again in some other ad group. That keyword will be new and have to gain that CTR and Quality Score again so that it shows at higher position and gains that conversion rate again. So best practice is to change ad groups in such a way that we have to move only lesser converting keywords and if there are many keywords we can partially do it and monitor the changes first, then proceed further.