So you’ve hit a wall in your account optimization. We know the feeling. As professional PPC marketers who work on Google AdWords accounts 40-60 hours per week, we sometimes struggle with finding new ways to take our campaigns to the next level. Fortunately for us we are taught to keep plugging away until we achieve a CPA of $0.01 (pro tip: this is impossible). One of my favorite strategies to employ when optimizing my accounts is campaign segmentation.
Split out campaigns to target your top converting queries.
Once your campaigns have been running for a good amount of time, you should look into a way to highlight your best performing queries. Why not make your best queries your best keywords? To do this, create a separate campaign. The ad groups you should put in here will only contain one exact match keyword. Pull these keywords from your query report on your current campaigns. Sort by conversions, CPA, whatever metric you’re most worried about. Once you’ve added these in, you can focus your energy on these top performers.
Play around with the bidding. Test new and experimental ad copy. You now have a campaign to perform incredibly controlled tests on your best keywords. Don’t stop there. Continue to check your SQR on your other campaigns over time, and continually add new ad groups to target.
Focus your budget on campaigns where revenue is high.
It’s important to implement revenue tracking if you are selling items of varying values. A $100 product should not be treated the same as a $1 product. If Widget A only generates four conversions monthly, while Widget B generates fifty, shouldn’t we focus our money on Widget B? Well, that depends. How much do the two Widgets cost? How much revenue can we generate from each item? It makes sense to direct budget to areas where our revenue is high. Furthermore, what are our margins on these two products? Perhaps we only make $.02 on the $100 item, but we make $.98 on the $1 item. These are all things worth considering when segmenting your campaigns.
Learn to love the Impression Share metrics.
So you want to increase your account performance by using campaign segmentation, but you don’t really know how much opportunity you have to do so? This is where search impression share comes into play. Add a column to your data view to include “Search Lost IS (budget)”. This will give us a percentage for each campaign of how many impressions we are missing based on our limited budget. If we have an $80/day budget and our Search Lost IS is 25%, we can reasonably infer that we could scale up another $26/day to capture the remaining traffic. Use these percentages to decide where to spend your money. Do you see a campaign with a high number of conversions, a low CPA, and a great ROI? Check the Lost IS by budget and see if we’re missing out on any possible impressions. We could be missing out on revenue that we don’t even know exists.
Don’t feel trapped in a single campaign. I don’t care what your business or industry is; I guarantee that I can find a reason to break your account into multiple campaigns. These efforts won’t be in vain. On the contrary, breaking out different campaigns can improve your account performance substantially. Give these methods a try in your account today.
