As Adwords managers we like to detail our value to clients as we tinker around in their accounts.  Often, we throw out the term “optimization” as a catch all to describe our at-the-moment efforts.  That’s probably the most honest description of what we are trying to do, but it is also very broad.  One of the more recent efforts that I have been undertaking that I describe as “optimization” to clients really just re-enforces best practices:

Adgroup “Silo-ing”:  Adwords Optimization By Way of Organization

This is a very simple concept.  And some companies or pay per click management gurus may do this from the start when they create the initial list of campaign level negatives (note: if your Adwords management company does not have negatives in your campaigns you ought to ask them why).  The way I approach campaigns doesn’t allow for me to necessarily 100% prevent cross-pollination of adgroups from the start so I need to do this as we run the campaign.  Let me explain.

Lets pretend you sell shoes.  You have two adgroups distinguishing between hiking shoes and running shoes.  However you have both keywords matched to broad.  While attempting to catch all the impressions as possible starting off, we run that risk of displaying for some pretty broad terms.  In our search query report we find out our hiking shoe ad is displaying for a running shoe search term.  Google didn’t make a mistake but it just so happened we were bidding against ourselves and diluting our message by cross-pollinating adgroups.  Because of the broad matching we opened ourselves up to displaying the wrong ad.

As we run ads and find out what search terms perform well, etc we can start to darken the lines between the adgroups and make them more and more distinctive.  This process is actually a simple concept: add keywords that don’t belong (showing up in the search query report) as negatives in the adgroups they don’t belong in.  So if “running shoes with arch support” somehow triggered your hiking shoe ad, put that term in as an exact negative.  As you do this week after week your adgroups become more and more organized.  The great thing about this method is that you’re able to keep the broad match on to catch new terms without diluting your message.

The only flaw to this approach is that a new ppc management company (or yourself) may not immediately recognize this “organization”…but they would see that the search queries reports are super relevant.  So it could be hard to pick up and run with, but then again, everyone has a different approach and method so that’s expected.