What is the best way to structure my campaign?

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What is the best way to structure my campaign?
Honestly, good structures are almost unlimited. They just depend on your ingenuity and creativity. Beyond the classic “Brand vs Generic” and “Match Type Structure” structures, in this post we are going to explore somewhat less conventional alternatives. They are neither better nor worse than others, nor do they have to work well with any type of account. They are just a demonstration that, beyond the numbers and statistics, there is room for imagination in this PPC thing.

1. Temporal division
Adwords, as is well known, allows you to schedule your ads to be shown only during certain time slots or, directly, to exclude hours that do not interest you. The same goes for the days of the week. It is common to find clients who, due to their particularities, do not want to advertise during the weekend, or only from Monday to Wednesday... there can be various combinations.



Well, what if instead of having a single campaign with schedules we create a campaign for each time slot/day we want to target? Advantages: You can create special content for each campaign. For example, if your client sells bicycles, why not create a campaign for “Mondays” with ads like this:



What if you have a two-day deadline? An announcement for Wednesday!



As you can see, it can attract much more attention than a generic ad… an increase in CTRs is guaranteed!

Disadvantages: Having to manage more campaigns, more content and keep a closer eye on the budget.

2. Shopping by categories
Shopping campaigns are a must for any e-commerce business that advertises on Adwords. On the Internet we will find a multitude of tips on how to generate your “data feed” in an optimal way. These include good labeling and description of products or segmenting as much as possible into categories and subcategories. This way you can deploy it in Adwords and control the CPC, as in this example:



We see that the feed is divided into “Apparel & Accessories” and “Shoes”, which are the main categories, and within them there are their subcategories with their specific Max CPC's (NOTE: you have to “unfold” the levels by clicking on the “+” symbol. The more detailed your feed is, the more levels you can unfold. By default, the feed is closed… so there will only be one common Max CPC for all products). So far, everything is normal, a “correct” Shopping campaign, deployed in 3 levels and with specific Max CPC's. Can it be structured in another way? Of course!

How about creating a shopping campaign for each product group? We just need to legal email leads for sale duplicate the campaign and leave the categories we are interested in active. We can exclude a category in the Max CPC editing section:

Win customers!


If we exclude everything except the group we are interested in, that shopping campaign will become exclusive to that group. This way we can create a campaign for “Apparel & Accessories” and another for “Shoes”.

Advantages: More control. If one works and the other doesn't, you have more room to pause or reallocate budgets. It's easier to know which products are converting and at what CPA.

Disadvantages: If you have a data feed with dozens or even hundreds of categories, this may not be your best option… although you can always separate only the most notable ones.

3. (Inter)territorial division
It is clear that we are going to separate the countries by campaigns, especially in these scenarios:

There is a lot of disparity between performances: If your target is the English-speaking countries, you will want to separate the UK from the USA or Canada. The performance of these countries is very different as well as their CPC's, CPA's, etc.
Language differences: Even if your campaign targets different countries with similar behaviors, if they speak different languages, separation is mandatory.
Still, why not segment at a deeper level? If we have a campaign targeting Spain, we would probably want to separate Madrid, Barcelona and the rest of the cities. Otherwise, the main cities will take up all the attention and leave no room for growth for the secondary cities.

Advantages: Dividing your campaigns by city allows you to optimize your budget within a country and allows secondary areas to have their own investment to grow.

Cons: Again, the more splits you run, the more campaigns you'll have to analyze and optimize. Still, it's worth it!

4. Let's separate Remarketing
Just as Google is constantly updating its search engine to refine its service, it is also trying to optimize AdWords to make the tasks of creating, managing and optimizing campaigns easier. However, although many processes have been simplified, in others we miss a little more control… such as in remarketing.

Nowadays, it is very easy to create a remarketing list (or several), go to “audiences” in your campaign and select it as “Bid Only”. Voila! We now have a campaign with active remarketing. If we select “enhanced CPC” Google will give its own CPC to that list.

Win customers!
What happens if instead of adding that list to the campaign we set it as negative and create a separate campaign just for it in “target & bid”? A priori the result is the same but it opens the door to several benefits.

Advantages: We can create different ads depending on the remarketing list. We can even create a campaign for “visitors,” another for “people who filled their cart,” or “people who bought.” Each user behaved differently, right? Well, we can show them a different message, too.



Similarly, as in all the previous cases, we can manage the budget allocated for remarketing much better.

Cons: Just the time it takes to set it up and create new content!

5. CPC Structure
In a conventional scenario, we will structure our groups according to qualitative criteria such as “product type” or “search combinations.” And that is completely correct.

But do all the keywords in a group, even if they are from the same topic, really get the same CPC?

It is easy to see this in campaigns with a certain history where the data is representative. It is surprising to see how with a specific term we can have a quality score of 8 and a relatively low CPC, and at the same time with a variant of the same term we can obtain a QS of 5 and a much higher CPC, regardless of the match. The pattern will be repeated in most groups. We will find disparity in CPC; in some cases keywords with a CPC of €0.05 may coexist with others with a CPC of €1.2, to give just one example.