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July 14, 2009

The 1K Impression Rule -Taking the Guess Work Out of Creating PPC Ad Groups

There are many articles talking about how to structure your PPC accounts.  Here are some good ones: Is Your Paid Search Account Structure Optimal? and Back to PPC Classroom Building Effective Campaign Structure.  I think it is crucial to have a good account structure because it is one of the most important elements in PPC.  This excellent PPC Hero blog highlights the disadvantages of not having a well structured account, A Poor PPC Account Structure Will Make Your Campaign Suffer.

The above mentioned articles give great strategic solutions in organizing your campaigns and ad groups based on site architecture and reporting needs.  PPC best practices also tell us that our ad groups should be granular so that you can incorporate the keyword into the ad copy.  This will then result in increasing your Click Through Rate and quality score, thus, lowering your CPC’s.  Furthermore, this approach will increase your relevancy and thereby propensity to convert.

Keeping these best practices in mind, how granular should you get in creating ad groups?

Recently, the SEER Google Agency Team visited our office.  Among the wonderful breakout sessions they provided, one of the most insightful sessions was on strategies to create well-structured ad groups (especially new ad groups).  Google introduced the “1k impression rule.”  It’s short, simple and providing a ton of values -  If a keyword does not have more than 1K impressions determined by Google’s Keyword tool then the keyword does not need its own ad group.
Although the SEER Team has been utilizing similar approaches, the 1K impression cut off has systematically enhanced our ad group structuring.  It also has helped us tremendously in re-organizing our current accounts as well as in creating new accounts.
Below is a step by step outline in how we have been using this rule for our practice:

1.    Run your seed keywords on the Google keywords tool.

2.    Sort your results by search volume and pay attention to keywords with impressions equal to or greater than 1,000.  I sort the keyword by Local Search volume (in this instance is the US) which is relevant for this client (see the screen cap below).  Further information on Google’s keyword tool can be obtained from the Adwords help.  By now, you must be thinking why only keywords with 1,000 impressions or more?  The reason behind this is that we want to invest our time creating targeted ad copy on keywords that have the greatest potential to drive the most traffic and thereby conversion.

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3.    Download all the keywords as CSV files.  It’s just easier to manage the data in excel.  You can filter data in a descending order and copy and paste your keywords as needed.

4.    Start looking for potential ad groups theme.  Based on the screen cap above, we have the following information:
a.    The 1st keyword has 110,000 searches, let’s call this ad group X (if the term is relevant and not too broad for your intended audience)
b.    The 3rd keyword has 27,100 searches. It’s actually a plural form of the 1st keyword. Thus, you can add the 3rd keyword into ad group X

5.    Expand your keyword selections. After the ad group structure has been laid out, I recommend finding additional related terms, using Yahoo Suggest or any other Keyword tool you are comfortable using.

6.    Remove duplicates.  Once you have all your ad groups and Keywords in a long list make sure to remove duplicates.  It can be easily done in excel 2007 by following this direction:

Highlight your Ad Groups and Keyword column, Select Data, Remove Duplicates, Select Your KW Column Only in the Pop up box and Hit Ok

It’s a simple process but after doing a lot of research, this task is easily overlooked.

And there you have it.  Of course, this is not the only method for creating ad groups.  I have found this method very systematic and helpful by taking out the guess work from deciding how many ad groups need to be created.  In summary, if the impression volume is not greater than 1K, the keyword is probably not worthy for its own ad group with its own ad copy.  Instead, the keyword should be placed in an existing, related ad group.  Hopefully, this process could help you in developing your ad groups as a simpler and less daunting task as it has been for the SEER team.

8 COMMENTS

  • Paul Bartlett says:
    July 15, 2009 @ 12:58 pm

    Be VERY careful of two things here:

    1. “greatest potential to drive the most traffic and thereby conversion”

    Traffic numbers often have little to do with actual conversions. Run a free contest, and you’ll get loads of traffic, most of it non-converting. A really great way to burn PPC dollars.

    2. Some of the sub 1000 branded keywords can convert magnificently, so don’t necessarily bury them with other poorly performing keywords just based on traffic numbers.

    An effective strategy we’ve been testing lately is to put ALL keywords in to their own ad group, and using fewer keywords overall, especially for smaller businesses. To raise conversions and/or ROI, optimize your landing pages to subscription based services, products, and communications. Ongoing revenue is the key.

  • Mark Kennedy says:
    July 15, 2009 @ 2:30 pm

    Great post. A good portion of SEM work comes with the setup. A good setup will not only help performance, but will save an SEM professional a lot of time in the future.

    Also, I agree with Paul. It really pays to take the tail approach with small campaigns. Yes, it may seem like overkill to be really granular, but for a small budget, it really helps. And in some rare cases a small campaign is better off with just the low volume tails.

    However, for medium to large clients, I like your approach. One thing I like to do is if I see a tail keyword with a poor Q-score in an adgroup like you described, I’ll pull it out and give it it’s own adgroup with a very specific ad. That alone sometimes increases the q-score. So you don’t have to break the adgroup down into 50 little ones, but after some data you can tell which keywords need a little extra attention.

  • Bonnie Schwartz says:
    July 17, 2009 @ 8:18 am

    I don’t think this post is saying you should NEVER get granular, and I agree with Paul and Mark100% that being Granular is essential for a well managed campaign. The SEER PPC team adheres to that approach 100%.I dont actually think this post is saying that is not true.

    Like Mark said, for big accounts with 1000’s of keywords it just not feasible to target every word in its own group. The 1K impression rule just helps you focus at the start on the terms that will drive volume. Tail terms often get VERY little maybe no traffic so focusing on them in the beginning is not a good way to maximize your time sometimes. If you have 1000 terms that get 1 impression a month each, does putting each of these terms in its own group and writing copy for 1000 terms directly really worth the effort?

    We also use the approach sometimes of putting very competitive terms in their own ad group alone so that we can focus on that term directly to increase the QS

    Once you launch the account, if you notice some tail terms getting volume you may want to break your groups down farther.

    I love Mark’s idea of taking low QS terms and putting them in their own group and targeting them directly. If that does not work you may even want to delete the low QS terms from your account since QS is also held at the account level. However, I sometimes leave the in because I find competitor terms often have a low QS and I want to show up for those terms despite the QS.

    The 1K impression rule also helps when you have an existing large account and you want to look to break your ad groups down. Any term that Google’s Keyword tool says has more than 1K impressions, (which actually is not that many) and actually pretty granular definitely should be targeted directly.

    This advice comes right from the SEER team’s Google’s rep, an optimization specialist at Google and I know personally and for the SEER team as a whole has really helped us optimize our accounts.

  • davinam says:
    July 21, 2009 @ 12:38 pm

    @Paul Bartlett: I agree with you that traffic estimate is not always right in predicting conversions but it gives us information on terms that have potential and received a lot of queries. This information is a good starting point to structure our ad group.

    This method has saved us time and again helped us creating a better ad group structure, especially for clients with high volume search (which something that I should have included in my post). If for some reasons, we find that these terms are not performing well (after launching), we could try a different approach.

    Lastly, thank you for sharing your strategy for the small business. How long have you been implementing this strategy?

    @Mark Kennedy: I like your strategy for medium to large clients! To follow up on Bonnie’s point, are you also implementing this strategy for the competitors’ terms? These terms usually have low quality scores and I’m curious to see the impact of your strategy on their QS.

  • Scott says:
    July 30, 2009 @ 2:48 pm

    This may be a dumb question, but when you say “If a keyword does not have more than 1K impressions determined by Google’s Keyword tool then the keyword does not need its own ad group.“ — do you mean 1k impressions a month? a day? forever since the beginning of your campaign?

  • davinam says:
    August 1, 2009 @ 9:38 am

    Scott,

    I looked at the local search volume column and this column collects data from the last available month.

    If you click on question mark button next to the column, this is the explanation
    “Local Search Volume: [Last Available Month]
    This column shows the approximate number of search queries matching each keyword result. This statistic applies to searches on Google and the search network in the most recent month that we have data for. It’s specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. If we don’t have sufficient data for a particular keyword, you’ll see not enough data. “

  • Mark Kennedy says:
    October 23, 2009 @ 4:36 pm

    @Bonnie and @davinam

    Hi Guys! Looks like it’s been a while since I checked back, but better late than never :)

    When bidding on competitor terms (and some other low q-score but relevant terms), it’s a tough call and case by case. I agree that bidding on a competitor name can really have a strong ROI (although not always a lot of volume) and deliver results despite a low q-score. If that is the case you have to leave it in. And you can’t really re-optimize since you’re not going to put a competitor name in the title of your ad. In this situation it’s a case of if it ain’t broke…

    Then there are those borderline terms that Bonnie is talking about. You give them their own ad, landing page, and love, yet you just can’t get any q-score improvement. In that case you weigh the results (and potential results) vs. the pull it has on your campaign q-score. Then it’s just a case of delete or not delete.

    Again, this was a good post and the comments as well. Keep blogging!

  • davinam says:
    October 27, 2009 @ 8:30 am

    Mark,

    Thanks for sharing your experience!

    and Yes, we will keep on blogging :)

  • chrisco says:
    November 27, 2009 @ 4:18 am

    Where does one find an AdWords pro to setup and run Google AdWords, analytics, and website optimizer (or at least AdWords)? Thanks.

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