Paid search doesn’t need to be complicated. Sure, you could test text ads to death (and it works). You can also use multi-variant landing page technology to squeeze out higher conversion rates (and please do). You can even have ROI-based bid management software. These things all help in the process of getting the highest return on your paid search investment. As far as Google and Yahoo paid search account architecture is concerned, simplicity is king.

In order to understand why, we need to look into the exact purposes of each level of organization in an account. A common mistake that many of our clients have is using campaigns instead of Ad Groups.

Campaigns are for 4 things:

Geo-Targeting

Many times in-house paid search people mistakenly make a campaign for every state or every city for their national product. The problem is that it creates a budgeting nightmare, since budgets are typically set at the campaign level.

A good time to have separate campaigns for each state would be when you have certain services or products offered in specific states. We have some clients that offer services in only a few states and some services in single states. This would be a great case to have multiple campaigns:

Ad–Scheduling

Some Clients only want to show their ads at certain times of the day. This job is generally taken care of at the campaign level. It’s pretty straight forward and we haven’t run into many in-house massacres that were caused by ad- scheduling confusion.

Budgeting

This is one of the major features that cause non-professionals problems. Sometimes people go hog wild in making tons of campaigns based on a geo-targeting strategy. If a company wanted to split their budget into two specific regions (let’s just say west coast east coast campaigns), then doing so at the campaign level is very useful. If a company carries a product nationally, 99.99% of the time there is no need for 50 state specific campaigns. Remember to keep it simple.

Search network/Content Network

This is an excellent time to use additional campaigns. The mistake people make here is not using more campaigns to take advantage of crafting a special campaign for the content network.

Adgroups: They designate which ad shows for which keyword.

Seem too simple? Well, that is the theme here. If someone wants to speak to their specific audience, they can do so more effectively with ad groups. You can go hog wild here and be richly rewarded for it.

One client came to us with 6 ACCOUNTS with over 100 campaigns per; that’s 600+ campaigns. Believe it or not we consolidated all of this into ONE campaign with 151 Ad Groups. What are the results?

Simple enough?