At Leapfrogg, we often inherit paid search accounts from clients (and their incumbent agencies) which have a poor structure resulting in poor management and performance. We immediately look to create a clear account structure to set the foundations of our strategy moving forwards. A good structure should incorporate the strategy at an ad, keyword, and ad group and campaign level.

The points below are what I believe to be the top five benefits of putting together a strong AdWords or Bing Ads account structure.

1. Establish areas of focus and control

Maximising the revenue potential for key search terms is vital for a strong performance. For example, for a retailer of wedding rings the term ‘wedding rings’ is highly relevant and will hold high search volume. To not limit this term by budget – put your top exact match keyword in a campaign by itself. This then allows the important keyword to run with its own budget, allowing the potential for conversion optimiser and AdWords Campaign Experiments etc.

2. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs)

An audience targeting strategy, powered by RLSAs , should be of utmost importance to advertisers nowadays. Using this feature to identify whether your campaigns are targeting a previous visitor or a new visitor to the client’s website is highly beneficial to campaign performance and understanding audience behaviours.

Having used this feature for several of our clients, I feel it is best used at a campaign level. Setting up separate campaigns targeting new and returning visitors allows us to change ad copy, target broader search terms and adjust bidding strategies as returning visitors know the brand and are likely to be ‘hotter’ leads.

3. Day-to-day management

All advertisers have budget limitations and KPIs to reach, so the day-to-day management of campaign performance is pivotal. To be able to manage performance daily, a solid structure of campaigns is required to show product areas at a granular level without creating unnecessary campaigns, which can make the account difficult to manage. This allows the advertiser to quickly identify performance and spend by product area. For example, rather than one campaign for clothing, you should separate this by ‘trousers’, ‘shirts’, ‘knitwear’, etc or even ‘men’s shirts,’ ‘women’s shirts’, ‘small shirts’ and so on. The approach will be dependant on multiple factors such as product range and search volumes.

4. Budget allocation

Following on from the day-to-day management of the account, creating campaigns for specific product areas allows you to allocate budget in relation to campaign performance and overall budgets. Due to budget limitations or poor performance, the advertiser may want to spend less on particular terms. A benefit of a good account structure is that it allows the advertiser to limit click spend and affect performance at a campaign level.

Another benefit is that it allows an advertiser to allocate enough daily budget to effectively ‘uncap’ particular campaigns. A poor structure could result in particular terms using up the campaigns daily budget before other terms have had a chance to gather impressions and clicks.

5. Search term to ad relevancy

To achieve a high click-through-rate the ad copy must be highly relevant to the searchers query. For the structure to help achieve this, I recommend grouping related keywords at a granular level so that the ad copy can be tailored to each group of search terms. For example, rather than one ad group for ‘trousers’, create several ad groups with tailored ad copy and search terms such as; ‘red trousers’, ‘corduroy trousers’, ‘red corduroy trousers’ etc.

Although a lot of the points above are simple setup tasks, a strong account structure from ad creatives to campaign grouping will benefit several key tasks for an advertiser. Creating a strong structure in line with your strategy will help result in executing the above benefits.