How to Audit your AdWords Account Structure

Welcome to Week 3 of Audit Month!

Structure and relevancy are the unsung heroes of Paid Search management.

It’s not exciting or glamorous… until you 10x account performance and have the best month, quarter, and year ever… and then beat it the next year… just because you know how to structure an account.

Resources:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375404?hl=en
https://unbounce.com/ppc/landing-pages-for-adwords/

Transcript:

James: Amy, welcome back to week three.
Amy: It’s good to be here. Thank you.
James: This week we’re going to be talking about structure and relevancy.
Amy: Yes, or as I call it, relevance.
James: By the way, that’s exactly opposite. I did a little research on this. I say relevance. She says relevancy. Only about 2% of the world apparently uses relevancy, but it’s ingrained in Amy’s head.
Amy: I’m one of those special 2% I guess.
James: That’s one way to look at it for sure.
Amy: Sorry if it’s confusing anyone. Apparently relevancy is not the way to say it. It’s just the way I say it.
James: But hey, we love you guys so you can say it however you want.
Amy: Of course.
James: Anyway, this is a section that at times can be unpopular or difficult to explain to people.
Amy: I think it’s just not a sexy topic. If you’re going to go into say you’re auditing someone’s account, and you can go in and say, “Hey, we found all those ways people get upset,” or, “We found all the specific opportunity people get happy,” but if you’re like, “Hey, your campaign is inaccurately labeled,” no one cares. Or, “Hey, we found this. The keyword red shirt is actually in the blue shirt ad group.” It doesn’t strike a nerve with anyone, and so it’s not popular. Clients don’t get excited about it. People don’t get excited to do it because there’s not a lot of immediate reward. There’s no dopamine that’s triggered or whatever, so it usually goes-
James: Because it’s complex and it can be subtle.
Amy: Yeah, and it doesn’t even have to be complex but there’s just not a big reward at the end of it.
James: That’s what I mean though. The reward of it is multifaceted and complex because there’s so many components that are going into this.
Amy: Right, right, and I would say maybe the irony of it is that you can do amazing things when you have account structure figured out. That is my go-to way of getting really, really good results for people.
James: You are good with account structures.
Amy: Yeah. It’s my super power, but it’s just not something that everyone gets super excited about, so I hope that we can bring some excitement to this and that people who are listening will feel a little more excited about this section of auditing structure and relevancy.
James: Or how about if not that, at least a really great understanding of it so that they can get through it quickly and efficiently?
Amy: That works too. Yeah.
James: Okay, so as we’re going into this we have account structure, we have relevance, or relevancy. Where should we start with this?
Amy: Well let’s go ahead and look at account structure first and just talk about what structure is, and then we’ll talk about how it pertains to specific elements.
James: Under structure, where are we going to start?
Amy: I think the main thing to be aware of in an AdWords account, and let me just say. People who do AdWords are smart people, and people get a lot of things right and there’s a lot of things that happen and things to keep track of, and people do a great job. But one area that a lot of people aren’t very good at is structure. I don’t know why. I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons why, but people just, on a general level, tend to be pretty bad at matching like with like. Sometimes there’s failed attempts and sometimes there’s no attempts at all. I’ll look at an account where it’ll just be like campaign number one, campaign number two, campaign broad match, campaign spend a lot of money. You know? It won’t make any sense. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, and a good structure is matching like with like.
You’re putting things that perform the same or that require the same settings or require the same treatment in some way, and you’re grouping those things together smartly so that you have a very well organized account. You want your account to function like Target functions where everything is just streamlined and clear and you know the inventory and you know where everything is. You don’t want it to be like a Dollar Store bin where you’re rummaging around like you don’t really know where things are. It may not seem like it, but this affects the end user experience. How things are grouped together, what they type in, the ad that they see and the landing page they go to. All of that is dependent on getting like with like right in your account structure.
James: You know what’s interesting about that, just as a memory. I remember when I was first getting into paid search and I was learning a lot about it. You had obviously been in it for a long time already and I asked you, “When you’re looking at all these new accounts, what’s the biggest thing that you run into that’s a mistake? What’s the biggest mistakes that you run into on each account?” And I was surprised when you said account structure, that that was the most common thing.
I’ve asked dozens of people the same question. People with a lot of experience, people with a little experience, and almost universally the people that tend to have a lot experience, they answer that question with account structure. It’s just that thing that if you get it wrong, everything else is problematic. So many things and so many optimization methods, so many future things that you may want to do is based on account structure, and if it’s not right already this is the time to get it right.
Amy: Yeah. For sure, and honestly that’s a question that I would ask when I was interviewing people is just, “What’s the thing that most frequently goes wrong?” And there’s not one right answer because people have different experiences, but I did tend to see that people who had more experience were like, “Oh, you know what? Let me tell you about this account structure that was just horrible and how fixing it literally changed everything.”
We’ve got a client now where we went from their revenue from being low five figures to now seven figures, and that was just because what we were doing to improve the campaign to improve the structure. We were able to make so many more optimizations based on that that we could really grow it, and that’s something you cannot do when you have a campaign that literally says “mobile keywords” and “popular keywords” and “unpopular keywords.” You can’t do it that way. You have to know what’s in the box, what’s in each of these ad groups and campaigns in order to be able to grow it.
James: And this is I think something worth pointing out. A lot of times when people either they’re coming onto a new account or for whatever reason they’re hesitant to make these types of changes, and frankly clients and going into in-house jobs, they’re hesitant for you to do it too. They’re nervous about you changing what’s there. It’s kind of like they see it as just a baseline that you’re supposed to improve from the ground up, and anything that might take away from what they already have. It’s kind of like that old saying. It’s like, afraid of losing what you have, or not getting what you want, and by changing your account structure that’s a significant move.
Amy: Yeah, there can be resistance to it for sure, or you have to prove yourself. It can be a little bit tough, and when you do make changes, which is different than auditing. I guess we’re talking about two different things right now, but when you go in and start making changes you can one, meet some resistance, and two, if you’re starting over with something, you are resetting the quality score. You’re having to build from there, but it usually makes sense to do the right thing the right way and over time you’ll see-
James: Yeah, build the right foundation.
Amy: Not always. There are some exceptions, but it’s usually pretty good.
James: Okay, so establishing that it’s important and that this can be a long term process, but right now we’re just going to assess where we’re at.
Amy: Exactly.
James: What else is there to be said about structure before we move on?
Amy: I think a good way to think about this, and I know I mentioned Target earlier but keeping Target in your mind, because I love Target and I think it’s very pleasurable for people to shop there for the most part. If you think about if you walk into Target, and let’s say you need to get laundry detergent. You walk in there. Even if you’ve never been to Target before you can look up and find, there’s going to be an aisle that says, “This is where laundry products are.”
So you know what you need, you see something that says, “Hey, they’re over here,” and you go over there, and then you can see in the aisle you probably got a lot of different choices for laundry detergent. You’re looking at a lot of them. That process is very similar to someone needing something, going to Google, searching for it, seeing … You can think of your little ad as kind of a way finding sign. Like hey, it’s over here. This is a navigation. This is where you go. Then someone clicks on it, goes to the landing page, and sees the product. It’s the same thing only it’s being done online.
James: Maybe because they have intent. They have something in their mind, and so the first indicator, so they’ve searched for something. That keyword.
Amy: They’ve gone to that place. Yeah, they’ve seen the sign that says, “Hey, it’s over here.”
James: “Hey, we’re relevant to the thing that you want.”
Amy: Right.
James: “Come and visit us.”
Amy: Right. And so that process needs to … I think sometimes people understand the whole idea of message match more than they understand the idea that the structure behind it needs to be there, because your keyword, your search term, your ad, and your landing page all exist within the same ad group and it’s largely mix and match as far as Google’s concerned. They will serve any ad in your ad group against any keyword in your ad group with any landing page however you have it set up, whether it’s at the ad level or the keyword level, but you’re going to be mixing and matching that and that’s something that some people don’t understand. They’re like, “Well, if I have an ad that has my keyword in it, then Google should just serve the most relevant one and I don’t have to worry about it.” No, you still have to worry about it. There’s no guarantee that they’ll pick the one that has your keyword in it. You need to break them out into separate ad groups if you have ads about different themes that are matched with different keywords.
James: Right. Essentially Google is going to try to choose the one that’s going to get the highest click-through.
Amy: But that’s not a guarantee though. If you click down and see which ads, if you signal down to see which keywords are serving against, it’s not just the ones you want.
James: Right. It has a bias towards its historical account, so if it knows that one ad that may not be the best one but it’s an older one that has a lot of history, it may well serve that one instead of your new-
Amy: Right, and not necessarily the best one for your keyword. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make is it’s not going to say, “Hey, this click-through rate will be better if we choose it this way.” They’re not making that decision for you. That’s something you have to set up and articulate by way of creating a smart ad group.
James: Yeah you can, and you should.
Amy: Yeah.
James: Okay, so what about when it comes to campaigns and ad groups, how are they supposed to be used, each one of them?
Amy: This is something that people can get tripped up on a lot. It can be confusing because both of them are essentially containers, and so it’s, what goes where? How do I get this set up?
James: Right. People see it as a hierarchy and one contains the other, but besides that …
Amy: Yeah. It’s not always super clear to people, and I think you have to just learn the ropes to figure it out because it’s not like there’s one prescribed way to do it, but it’s important to keep in mind that ad groups are not just arbitrary containers where you put stuff. Kind of like what we were talking about. You need to really have a theme for each ad group, and within that theme you want keywords relevant to that theme, ads that are relevant to that theme, and landing pages that are relevant to that theme and they all have to function together. And that is what comprises your ad group and if there’s something else that’s a different theme, that belongs somewhere else but everything needs to be self-contained within your ad group in order to make sure again that it’s going to be matched appropriately and can get that message match that you’re hoping to get for your end visitor.
James: One important thing that I think we might want to delve into a little bit is just what is a theme? You’ve mentioned it several times already and I’m sure we’ll mention it again but just within the context of AdWords, what is a theme and why is it important?
Amy: That’s a good point. Theme can mean different things. It’s not super specific so it is a little bit vague unfortunately.
James: It’s a bit of an abstract concept, yeah.
Amy: It is. It’s abstract and it can change a lot. Let’s say I have an ad group that’s chairs, and then I see that I actually want to break it out. So I’ve got modern chairs as its own ad group, and contemporary chairs, and old style chairs. Those could all reasonably be themes, so the way I’m going to approach it is I’m going to go through and say, “Where’s the volume? Where’s the opportunity? Where does it make sense? What landing pages do I have to break it out?” So there’s not a hard and fast rule and you can make changes to it, but it wouldn’t make sense to have say chairs, tables, and lamps all in the same ad group because it’s very unlikely that they’re going to go to the same landing page. Now, I’m using examples of products. Obviously if you have a huge catalog you’re probably going to be using dynamic search ads and not have to deal with this, but these are just easier concepts to illustrate the point.
James: And something that you just brought up I think is an important thing to consider is it’s not just what the ideal is here. It’s what you have to work with. When you’re looking at landing pages, it’s very unlikely that you have an infinite amount of pages that you can direct your ad groups towards, so you really need to look at that and keep that in mind as you’re figuring out the themes that you want to organize by.
Amy: Right. To some extent it doesn’t make sense to break out 50 different ad groups that are all going to go back to the exact same landing page. Sometimes it can, but not always.
James: Well there’s plenty of accounts that do just that. There’s plenty of accounts that just direct everybody to the homepage because they think it’s so magical that it’s ready for any kind of user you throw at it. But generally speaking, if you have a landing page that matches the theme of the ad group, of the ad, the keyword-
Amy: Yeah, I would say the theme being the core idea.
James: Yeah. Behind the intent.
Amy: Right.
James: I’m glad that we delved into that a little bit. I think it’s also worth noting that if you go to AdWords support, you had mentioned this to me earlier and I looked into it and they had some pretty terrible examples of themes.
Amy: They actually are using the word “theme.” Group ad groups by similar themes. Okay.
James: It’s literally in the AdWords test is I think one of the answer is how you group keywords together in an ad group, and they’re looking for the word “theme.”
Amy: Yeah, but the example they currently have. For example, you’d have ad group desserts, and it would say that the example keywords in ad group desserts are cupcakes, pumpkin pies, apple pie, chocolate cake, ice cream, and cookies.
James: Yeah. In this case I would think that the campaign-
Amy: I would fire you if had this all in one ad group.
James: So what would you do? You’d put a campaign maybe as desserts, and then you’d have individual ad groups for each of those.
Amy: Right, and obviously it’s going to depend on your business type. Are you a bakery that specializes in desserts, or are you a huge chain of grocery stores where you have a dessert department? But either way, if you Google-
James: Or you have a sad rack of pastries that may or may not contain any one of those things.
Amy: Right. I Googled cupcakes. There is not one page that shows up where it’s like you type in cupcakes and you go to a dessert page where you also see pumpkin pie. Most places are going to have a specific landing page for cupcakes. Your ad group is going to be about cupcakes. Take them to a cupcake page. That just makes so much more sense.
James: And let’s think about it. It does make sense. If somebody is searching specifically for a cupcake, then take them to a cupcake page. Because if they’re that deliberate about what they’re looking for by cupcake, like that’s their search term, they want a cupcake, bad.
Amy: Yeah, and obviously again it’s going to depend on what landing pages you have, but I just can’t think of a time where you’d have dessert as your only landing page and then … You know what I mean? You want to be considerate about it.
James: In general, you want to know vaguely or in general what a theme is, and I think that people probably get an idea of that, and then you want to look at your account-
Amy: Let’s just say one other thing because I do see that this can go wrong sometimes is when you’re thinking about themes, sometimes there’s a lot of different ways to subdivide information and people will pick the wrong way to subdivide. For example they’ll be like, “Well these are things that are green,” and so then they’ll have an ad group, just as an example, like green apples and green grapes and green cabbage.
James: Which by the way, this is a good example of how a theme might technically be a theme, but be a terrible one.
Amy: Right. You really want to group it by the core idea, which is probably not green foods. It’s probably, I’m looking for cabbages or I’m looking for apples or whatever, and have those be separated out. But I have seen where people will use an adjective to be their theme, and so I just want to warn against that if that’s what’s being done. If you’re saying, search words that use the word “sale,” or search words that use the word “new,” or search words that use the word “2018,” probably not.
James: I think a way past that is to again revisit the intent of your hypothetical user. Think about what they’re searching for and think about the different things they might be keying in to get there, and then if you consider that then you can start creating your ad groups and directing them to the right landing pages.
Amy: Right, and I think that’s definitely the name of the game is thinking about what the intent of your visitor, and not just, “Oh I’ve got all these keywords. These ones start with A. I’ll group all those together.” Just think about how someone’s working their way through to get to your landing page and decide to take action there.
James: Honestly, any time that you might feel confused about something or if you feel like you’re getting off track, just try to return to the intent of your user.
Amy: Yeah. That’s a really good point.
James: And I think it returns you very well.
Amy: Yeah, for sure.
James: So we have that. I wanted to talk about the contrast between campaigns and ad groups. Campaigns, they encapsulate ad groups technically, but I think that sometimes people don’t really … They don’t separate them well, so I just wanted you to speak a little bit to that.
Amy: I think it can be confusing to people for how to group ad groups into campaigns.
James: Yeah. Better said. Yeah.
Amy: How do you decide which goes where? And without a strategy there then it’s kind of just an ad group dump where your campaign just contains a ton of ad groups and it’s like, broken out by date. We added these ad groups on this date, or this campaign on this date.
James: I think we’ve both seen those.
Amy: Yeah, and really what you want to do for your campaign is be a little bit more methodical about it and consider what … Campaigns will have some unique targeting capabilities that ad groups don’t have, so ad groups are nice containers for again, all your themes, everything together.
James: But kind of the nexus between intent and the themes.
Amy: Right, but then we need to group them smartly together, and this is where your campaign comes in because your campaign is where you set your location settings for example, and so if you have ad groups that are similar but one needs to target Japan and one needs to target Germany, they don’t go in the same campaign. You’re going to need to have a different campaign for each of those, and same with languages. All ad groups within the same campaign are going to share the same language settings, and so that’s something to be mindful of when you’re setting up a campaign. You can’t mix and match or cross divide there. You have to make sure that they all have those similar properties.
James: And of course the other important thing at the campaign level is just that’s where you control the budgets.
Amy: Right, and so if you’ve got keywords that need a really high budget or you’ve got a different target, you want to separate those out into separate campaigns. Otherwise you’re going to have some keywords that are potentially cannibalizing everything else.
James: A good example would be say separating out brand and non-brand, which is a common thing to do at the campaign level. Because you have a certain expected set of behavior from your brand keywords which generally, they should be high converting. They should be relatively cheap. So separating those out from product keywords or service keywords is a good separation. It just makes sense because of the budget differences, and also because they’re just fundamentally different classes of keywords.
Amy: Yeah, ultimately your brand terms are going to be more bottom of the funnel and hot traffic, and then you’ve got other campaigns and campaign types that are going to be colder traffic. You’re going to be measuring their performance differently, maybe have different goals for them, so you want everything broken out so you’re not just mixing that hot and cold traffic. You want the hot side hot and the cold side cold.
James: I think that was a good way to put it. This is not something you want blended because you want to see just how hot brand is. Just how much of a lift maybe you’re getting there. And you don’t want it to be unduly lifting up keywords that otherwise might be terrible.
Amy: Yeah. Like with like.
James: Yeah. We’ve had experiences with that with other clients. Remember that one where essentially they had a terrible account structure. This was actually one of the worst campaign structures I’ve ever seen. They were selling, what was it, prom dresses? And they were really surprised because in this one ad group, prom dresses were just selling like hotcakes all around the year. All months of the year. They were just doing excellent.
Amy: Yeah. I think it was for decorations, right? It was like prom decorations was doing super well, and when we looked into it the weird thing about that client is that not only were we not allowed to bid on brand, but we had to actively negative match brand terms from showing up. This was several years ago.
James: But-
Amy: But, it turns out that the account that we had inherited, for some reason it had prom plus the brand, and so all the brand traffic whether it had anything to do with prom or not was all coming in through that and performing really well, but gave-
James: Right, it was a broad keyword.
Amy: Gave a really inaccurate picture of the success of prom.
James: So they thought they were killing it on prom.
Amy: Right. “Let’s just keep on putting more money into prom.” No, prom was not what was doing well. It’s that people were actually-
James: Prom was sucking.
Amy: Looking for your brand. This is the only possible way for them to find it.
James: And not to go off on a detour, but that’s just a terrible decision not to bid on brand, because they had competitors that were eating their lunch on it.
Amy: Yeah, for sure. It can be case by case, but this was a case where their competitors were really taking advantage of the fact that they could use their brand terms to get very cheap traffic.
James: Anyway, so getting back to the campaign thing. There are certain things that are worth separating these out, but they’re at more of a settings level, and we’ll be doing more of that next week about some of the specifics. Budgets, location, language. Were there any other ones that I’m forgetting to mention?
Amy: And just overall performance. I think when we go through the workbook for this, there’s a lot of focus on ad groups because that’s going to contain the different elements that are going to make up that whole message match, and then for campaign it’s just kind of a soft review. It’s just looking at hey, do these ad groups all together make up a campaign that makes sense? Because sometimes you’ll see where people, they don’t really know that you can’t use an ad group to do location targeting and so they’re trying to force it with keywords, and that just doesn’t work. You want to make sure that everything shares those settings or just those properties and that targeting in order to say, “Yeah, everything belongs in the same campaign,” as opposed to, “We should break it out into a different one.”
James: One thing since we’re talking about the structure of an ad group. You have a certain style that you like to build accounts out under, but something that’s really common are SKAGs, single keyword ad groups. How do you address those versus a different approach to account structure?
Amy: Well I don’t think it really matters. Some people get really hung up on how many keywords you’re supposed to have in an ad group. This is a really common question that people will ask, and sometimes people’s answer is one. Sometimes it’s 15 to 20. The number of keywords in your ad group is kind of like arguing about the font size of your cover letter.
James: Or the font.
Amy: Yeah, make it legible, and then who cares?
James: And not Comic Sans and you’re okay.
Amy: Exactly. It’s kind of chef’s choice at a certain point. You can do what works for you. I don’t think there’s one way to do it, and some people swear by SKAGs and if it works for them, that’s great.
James: Yeah, sometimes it can be effective but it can also be unruly.
Amy: But it’s really at the end of the day, what can you manage well? So there’s really no difference between a SKAG, a single keyword ad group, and a multiple keyword ad group that both as long as all the keywords in your ad group share the same theme. If it’s one keyword it’s a little bit easier to share the same theme than if it’s 10 maybe, but at the end of the day as long as they all share the same theme and they have ads that match that theme and landing pages that match that theme, I don’t think it really matters the quantity in there. It’s more just how relevant are they to each other?
James: I think it’s worth noting too that over time the distinction is becoming less and less as Google is taking away some control on what you are matching against. So just as match types get more liberal in how they’re matching and frankly as the way that people use technology gets more dynamic, search by voice and search and … It’s hard to be too precise with your ad groups, and SKAGs are built around this concept of hyper-precision, hypersegmentation. Anyways, we just want to address that. At its root, they’re essentially the same thing. You still want to follow the same rules when you’re looking at them for relevance.
Amy: Exactly, so whether it is a single keyword or multiple keyword ad group, you want it to be relevant and I would say also, to give advice that goes along with that, to try to avoid doing keyword dumps. I think this is where people get into trouble a lot is they’ll try to find new keywords or search for new keywords, and I know you’ve been in situations where you had a target number of new keywords you were supposed to come up with every single week or every single month. And I’ve been in that situation too where it’s like, “Well we always have to be adding keywords.”
Well, I think that’s a poor idea for a lot of different reasons, and let’s just say the most obvious one is that Google is doing that for you. That is not something you have to do. They will match against other keywords. If there’s new relevant topics or themes, then sure. If you have the landing page to support that and you can create new ads to support that, sure absolutely, but if you’re just doing research to say, “Hey, here’s what our competitors are bidding on,” or you’re doing research that says, “Hey, there’s a lot of volume around this term,” well if you don’t sell that or you don’t have a landing page for that, you don’t just get to add the keyword just because it’s a popular keyword or your competitors are using it. It needs to match what your offer is, and for some reason people ignore that and they’re just looking for what’s the hottest keyword or the newest keyword? No, make sure it’s relevant to what you offer.
James: Right, and I think those are two different things. You have one school of thought where they think, let’s dump every relevant keyword in there, and then the other school of thought just kind of sounds like you’re saying Britney Spears, or just whatever popular term is going on at the moment even though it might not be relevant at all.
Amy: Well I would say if you’re doing keyword research you’re hopefully not just saying, “What’s the most popular search term?” But that if you’re within, say you’re using the keyword “planning tool,” you have your keyword and … I’m failing to come up with an example, but let’s just say you sell board shorts and Google says, “Hey, maybe you want to have an ad group about bikinis,” but you don’t sell bikinis. You can’t just use that because it’s popular. You have to make sure you offer what’s available.
James: Like you sell cars. A lot of people are searching for motorcycles. Hey, they’re both means of getting around, so why not throw those in? Because maybe those people looking for motorcycles might actually be interested in cars.
Amy: Yeah, don’t bid on motorcycles if you sell cars. How about that?
James: By the way any newbies, that’s the classic mistake. Never do this. Never, ever, ever add keywords just because they’re popular. You got to make sure that the intent matches. Alright, so beyond that, ad group structure. Break it down for us.
Amy: Okay, so your ad group, I think we already went over this, right? We’ve got keywords, ads, and landing pages. Those all need to go together. Part of keywords, it’s not just the words you’re bidding on. It is also the words you aren’t bidding on, the words you’re negative matching, and you’re search terms and I think the search terms are going to be your secret weapon in getting all of this together because you look at your search terms and you can understand what people are actually search for. Does that match the theme?
So at this point when we’re going through to audit relevancy and structure, we are only really looking at, does this match the theme what we’re trying to get? We’re not looking at, did this convert? Or did it not convert? Or how expensive are the conversion? There will be a time to review that, but right now we’re just looking at, does everything go together? Are you getting wild search terms that don’t belong there that need to be negative matched? Are you getting really interesting search terms that you don’t have keywords for that maybe you should add, or maybe you find out that all of your search terms are for one keyword that needs to be broken out into a separate ad group. There’s a lot that you will find looking at your search terms, and I wrote-
James: Yeah, it’s a great insight into the intent behavior and searching have of your target user base.
Amy: Right. I wrote an article a few months ago, I think we can link to it in the show notes for Unbounce, and basically I walked through a strategy of how to determine whether your search terms are valuable or not, because so often people will go through and either they’re looking at search terms or keywords and saying, “Hey, this didn’t convert. It is garbage. It is a waste,” and that is not accurate because if you’re using a good search term with a bad landing page, or just the wrong landing page, that causes a problem but it doesn’t mean that it’s the search term’s fault or that the search term is bad.
Like we were at the store last week and we were looking at pants and there was a pair of pants and I thought, “Hey, maybe you’d like these,” and you’re like, “Those are four extra large. That’s not my size,” but the hanger said four extra large. The actual pair of pants was your size and it was the only one that was your size and everyone had passed it up because it said 4XL.
And so if you were just looking at the pants themselves you’d say, “Hey, this isn’t selling. These are bad pants.” But actually it just was on the wrong hanger and so it was really confusing for people. So getting the right search term, the right thing matching the right experience is huge. You can’t decouple those and say, “Hey, we found all this a waste.” You need to know whether the search terms are good or bad. You can’t just say they’re bad because they didn’t convert.
James: One thing that I think can be difficult about all this is that you do have to tie together several different variables at once and hold it in your head. You had just mentioned that you don’t want to pause a keyword or negative match out something because it hasn’t performed very well necessarily yet. Because if it’s going to a terrible landing page, or maybe even like a 404 or worse, then of course it’s going to perform terribly. Or if the tracking is wrong, or whatever. All these different things that can go into it, but for the purposes of this, you want to make sure that the ad is matching the right keyword and search term and that it’s directing to the right landing page, and you have to be tying all that together before you make any of those types of decisions. Okay, so what’s next with structure? What do we want to look at? Is there anything else when it comes to ad groups?
Amy: I think at this point we can probably jump into just talking about how we’re going to audit, and looking at search terms is an important part of how we’re going to audit. And like you said, there are a lot of things to be keeping in your brain at the same time which is why of the workbooks that are available for audit month, this is the one that took me the most time. Just grappling with how do we do an entire review of ad groups and campaigns and structure and relevancy and reduce that to a workbook that someone can just go through the workbook? And it took me quite a while, and I’m honestly pretty happy with it.
James: It’s great.
Amy: Because I’ve been able to use this on the ad groups that we’re running and find opportunities to improve, and I feel really good about that because I think the risk that you get when you’re trying to look at your keywords or you’re looking at your search terms is you kind of get in this wall of scrolling where you’re like, “Yep, those are all keywords. Yep, those are all …” and you don’t know how to take action or make a decision on this, and this makes it really-
James: Right. It becomes overwhelming.
Amy: Yeah, and this is a really easy way to take action and not only to identify areas that need help but to know what your next step is, and so I’m just really happy with … It took a lot of work but I’m really happy with how this workbook turned out because it’s something that I’ve already used and really learned from.
James: So where are we going to start in this and how are we going to proceed through it?
Amy: We’re going to start by looking at the ad groups, and normally if I’m auditing an account, I don’t start with the ad groups. I start with the campaigns. I work big to small and then back to big again, but for this auditing our own account I think starting with ad groups is a really smart idea because we’re going to take one ad group and we’re going to look at what is the theme of the ad group? How did those keywords that are in the ad group match the theme? How did the landing pages match the theme? How did the ads match the theme? How did the ad extensions match the theme? How did the search terms? How did the negative terms? How did they all work together? And just one ad group, and just bang it out so we can really make sure that everything is tightly related to each other.
James: Okay, so for each one of the ad groups we’d like to do that. Let’s say there’s 18,000 ad groups.
Amy: Then you’re doing it 18,000 times. What do you want me to say? No.
James: I mean I think that the first thing that would make sense is sort them by volume and value so far, right?
Amy: Hey, that’s a great idea. Maybe I’ll add that to the workbook.
James: Oh, did you put that in there?
Amy: Yes, of course. Of course we’re going to filter it by performance, and this is again, I’m going to say chef’s choice because you can choose … Well I don’t want to get too much into the how-to of the workbook, but basically you’re going to be sorting by what’s most important to you. You can bang out the first five, get the next five, get the next five, and you’ll already be prioritizing them, kind of the 80/20 rule here. With a little bit of work you’ll knock out your most important ad groups really fast.
James: It’ll also start giving you insights into … If there are certain types of problems with your account, going through a few ad groups will start to reveal these. Like if you have poor negative coverage and you have a bunch of irrelevant terms that are getting sucked in, search terms, there’s a good chance that you have that problem throughout your account.
Amy: Yeah. I will say too that the first versions that I had of this particular workbook were a lot more complicated, and one thing I did leave in as an extra worksheet is scoring each section of the review of an ad group on, this looks great. This is something I actually need external help on. I need to ask the client a question or I need to reach out to someone who’s doing the analytics part, or I need to reach out to someone else on my team. Where you need a lifeline and where you need help with it. What things you made changes to because oops, this isn’t an issue where you need to review it later. You need to take care of it right now. There’s some expired ad copy in there. No, this doesn’t belong in an ad group. We’re going to audit that and take care of it right now.
So just being able to walk through and evaluate each of these elements at the same time, I think that that’s really valuable to just because, like you said, it’s trying to keep a lot in your brain all at once, so being able to just make notes and document what needs to happen next, it’s just kind of freeing to let you keep moving.
James: And at some point you just got to dive in.
Amy: Yeah, absolutely. I think this was kind of fun. It’s good stuff and starting-
James: I think it’s fun because one of the things I hear from a lot of people when, I don’t know, when they have a few beers in them and they’re admitting things maybe they wouldn’t otherwise, is that people often have low confidence in this stuff. They feel like they don’t understand how their account is working.
Amy: We should have a new podcast. James Gets Drunk and Talks to People About Their-
James: No, not me. It’s the other person.
Amy: James Gets People Drunk. That’s what I meant.
James: Yeah, that’s much better. Thank you.
Amy: James gets people drunk and finds out that they don’t actually have confidence in AdWords.
James: How about, James empathetically discusses personal issues with people and helps them through them?
Amy: Okay.
James: Anyway, but I think this kind of stuff just builds further confidence. It’s a common theme in this whole audit month is this idea that by going through all these steps you’re going to build confidence that you know how your account’s working.
Amy: Absolutely, and I think it’s worth pointing out because this is the third in a series of five. After this we’re going to be looking specifically at settings and we’re going to touch on strategy there, and then the last episode we’re doing is just full on strategy, and I know it might sound weird that we’re saving that to the end but knowing what’s in your account is going to make it a lot easier to do the strategy. So if it feels like we’re skipping over that part right now, that’s a little bit for a reason. It’s to go through right now, inventory what your ad groups are and start to identify where you need to make changes, and then we can piece together a strategy that’s based on all that.
James: Alright, so what do our listeners need to know to finish this week out then?
Amy: If you haven’t already, I think this one is PaidSearchMagic.com/26 is where you can go and get all of the workbooks, everything you need to be able to go through each step of audit month. You need the worksheets and then from there I think it’s kind of self-explanatory. I hope that I did a good job with the workbook and you just work your way through it. Just setting aside some time. Just go through one ad group. See how it goes. Try it the next time. Then after that I think you really will get a rhythm for it and it’ll start going faster or else you’ll get to the point where you’re like, “Hey, all these ad groups spent less than $20 last year. I don’t care anymore.” You know what I mean?
James: Yeah.
Amy: You’ll get to that point.
James: And honestly I don’t get as excited about this stuff as you do, but I have to admit that it’s pretty fascinating to look through the search terms. It really does start to give you an interesting picture into how things work.
Amy: Yeah, it definitely does. So campaigns lightly and ad groups in depth, and then that’s it for this week.
James: Awesome. Well thanks again for the work that you put into this as well as the past ones.
Amy: Thank you.

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