Organize to Optimize

When starting to improve and optimize your AdWords account, or any pay-per-click advertising account, the first step should always be organization. You cannot enhance your online marketing results if your campaigns are not structurally sound.

For those who ultimately want to be in a position to optimize and are feeling overwhelmed by the task of setting up or re-structuring their AdWords account an easy place to start the organization of your online marketing efforts is to simply use the four P’s of marketing as your guidelines:

Product: Group the same product and service types together by separating them into Campaigns and then divide them up into more specific Ad Groups. Write specific ad copy that is relevant to the product or service that it is being advertising within each Ad Group.

Price: Set a marketing budget for your AdWords efforts. Prioritize and divide this budget up between your different AdWords Campaigns. Set your individual keyword bids according to the market, your account history (if there is any), and the dollar amount that you are willing to spend on each word.

Promotion: It is very important to separate search network and content network advertising within your Google AdWords account. Search advertising and content advertising are different promotion types and need to be approached in different manners – be sure that your individual AdWords Campaigns are set to focus on one or the other.

Place: Google AdWords offers the ability to run your advertisements worldwide or in just one city. Set up each Campaign so that it advertises to the region that you are targeting with your products and services. If you take the time to divide your Campaigns into different geographic locations (i.e. having one Campaign per state or one Campaign per country) you will see further success by taking advantage of the different traits of the different marketplaces.

Using the four P’s as an organizational starting point will put the building blocks in place that will enable you to initiate your online optimization process. Optimization is a task that requires a lot of effort, hours, and expertise, and can only be accomplished when time has been put into the organization of your account. You must organize to optimize.