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Managing Large Scale Google PPC Campaigns Running ecommerce campaigns on Google PPC may seem to be pretty much straight forward. There is enough literature available on how to run campaigns on Adwords and on general optimization techniques. But practically when it comes to buying media on a very large scale then agencies start to panic. After a certain point of time you find it really difficult and cumbersome to achieve your sales target and start getting lost in CPC, CPA, Conversions, Sessions, Bounce Rate and what not! This guide will help you to understand what are different tools, methods and techniques which you must follow to efficiently manage large scale accounts. However the scope of this ebook does not include intelligent tools which use automation and machine learning for Google PPC optimization. 1. Use Adwords Editor Adwords Editor is an extremely powerful tool when it comes to handling media buying, efficiently at a very large scale. It s a free application by Google which you can easily download to your machine and treat it as your master control room!
Although Google has been revising the web version of Adwords to add a lot of functionalities but following are the reasons which make Adwords Editor an indispensable tool Adwords Editor lets you work offline while the web version doesn t not. This also allows multiple users to work in parallel and publish the changes when an account manager reviews and wants to finally push the changes online. AdWords Editor allows you to upload and edit ads in bulk. Although Adwords also has an option of downloading the spreadsheet (where you can make edits and upload back) but Editor is much more sleek, faster and easy to handle. Adwords Editor has quite a few killer features which are extremely necessary for large scale accounts such as find and replace function for keywords, easy shortcuts (to insert ad groups, to go to ad group level, to go to keyword level), downloading the entire MCC account in one single click, opening multiple account windows side by side, advanced bid changes, appending text to keywords and advanced keyword opportunities 2. Using Automation for Keyword Generation - Keyword automation is something about which a very few digital agencies are aware of. Out of that aware-lot, a very small chunk is capable of automating the process of keyword generation. Suppose you are buying media on Google search for an ecommerce giant which sells more than 10,000 products in about 100 of product categories. In such a scenario an account manager would need to generate and bid on more than 100,000 keywords.
It is not possible to generate these keywords manually or by talking the help of keywords research tools. These tools will never be able to index all the products that you are selling online, they will just throw you the list of popular searches. You might not be selling those items and most likely you would not want to bid on the most of them. To solve this problem, we at ET Medialabs have built excel models for keyword generation process which is a many to many mapping of keyword clusters and campaign clusters. With our tools all you need to do is just fill in a small template and hit the throttle. Within a second it will generate the entire list of keywords, along with account name, campaign name, ad group name with proper and uniform naming convention. 3. Using Scripts for Optimization If there is one thing which will help you to stand apart from the rest in terms of optimization skills then it is definitely the Adwords scripting. When it comes to media buying at a very large scale (let say you spend around a Million USD in a month or quarter) then you just can t manually manage your optimization effectively.
Even if you are taking the help of various rules then you would find them cumbersome. For that very purpose, Adwords scripts let you make automated changes in your Adwords account. Using JavaScript code, you can change bids, pause various ad groups; add keywords with written scripts directly instead of manually within your Adwords account. Imagine a situation when you need to scale down some 50 accounts and each of them have around 20 campaigns. In such a scenario you just can t change budgets at 100 points at speed. Even if you do that, you would need to analyze the performance at all those campaigns. This is where scripts come to rescue. Just sit down with your Excel sheets, analyze the historical data, and write down the conditions which have helped you to optimize effectively. Then pass it on to your developers to convert them into scripts. Once the scripts are done, you would not need to take this pain again. Optimization would not be an iterative process anymore.
If you manage multiple accounts through a My Client Center account, you can run one script across multiple accounts to optimize bids, create multi-account reports, and monitor for potential problems (such as fixing broken links or conflicting negative keywords). 4. Using Rules on Adwords Although scripting is the right thing to do for optimization on large scale accounts but in case you don t have resources with scripting skills then you can conveniently choose to go for Adwords rules. Setting up rules is much simpler and all you need to do is to identify the conditions which you think would help you cut down on cost and improve on conversions. Some basic rules can be the following Pause keywords if CPA > 100 USD and Cost > 1000 USD Increase CPC bids by 25% if conversions > 10 and clicks > 1000 Receive emails for assisted clicks if assisted clicks > 1 and converted clicks < 1 The only limitation with rules is that you cannot setup rules at MCC level. Hence for all your accounts (be it campaign level or ad group level) you will have to set up the same rules at all the accounts repeatedly. If you want to setup rules at MCC level then you would need scripting.
5. Using Quality Metrics to Scale up/down In case you are wondering what Quality Metrics is, don t be dazzled. There would only be handful of agencies that optimize based on a single metrics which has the strongest correlation with their KPIs (can be total conversions or CPA or number of sessions or something like that). The biggest challenge with large scale optimization is that if you try to optimize the parameter 1 then parameter 2 falls down or if you try to optimize the parameter 3 then may be parameter 1 and parameter 4 falls down; ultimately affecting your campaign objective. Hence there is no single metric which will ensure that you can maximize your ultimate objective. We at ET Medialabs have defined Quality Metrics to solve this problem. You should always think of identifying the correlations between your constraints and objectives. Use regression and statistical tools or machine learning so that you optimize the KPI which has the strongest correlation with your ultimate goal. 6. Display and Search Remarketing Remarketing can be extremely helpful when none of your optimization exercises are being fruitful. Remarketing lets you show your ads selectively to the users who have visited your website or used your mobile app before. When people leave your website without buying anything, for example, remarketing helps you reconnect with them by showing relevant ads as they browse the web, as they use mobile apps, or as they search on Google. There are several ways to remarket with Google Standard remarketing, to show ads to your past visitors as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps
Dynamic remarketing to show dynamic ads to past visitors with products and services they viewed on your website as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps Remarketing for mobile apps to show ads to people who have used your mobile app or mobile website as they use other mobile apps or browse other mobile websites. Remarketing lists for search ad to show ads to your past visitors as they do follow-up searches for what they need on Google, after leaving your website. Video remarketing to show ads to people who have interacted with your videos or YouTube channel as they use YouTube and browse Display Network videos, websites, and apps But you must take care of the fact that to set up remarketing, you'll need to add the remarketing tags to your website or app, create remarketing lists, and build remarketing campaigns that use your lists. The remarketing tag is a small snippet of code that you get from Adwords. After you've tagged your website or app, you'll create remarketing lists. For example, you can create a remarketing list for visitors to your most popular product category page. The remarketing tag tells Adwords to save visitors to your "Popular category list." When people visit that page, their cookie ID is added to the remarketing list.
7. Setting up Dashboards on Google Analytics Private dashboards become extremely helpful for setting up your very own control room for marketing campaigns. This also eliminates the daily need of creating reports to your clients (or to yourself). Dashboards also give you a comprehensive and summarized understanding for all your efforts. Let say you are optimizing media buying for an ecommerce company then you must set up the following reports at Google Analytics Revenue and cost by accounts Revenue and cost by devices Revenue and cost by languages Revenue and cost by country Sessions by accounts, devices, country and languages Cart visits by accounts, devices, country and languages Transactions by accounts, devices, country and languages Bounce Rate by accounts, devices, country and languages
8. Ensuring Proper Tagging and Naming Conventions We can never over-emphasize the importance of this particular tip. We have worked with quite a few clients who have been buying online media for millions (per month) and they haven t even ensured proper tagging and naming conventions for their account names, campaign names, ad group names and destination URLs. Once you start scaling, it becomes next to impossible to analyse the tones of data coming from Adwords and Google Analytics. Unless you do proper tagging and your destination URL, you just can t attribute KPIs like revenue, cost, CPA, cart visits, bounces etc. to accounts, campaigns and ad groups. Miss this and optimization is out of question. You just can t afford to ignore the standard tagging format suggested by Google. Also a good practice says that account name, campaign name and ad group names must trace connected identifiers so that you can make out which ad group belongs to which campaign or account. Similarly as Google suggests, this is how you should build your destination URLs www.example.com/?utm_source=sourcename&utm_medium=mediumname&utm_content=content name&utm_campaign=campaignname&utm_term={adposition},{matchtype},{keyword}
9. Automation of Ad Generation Over a period of time when you have added thousands of products on your e- commerce site and you are still adding hundreds of them each month then it becomes quite difficult to keep on manually adding and designing ads. In such a scenario you should move towards automation of ad generation. We have devised tools which can fetch data from a standard product feed and extract fields from the feed. Fields are then passed on to standard ad copy templates to create new ads. Ads are then passed on to Adwords to go live. This becomes extremely helpful when you are growing at a fast pace and you can t afford to wait due to resource crunch. 10. Other Important Tips Mastering Adwords is a mammoth task and we can t cover all the tips at one place. Still we have tried to cover those which are really helpful for large scale media buying. To close with, we are listing a few more important tips - If you haven t signed up to the Google Merchant Centre then do it right away. The Merchant Centre is a place where you can upload your product data and make it available to Google Product Search To make the most of linking to the Google Merchant Centre you can attach attributes to help campaigns perform better. For example the Adwords Grouping Attribute can be used for Product Filters to limit a campaign to a group of products or to vary bids for certain keywords If you want to test some changes but don t want to risk rolling it out across the whole campaign why not try ACE (Adwords Campaign Experiments). This tool is perfect for testing the water before optimizing large accounts
First things first, you need to get organized. Your Adwords account needs to mirror the structure of your website. Don t bunch all your products into one campaign with a couple of ad groups. Create a campaign for each product or even each product brand Try out all the different type of available ad options. For example, dynamic search ads, call out extensions, site links, keyword insertion and product listing ads. Once your PPC account becomes huge then performance starts deteriorating after a certain point of time. Then trying out different type of ads really starts becoming fruitful.