It’s ALL about the segmentation

I got an email from a friend of mine getting into PPC asking me what’s best tip I can give him.  There are so many different directions I could have gone in my answer, but it always come back to segmentation of your campaign.   Segmentation is just another way of saying “breaking your campaign up into small chunks”.  The initial work you do in setting up numerous adgroups with highly targeted keywords and ads will pay off many times in the long run.  It’s tempting to just throw everything in 1 campaign to get something running, but laying the ground work is the key to a campaign’s success. 

For a real world example, I recently worked with a client to improve their Adwords campaign.  They had about 1,000 keywords in 3 adgroups.  I examined their keywords list and was able to break out 45 different adgroups from their original 3.  I then wrote more targeted ads for each group of keywords.  Sure it was a ton of work, but their total average CTR increased by 70% within a week.  That’s before even touching the keyword list or match types.  Just goes the show the power of good campaign structure.