How to Structure a PPC Campaign in the Age of Automation via @siliconvallaeys
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How to Structure a PPC Campaign in the Age of Automation
Over the years, much has been written about how to structure a PPC campaign for maximum performance.
When I was recently asked to lead a panel on the topic, I covered some of the classic structures like single keyword ad groups, single product ad groups, etc.
But now that automation in PPC is much more prevalent, what are some new considerations for the perfect structure?
1. Automation Requires Consistent Structure
Maintaining a consistent structure has always been important to:
But where humans can usually figure out where to find things in an inconsistent structure, the machines may have a much harder time.
Here's an example.
One of our clients was using a combination of a few automations:
One day, they noticed their budgets had been exceeded for Nissan vehicles.
After investigating, we found that the feed with inventory was sometimes putting the word Nissan in all caps and sometimes not.
As a result, the automation that created the campaigns had started creating two Nissan campaigns as you can see in the image below.
Automation can be broken when there are inconsistencies in account structure, like in this example where words are sometimes capitalized in different ways.
The automation that checks budgets had been set up to expect the brand to be proper cased: "Nissan" and so the campaign with upper casing "NISSAN" was causing extra budget to be spent.
Fixing this wasn't rocket science but the issue could have been prevented if naming conventions had been more consistent.
When things are automated, the risk is that humans pay less attention and don't catch simple mistakes like this before they cause an issue.
In other words, the problem is more likely to be discovered after it has caused overspend.
Whereas, in t