Intro to Paid Search Campaign Structures

As far back as I can remember in my career in 12+ years of PPC advertising, there has always been a debate about the right campaign structure to use for search campaigns. Now, my personal opinion on it has always been that the best campaign structure is the one that you manage the best. Everybody thinks differently, everybody optimizes differently and depending on how those things align, one structure might make more sense for you than another. But things have been changing and evolving over the past few years, I’m coming to think that there’s maybe only really a couple different types of campaign structure that make sense that don’t make a lot of duplicate work. So, in this video, I want to go through a handful of different popular campaign structures, talk about some of their strengths and weaknesses and help you figure out which one might be right for you.

The best way I can think to show you all of the different types of campaign structures that I’m going to talk through today is to start off with a basic set of keywords that we’ll use as the same example throughout all the different strategies we’re going to talk about. So, the keywords on the screen are the ones that we’re going to use. I’m not going to always use all of them, but at least you’ll be able to see how these structures differ from example to example because all the keywords will be the same. In this video, I’m going to talk about four different approaches to search campaign structure and these are the different ones that we’re going to talk about in order.

We’ll start with Single Keyword Ad Groups or (SKAGs) then we’ll talk about Alpha/Beta, then Match Type Segmentation and then we’ll work down to Consolidated. Which admittedly is a terrible word but there’s not really a word for the type of strategy that I’m going to talk about. So, I just made one up and consolidated is what I went with. If you don’t like it, please suggest something else to me in the comments. If you’ve watched any other Paid Media Pros videos, you know that there are sometimes caveats to the videos that we put together and there’s a big one for the video today. As I mentioned in the intro, the search campaign structure you should use is the one that you manage the best. I am not immune to that rule. That means that one of these strategies is the one that I use and I will tell you about it when we get there, but the three others are strategies that I do not use.

So, I am not going to be the most well-versed person in these different strategies, but I’ve been in this industry long enough. I’ve seen these different structures in action and I’ve done a bit of research to make sure that the video today should give you a pretty accurate overview of how each of them work but I’ll admit it might not be perfect. So, bear with me. Hopefully you’ll still be able to get 90% of the idea for each of these structures to decide which one works best for you.

Now let’s start off with Single Keyword Ad Groups. The core tenant of this is that each ad group has a single keyword and these are typically broken out by match type, but they don’t always have to be. Now an example of this would look something like this. You have a campaign level and it’s just for the shoes list of keywords that we had to start. Each ad group ties to one of those keywords and here you’ll notice that each ad group only has one keyword and that ties exactly back to the same name as the ad group. Now again depending on the individual practitioner, in some instances all of the match types will be in one ad group, but in most of the accounts I’ve ever seen SKAGs utilized, the match types are broken out by ad group. So, you would see a list of ad groups that looks like this for exact match and then you would see a second set that is for phrase and a third, that would be for broad. So, while I only have 6 ad groups and keywords on the screen, for a full broken out list of single keyword ad groups, there would actually be 18, one that’s a set of exact, one that’s a set of phrase, and one that’s a set of broad.

Now, let’s talk about the pros and cons of Single Keyword Ad Groups. Overall, SKAGs have a very high level of control and they give you a lot of insights at the ad group level which can be really beneficial depending on how you manage the account. Now, unfortunately, in my opinion, there are honestly more cons than pros when it comes to this. Having a good level of control is great but if you have all of your ad groups broken out by match type where those are separate, the query mapping will be almost impossible now that we have close variants in a Google Ads and a Microsoft Ads platform. Additionally, my guess is that you’re probably not using different ad copy for the exact verse phrase versus broad match version of that single keyword. So, your ad copy testing is likely duplicated across a lot of ad groups, which means that you have three lines of data to consolidate and review rather than just one for conducting your ad copy tests.

That can be a real pain in the butt when you’re trying to determine which message works best for which keyword and it means the test is going to take longer. Because you have to either consolidate it all or you have to wait until each individual ad group has reached a certain level of confidence before you turn over a next test. And lastly, that’s not just for ad testing. That’s for all data segments. No matter what you’re doing, if you’re utilizing a SKAG approach with your match types broken out, you’ve basically separated all of your data into three different lines instead of just one and made it a bit harder to optimize on.

The next structure is Alpha/Beta and here we start to group things together, but it’s going to be based on performance. All top performing keywords are added into a single campaign as exact match and that creates the alpha campaign where your alpha keywords will live, and then all lower perform keywords or beta keywords are in separate campaigns and they’re added as non-exact. Whether phrase or broad match to help find new queries and try to find growth while also knowing that those will likely perform on a lower level than your alpha keywords. Those beta keywords are then utilized to find new queries that perform really well that will eventually be added to the alpha campaign.

So, here’s what that might look like. On the left, we have the alpha version where we have three keywords, I’ve identified for this example that perform really well. Women’s running shoes, men’s Nike running shoes, and Nike hoodies. Those are all added as exact match in that alpha campaign and then in the beta campaign, we have four additional ad groups, four different keywords and you can see that I’ve left them as broad but this could also include phrase match keywords as well.

Some of the pros of the Alpha/Beta strategy are that you can get a lot more aggressive on your bottom funnel optimization. In the alpha campaign because you know those are the keywords that perform best. You can potentially get more lenient on your target CPA or target ROAS or even get more aggressive on those bidding strategies because you know the performance will be met. You also have more control over those individual top performers to where in the single keyword ad group section, I mentioned that you might not have different ad copy for the exact phrase and broad match terms. But in Alpha/Beta, if one of them performs that much better, you might have different ad copy. It’s easier to all of those top performing, customized messages in that alpha campaign and let the beta have more of an aggregate level view. You also have a little bit more control when it comes to scaling up or scaling back on your growth-focused keywords with beta because you can control the budget, you can adjust settings and you can likely adjust your different bidding strategies to tweak the campaign to either increase or decrease volume as needed.

Now, again, another con of this is that query mapping still will never be perfect. Even though you have all exact match keywords added in the alpha campaign, you would need to then add them as exact match negatives to the beta campaign to ensure that those would never show up there. But even in that scenario, sometimes you’re going to get those exact match close variants showing up in your alpha campaign meaning that it’s not truly exact. You would still have to go through and regularly review, the search query results, add in negatives or just allow the alpha to technically be the exact ish match and not have to be the exact term.

Again, even though you might have more over ad testing like I mentioned earlier, it still could be more difficult if you wanted to have the same message from alpha to beta trying to match those up since they are in different ad groups across different campaigns. And then depending on the amount of volume you have siloed into your alpha or beta campaigns, utilizing smart bidding strategies might be a little tough if you have volume constraints. If you only have a couple of alpha keywords that don’t have a lot of volume, you’re not giving the algorithm a lot of information to work on and is true for beta. So, even though Google says they don’t need any conversion data to optimize on, in my opinion, still best to make sure that you’re meeting some minimum requirements over time, usually 30 to 50 conversions in a month’s long time. If you don’t have that, it might make sense to revisit.

Now, the next campaign strategy is one that used to be utilized a lot and is going a little bit more by the wayside recently with all the different changes to close variant keyword match types. And rather than focus too much on the match type changes right now, I’ll refer you to the video at the top of the screen right now published in June of 2022 that gives the most accurate view of Google Ads match types as of the publication of this video. So, for a match type campaign structure all of the keywords are added with multiple different match types. But those match types are segmented either by the ad group or the campaign. I’ve seen this done in both ways, but I’m going to show you how the campaign level would work and then we’ll just talk about how the ad group level might look.

So, here we have the keywords added to the campaigns. There’s a single keyword usually in each ad group even though it doesn’t have to be a single keyword but all of the match types are broken apart by campaign. So, on the left, we have the exact match set of keywords. On the right, we have the phrase match and as a third example, you could have a broad match campaign and again, you can either have single keywords or have keywords group within the campaign or have keywords group within each ad group. But the biggest delineation here is that no single keyword and all of its match types live in the same ad group.

Now, depending on how closely you paid attention to the single keyword ad group section, my guess is that you can probably figure out some of the pros and cons because many of them are pretty similar here. You can have more aggressive bottom funnel optimization and trying to segment out growth. Again, because you have exact match in some areas and broad and phrase match in other areas but again, the query mapping is going to be almost impossible to make sure that you have only exact match terms in the exact campaign or ad group, only phrase match variants in those respective campaigns and ad groups, and only broad match in those respective campaigns and ad groups.

Letting you behind the curtain a little bit and even though he’s not here to speak for himself, I’ll speak for him as I often do. Joe actually used to be a proponent of the match types campaign structure approach. This was his go to, it’s what he managed best but over the last two years because of the adjustments to how match types work, he shifted further and further away from it because it just has become nearly impossible to maintain the same level of control that he used to have in the past. So, if you’re somebody who currently utilizes this match types approach, I’d be curious to hear if you still find it valuable or if you’re finding it easier to shift into a different structure approach.

Now the last campaign option, again, terrible name is Consolidated and I can say it’s a terrible name because this is actually the one that I use. The fourth and last type of structure that I want to talk about is Consolidated and just out as I’m getting on this slide. I think a better term might be thematic but I came up with that just now and I don’t want to go back and fix all the slides. In this campaign structure, all of the keywords and ad groups and campaigns are grouped by theme and all match types live in the same ad group within the same campaign. So, that’s going to look something like this. I’m sorry it’s a bit small, but hopefully you can see what’s going on here.

In the shoes campaign, we have women’s running shoes and then you can see that we have the exact and phrase match term, women’s running shoes within that ad group and then the same structure applies for every ad group within the shoes campaign. But then we have a separate campaign for sweatshirts and the ad group and keyword strategy applies similarly there with exact and phrase and although I didn’t put it on this slide because it would have been impossible to see if you use broad match that would also be included in here as well. Now, in some ways, this is similar to an Alpha/Beta strategy in that you have things broken apart by a measure of delineation but for Alpha/Beta, that measure is based on performance. For this consolidated or thematic campaign structure, it’s based really on what the keywords themselves are more so than the performance itself.

So, I’ll hop back to the Alpha/Beta strategy slide real quick and here you can see that there are keywords for shoes and hoodies in the alpha strategy. You can see that there are keywords for shoes and hoodies in the alpha campaign and although I don’t have them listed here, there would be also keywords for shoes and sweatshirts in the beta strategy. But in the thematic version, all of the keywords based on the different product groups are together in a single campaign and then delineated by ad group.

Now, I told you I would let you know which strategy is mine that I personally utilize and manage best and this consolidated or thematic one is it. It works best for me when I can see at a high level whether shoes or sweatshirts are performing best and then narrow down based on ad group following a keyword theme and then looking at the keywords themselves to see what’s performing best. For the consolidated campaigns, As I mentioned, all keywords are grouped together by a cohesive theme. Aggregate testing is usually easier because all of the keywords that we utilize the same ad copy are in the same spot and since all the different match types are in the same ad group, you have relatively minimal work on query mapping because they’re all showing up about in the same spot.

Now, the problem here is that it could leave less room for customization on higher level strategies like bidding and it can make it more difficult in some areas to focus on these specific highest level performing keywords in the account in the way that you could with an Alpha/Beta strategy. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I would let you know when we got to the strategy that was the one that I manage and this is it. I personally use the consolidated slash thematic version, because this type of structure works best for my mind. I like at a high level of knowing which product group performs best when I’m looking at campaigns and then narrowing down based on high-level keyword themes at the ad group level and then finding individual keyword performance regardless of match type and then narrowing down to individual keyword performance including the different match types within each ad group. That just works best for my mind. It always has. This is how I’ve always built out campaigns with all of the match types for a keyword in the same ad group and then those ad groups are grouped together based on a high-level theme.

Now, that said, even if I personally use the consolidated or thematic version, if I had to suggest one for you to utilize or one for you to focus on, it would be either consolidated or Alpha/Beta. And in this instance, you have effectively all of the different delineations of your keywords but they’re broken apart in two different ways. For Alpha/Beta, it’s broken apart by performance and the consolidated version, it’s broken apart by themes. I would go one step further and say, if you decide to use alphabet, I would likely abandon one of the key tenants of it, unfortunately, which would be having only exact match in your alpha campaign with all the adjustments to the match types. I don’t know if that’s the best strategy anymore. It might make sense to have an Alpha/Beta strategy but have all match types in the same ad group in your alpha campaign.

I’m sure there are some Alpha/Beta loyalists out there who will find that just blasphemous but it just doesn’t make sense to me. It never has. In the same way that single keyword ad groups and match type segmentation don’t work for my mind. I find them also to be really difficult to maintain. Now that we have close variants with our keyword match types, I think it’s just going to be nearly impossible to maintain those the way that you would want to and a way that you used to be able to. Which is why again, people like Joe who used to use the match type segmentation have shifted away from it into a more consolidated type of approach.

Now, with all that said, as I mentioned earlier, there is no “right” structure. They all have their pros and cons. It really just comes down to which one makes the most sense for you and which one you’re going to manage best. So, hopefully with that, you have a better understanding about how each of these structures work or at least enough to where you can get started doing a little further search to figure out which one might work best for you, so you can build out the campaigns to get the performance that you need and make it as easy as possible to manage. If you have any questions about these campaign structure approaches or anything else that has to do with search advertising, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan