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Google Search Campaign Structure Idea – Need input
Posted by on August 10, 2021 at 8:18 pmI’m setting up some search campaigns for a pretty rural healthcare system.
I’m toying with the idea of including all of their target cities (which are all pretty close together) in the same campaign with an Ad Group for the keywords I want to bid on in a broad sense – so an ad Group called Broad which would exclude the names of the specific cities as negative keywords and send the user to locations page where they could choose their location.
I would then set up ad groups for each specific “city” and that is where I would include my long-tail keywords as phrase match for each specific city and those URLs would lead to the individual location URLs if that makes sense. I figured if certain locations weren’t getting enough of the bid then I could use bid modifiers to adjust that per target location.
I would normally split each location into it’s own campaign, but search volume is really low so I think most of the campaigns would see little or no spend, but the client wants to dominate search in their area, so I’m trying to find a good way to make it work.
I should also note that this would be for a general awareness campaign and that there would be subsequent campaigns for different service offerings later on that I’d try to use the same approach with.
Thought I would get some input if it won’t work before I put in the effort.
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6 Replies
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You can’t target cities by ad group. Honestly the whole thing needs to be reviewed but I suggest you hire a specialist as the comment section here won’t be enough to explain how account structures work.
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Why even split each location into its own campaign if search volume is so low? If the client wants to dominate all areas as much a possible, it sounds like you wouldn’t have budgetary reasons to warrant a split. I think you are over complicating this. Put everything in one campaign unless you have an actual reason it split it up. You can group services and cities by ad group.
Having one campaign will give you more bid strategy options. You may not have enough conversion volume in some campaigns if search volume is an issue. Google recommends to consolidate as much as possible.
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Every top agency uses the gold panning/alpha-beta structure.
Creative dictates ad groups and campaigns. So if you have ads in Spanish you need to have a geo campaign for example.
Next, you want a phrase match campaign with short tail keywords with the articles removed.
This is called the beta campaign. This will allow you to achieve proper impression volume while capturing all/most of the long tails.
Then you have the alpha campaign. Alpha campaigns take all exact match keywords with 1000 impressions and at least 3 conversions.
Betas will take all the keywords with 100 impressions and 1 conversion.
Use a forced exact match script on your alpha campaign and mirror all of your exact match keywords as negatives in the beta campaign.
Alpha uses skags only.
Beta ad group structure is also skag but phrase match only.
You need to make sure you have sufficient volume. So put all of your geos into the same campaign then layer specifics on top so you can get a more granular view of their performance.
Just use keyword modifiers to adapt the H1 to their query. {KeyWord:Insert Word Here} is the modifier you will put in the H1.
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>the client wants to dominate search in their area, so I’m trying to find a good way to make it work.
>I should also note that this would be for a general awareness campaign
You’re trying to overcomplicate this. This is an awareness campaign with a client that wants to dominate the market. Make a single campaign including all targeted cities. Build out a few ad groups based on their offerings. Build out an ad group with all of the city names + healthcare (or whatever they do). Hell, you could probably run straight broad keywords.
You don’t need ad customizers, you don’t need to do anything crazy in your structure. It’s awareness and low volume. Set a reasonable budget and let er rip.
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Use as few campaigns as possible. You don’t need to breakout city specific ad groups. Use ad customizers and/or dynamic keyword insertion to insert the city name into the ad text.
For routing ads to specific pages you can apply keyword-level final URL suffix along with a redirect to route users to specific pages based on a string that you include in the URL (Ex. URL contains ….
If you can’t setup a redirect then your current setup of ad group specific keyword clusters for cities is fine.
Forget the alpha/beta SKAG recommendation. It would have been fine 5+ years ago, not so much anymore unless you like to give yourself more work for worse results.
The ad customizers are optional but I recommend it if possible unless you like manually writing a bunch of different ads (vs. using a templated ad). Here’s documentation on ad customizers for RSA and ETA.
Responsive Search Ads.
[https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10711524?hl=en](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10711524?hl=en)
Ad customizer process is different for ETAs,
[https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6093368?hl=en](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6093368?hl=en)
To simplify I would only run RSAs and avoid ETAs if you plan on using ad customizers.
In terms of ongoing optimizations focus on the conversions and attribution modeling. Since you’re running a local campaign you won’t have a lot of primary conversion data so beef up your tracking on micro conversions and test different conversion actions sets to train Google’s bidding algos. Use as few campaigns as possible so you can run campaign experiments easily and determine what mix of primary and micro conversions to use as well as how much value to associate to the micro conversions.
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Hi!
I like to start with a compliment before diving into the specifics: Good job working out a plan and asking for advice instead of just posting a question. It is good to know you’ve been thinking about how to reach the goal of the customer before asking for advice.Goal: Your customer wants to be visible in the cities and areas around their health care locations. You haven’t mentioned how you would evaluate the succes of the campaign apart from it being an awareness campaign. I would still ask the customer what is most important for this campaign: Clicks to website + contact information / brochure download (or similar) or actual foot traffic to their health care locations.
Approach:
Volume – you mention the search volume is very low and you have different kind of landing pages for each location.Taking this into account (and knowing not much about the client, which country etc) there are different options to choose from:
a) Use location targeting with a radius around each location, add all target location to the campaign and then in each ad group a specific keyword theme without adding the locations as keywords. Landingpage would be where the user can choose their own location. In addition, use ad customizers with the geo location insertion for even better click through rates.
b) Location: Country (or state depending how big the country is) and on adgroup level you make keyword themes (as in option a). But now you add the keyword theme + location on keyword level and make use of keyword final url with the specific landing page per location. Also make use of ad customizers with the geo location for even better click through rate.
Keywords: Use exact and phrase in the same adgroup because you have low volume levels. When using CPC, use keyword CPC’s to set a higher CPC on exact keywords. Depending on your goal (like contact forms or something else with a conversion tag) you can also think about using tCPA when you have 30 conversions or more in the campaign in the last 30 days. If so, you can use broad keywords to up the search volume.
Be aware, it is very difficult to give good advice to you with so little information of the client, the market, the volumes, the landingpages and goals. Make sure to get back in touch with your client and ask more questions about their goals and what they want to achieve with this campaign to prevent spending budget for nothing!
Good luck!
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