The world of paid search is unique for all account man­agers, every account, and so forth. No two accounts man­agers are iden­ti­cal in the way that they strate­gize and no two accounts are iden­ti­cal in terms of what opti­miza­tions and changes should be made. With that being said, gen­er­al­iza­tions can be made and then altered with the account in mind.

In this post, we will dis­cuss at which point new paid search cam­paigns should be cre­at­ed and the process behind it. This is from my time as an account man­ag­er and may vary by account ver­ti­cal, plat­form, and network.

For the sake of this post, we will focus on three net­works with­in Google: Search, Shop­ping, and Display.

Search

For search, a few sce­nar­ios for cre­at­ing a new cam­paign include;

  • You have no search cam­paigns. This may be obvi­ous but the search is going to be low­er fun­nel traf­fic as users are active­ly search­ing. If you are look­ing to make a sale or gen­er­ate a lead, the search should be your first touchpoint.
  • A new prod­uct was released. Some­times prod­ucts are released and are near­ly iden­ti­cal to prod­ucts already around, which may not require new key­words. For exam­ple, if you sell a dress in black and the dress is now made in white, it’s prob­a­bly not going to require a new cam­paign but rather just a few addi­tion­al key­words. How­ev­er, on the flip-side, if you recent­ly only sold dress­es and now you are going to offer men’s shirts, a new cam­paign would be needed.
  • You expand­ed to oth­er loca­tions. I high­ly encour­age seg­ment­ing cam­paigns by larg­er geo­graph­ic regions. For exam­ple, if you offer your ser­vices in the US but expand to the UK, it makes sense to cre­ate a new cam­paign for the UK rather than tar­get­ing the UK and the US in the same cam­paign. This allows for more con­trol over day­part­ing, bids, key­word lan­guage, cre­ativ­i­ty, etc.
  • Traf­fic. When it comes to traf­fic, as an account man­ag­er, you will need to use your knowl­edge and past expe­ri­ence to deter­mine if a new cam­paign is need­ed. One exam­ple would be if the cam­paign bud­get is lim­it­ed and addi­tion­al bud­get can’t be jus­ti­fied at the cam­paign lev­el because per­for­mance goals aren’t being met. If you then look at the ad group lev­el, if one ad group is per­form­ing bet­ter than the cam­paign as a whole, it may make sense to pull that ad group out in order to increase spend and dri­ve addi­tion­al traf­fic to those keywords.

The above can be applied to oth­er search plat­forms, such as Bing, as well!

Search

Shopping

For shop­ping, the arti­cle linked in the head­er gives a great break­down of how to struc­ture shop­ping cam­paigns. Some ratio­nale for cre­at­ing a new shop­ping cam­paign include;

  • You have no shop­ping cam­paigns. Again, this may be obvi­ous but shop­ping is going to be low­er fun­nel traf­fic as users are active­ly search­ing. If you are look­ing to make a sale, shop­ping should be anoth­er cam­paign type that is launched ear­ly on, as it allows for more ad real estate to be filled and gives users a visu­al­ly appeal­ing ad to draw them to your site.
  • New Prod­uct Cat­e­gories. This is entire­ly depen­dent on how your cam­paigns are seg­ment­ed. If you have all of your prod­ucts in one cam­paign, you will want to ensure new prod­ucts are active but it may not require a new cam­paign. On the flip-side, if you have a catch-all cam­paign (as men­tioned in the arti­cle linked above) and high­er pri­or­i­ty cam­paigns, you will want to con­sid­er if a new cam­paign should be launched. This could be deter­mined by the amount of traf­fic gen­er­at­ed to the prod­ucts via the catch-all cam­paign or if the prod­uct is a high pri­or­i­ty for the busi­ness as a whole.
  • Pro­mo­tions. If you have pro­mo­tions run­ning, it may be ben­e­fi­cial to think about new shop­ping cam­paigns. The rea­son being is that it’ll allow for more con­trol over the traf­fic specif­i­cal­ly going to a group of prod­ucts. For exam­ple, if you sell a tablet that’s on sale for the month of Decem­ber, by cre­at­ing a cam­paign specif­i­cal­ly for the tablet pro­mo­tion, you will be able to exclude spe­cif­ic search­es and allo­cate as much (or as lit­tle) spend to the cam­paign as you want.

The above can be applied to oth­er search plat­forms, such as Bing, as well!

Display

  • You have no dis­play cam­paigns. Yes, this is obvi­ous but it needs to be said. Dis­play cam­paigns are not low fun­nel, some­times mid­dle, but most of the time upper fun­nel. How­ev­er, they are valu­able and if set-up cor­rect­ly, they can prove to be very ben­e­fi­cial. My phi­los­o­phy is that if you are able, at least give them a shot. No, you should nev­er devote all of your bud­get to a new effort but you also shouldn’t com­plete­ly dis­qual­i­fy it until you have the data to back it up.
  • Tar­get­ing is dif­fer­ent. If you already run some dis­play cam­paigns and want to tar­get a dif­fer­ent audi­ence base, I high­ly rec­om­mend a new cam­paign. It gives you con­trol over bids and bud­get and allows for bet­ter orga­ni­za­tion. For exam­ple, if you are tar­get­ing any­one who has vis­it­ed your site but want to begin to tar­get in-mar­ket audi­ences or spe­cif­ic inter­ests, cre­ate a new cam­paign. Nev­er com­bine with what you already have run­ning or you run the risk of nev­er know­ing how an audi­ence will tru­ly perform
  • Pro­mo­tions. If you have upcom­ing pro­mo­tions, the dis­play is a great way to get your pro­mo­tion­al cre­ative in front of those who are famil­iar with your site and those who may not be famil­iar with your site and are not active­ly search­ing for your product.

The above can be applied to oth­er search plat­forms, such as Criteo, Steel­house, and oth­er dis­play vendors.

Display

Final Thoughts

While the above doesn’t cov­er all sce­nar­ios, it def­i­nite­ly can give some direc­tion when it comes to whether or not you should cre­ate a new cam­paign. Aside from the rea­son­ing above, I’ll invite you to ask your­self the fol­low­ing when try­ing to deter­mine if you need to cre­ate a new cam­paign or not;

  • Is the objec­tive that I want to accom­plish already being accom­plished in anoth­er campaign?
  • Is the audi­ence I’m tar­get­ing cur­rent­ly being reached?
  • Are we cur­rent­ly capped when it comes to bud­get? And does it make sense to spread the bud­get thin­ner across plat­forms, accounts, etc.?

SOURCE: PPC Hero