Today we’re going to start a new series of blog posts – the Google Power Users Series. We’re going to be focusing on strategies and techniques to get the most work done in the least of amount of time, while maximizing your campaign performance. So here we go…

Splitting Up Your Search and Content Campaigns

Most search campaigns combine search and content together. Oftentimes, this is not the best strategy. Even if you set separate bids for your content ads, you should probably just separate content into its own campaign. The reason is that content is almost always much less effective than search, but it may generate just as many if not more clicks.

For instance, here is some actual data from one of our clients:

Search
Click-through rate: 1.57%
Avg. cost per click: $1.71
Total cost: $261
Conversions: 20
Conversion rate: 13.07%
Cost per conversion: $13.07

Content
Click-through rate: .05%
Avg. cost per click: $1.03
Total cost: $414
Conversions: 15
Conversion rate: 3.73%
Cost per conversion: $27.64

As you can see, the content clicks, though they cost less, convert at a MUCH lower rate, and conversions cost twice as much. Also, content clicks are consuming almost twice as much of the total budget. Now, every case is different, and it very well may be that this account is getting all of the search clicks it possibly can and must run content to generate more overall traffic and conversions.

But that may not necessarily be the case! It may also be the case that if a cap was placed on the total budget that was spent on content, then more budget would be soaked up by search, which would result in an overall increase in conversion rate and decrease in cost per conversion. But the only way to do that is to move content into its own campaign. If content and search are running together in a single campaign, it could very well be that when the daily budget has been hit, much more of the budget was spent on less-effective content ads. If content is running in its own campaign, then it can have its own budget, so we can allocate more of our budget to search.

With the help of AdWords Editor, it is a reasonably easy process to duplicate a search campaign and change it to a content campaign (thought not as easy as it should be due to bugs in the AdWords Editor). We’ll talk about that in a subsequent post.

If you could use some help in maximizing the effectiveness of your paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.