Yesterday I was reminded of a paradox in PPC management. As you expand your PPC efforts beyond a single campaign with a single ad group you too have encountered the paradox, though in varying degrees. This paradox is caused by the collision of two commonly accepted best practices: testing and tightly-themed ad groups.
Testing v. Granularization
Anyone worth their salt in PPC knows that you should always be testing. You test two to three versions of ad copy to get a better CTR. You test two different landing pages to improve conversion rate. You also know that these tests require a certain amount of clicks or conversions before they achieve validity.
Another best practice (and Google pushes this a lot) is to create small, tightly themed ad groups. By having only a handful of keywords in your ad group you can write extremely targeted ad copy and send traffic to a more targeted landing page. This practice improves the chain of relevancy (and your QS) while optimizing the user experience. The paradox, however, lies at the convergence of these concepts in practice.
The Paradox
The genesis for this post was a Powerpoint sent to me by one of our Google reps. The recommendations were solidly based on best practices like the two mentioned above, but the part that got me was when the slide said that by making more ad groups that were small and tightly themed I would have “easier campaign management.” On the surface that seems accurate; the ad groups have fewer keywords and the copy would be more specific, but what about tests?
To reach validity tests need to achieve a certain number of actions or responses. This particular client already has their campaign divided into nearly 100 campaigns with hundreds of ad groups. They spend a lot of money, but even with the existing account structure tests can take weeks or months to achieve validity. And now Google wants me to INCREASE the number of ad groups, further spreading out my traffic into more tests? This could potentially slow our test iterations to a virtual standstill.
Perhaps I’m tripping out about nothing, but I’m curious what all of you think. How do you balance testing and granularization?
PS I would especially appreciate someone from AdWords to chime in here, so consider this a challenge Google.
About Robert
It’s a tough call, because granularization is definitely needed to increase QS and performance. However it does take more time to collect “test” data. With small budget campaigns its especially tough.
I think being granular is slightly more important, so I make that my first priority. Then I test as best I can within the smaller groups. I’ll A/B test ads or LP’s common among the smaller adgroups to see if there is any significance as a whole or within the sub groups.
While I agree there are positives and negatives to a highly granular account structure, as I point out in my post on having 1 keyword per ad group…
…I don’t think granularity has to always be at the expense of testing validity. If some of your headlines, ad descriptions and display URLs are the same across multiple ad groups, why not download an ad text report and pool data across ad groups. Yes, it might not be as insightful as looking at each ad group’s keywords and ads in isolation, but surely it’s no worse than having multiple different keywords in the same ad group?
http://www.alanmitchell.com.au/techniques/keywords-per-ad-group/
@Alan – Aggregating data is a great way to go. Do you use pivot tables in Excel to do combine the data?
Definitely – pivot tables make things so much easier!