I was recently asked to solve an AdWords situation where a business has multiple internal stakeholders who own separate budgets and although each stakeholder owns their own account, some of them share the same relevant keywords. There were multiple instances of stakeholders competing against one another in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for visibility and driving up their own click bids.
This got me thinking of how I would target these keywords effectively by preventing the business from competing against itself and maintaining a bidding strategy where they weren’t driving up their own click costs.
THE SOLUTION? GOOGLE ADWORDS LABELS!
Google AdWords launched the use of labels in April, 2012, messaging the main use of these labels as another form of organization within advertiser’s accounts and can be applied to the campaign, ad group, keyword and ad levels. I’ll admit my first thoughts were not mainly around organization. I mean, isn’t that what ad groups are for? I thought labels would be ideal to use for testing purposes, insightful comments, easily keeping an eye on particular areas of the account, etc. While those remain to be darn good uses for labels, this particular situation proved to me and my client labels really can be powerful tools in organization to solve a long-standing roadblock of theirs.
MOUNTAINS TO MOLEHILLS
Since the shared keyword list was 500+, all these keywords would be removed from each stakeholder’s AdWords account and placed within one separate account of their own. Following the organization of the account into campaigns and ad groups, multiple keyword-level labels were appended with the stakeholder’s name. This simple organization of the keywords using Google AdWords labels provided both my client and I the following benefits:
- Pulling quick and accurate keyword-level performance reports for each stakeholder
- Search results exposure for all stakeholders involved tied to all-encompassing ads and landing pages
- Competitive click bidding against actual competitors
- Lower cost-per-click bidding, maximizing visits and budgets for everyone
- Even and fair monthly cost breakdowns for each stakeholder division
The second point mentioning ads and landing pages is an area the client and I work on to ensure searchers are taken to a landing pages containing the products, services and information they searched. From there, they have their options listed out nicely on the page for easy navigation to the product or service that best fits their needs. Each stakeholder within the business is now guaranteed exposure on the SERPs and be in front of their target audience(s) without anyone feeling they have to compromise their own exposure for someone else’s.
When facing challenges such as this, a search advertiser’s responsibility should entail ensuring the quality and integrity of the AdWords programs on behalf of your client(s), account for each participating member’s objectives and targets and most importantly, ensuring searchers are receiving informative ads most relevant to their search queries that qualify their interests to your client’s product and service offerings.
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to present at