When creating a new PPC account, the single most important task is taking the time to setup your PPC campaigns correctly (Hint: the more campaigns, the better).

If you'd rather take a shortcut of slapping some keywords under a single campaign so you could launch quickly and see what sticks... well, you might as well write a blank check to Google Inc and forget about making money with PPC.

Why?

Because as I posted ealier -


You need to measure PPC ROI and then make changes - tweaking bids, updating ads and pausing adgroups that are not delivering a positive ROI.

Without a properly structured PPC account, you're not going to be able to make product level changes to improve your ROI.

Think Granularity. You'll pay less (Quality Score), enjoy a higher click-through and effectively control your ROI.

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To demonstrate this, I'd like to share with you how we recently setup a PPC Account from scratch for an eCommerce-store client, selling 20,000 electronics products.

Products

The first set of campaigns we created are going to hold all Products. We're going to have unique relevant ad creatives, keywords and ad groups per every single product the merchant is offering.



Due to Google's restriction on the maximum number of adgroups you can have under each campaign, we have to divide products to several groups. In this case we chose to do this alphabetically, although at times it might be easier to divide products by category.

Note how we create separate campaigns for the Search and Content networks. This is done to achieve maximum control, allowing us to use different bids, different ads and different keywords for the Search vs. Content networks.

You should really treat Search and Content as two completely independent engines.

Phrases



The DirectMatch campaign group includes all keywords and ads addressing users who are directly searching for our merchant's website.

Phrases include all two to five word phrases that fall under short-tail keywords for our merchant's vertical (Hint: We keep all long tail and other experiments in a separate account)

Competitors



The Competitor campaigns hold all competitor company names, unprotected trade-marks, key phrases and slogans.

We keep competitor product-names under the Product campaign groups, matching every competing product to one of our merchant's products.

Seasonal & Events

These campaigns include everything that is triggered by a shopping season, holiday, media events etc.

Every single industry and vertical is affected by these fluctuations. You just need to be smart enough to utilize them.

Think outside the box and you'll be able to harness the latest hurricane, or last night Oprah, or a news story about Britney Spears, all driving relevant traffic to your site.



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Let me know if you'd like to see more specific examples like this and learn more about our aproach to setting up adgroups, ad creatives and keywords.

enjoy seeing more guidance on your adwords philosophy. Understanding how the pros do it helps me to 1) set up my own accounts 2) be a better customer when outsourcing so that I can clarify what I am asking for.

Update on this:

The easiest way to track ROI across your campaigns, is to take advantadge of SoftwareProjects PPC Console