by Mike Fleming

In my last post, we took a look at a good reason for an account manager to make separate campaigns in an AdWords account. If you have a similar product with different profit margins and total profit, then you want to control how much you're spending on each. In this post, we'll explore more of the reasons to separate campaigns.

The marketing goals for your company should guide you into the correct account organization for your PPC campaigns.

So, we're going to look at some other situations where unique marketing goals should lead an account manager to customize campaigns to more intelligently spend PPC dollars.

1. Multiple Website Goals Many websites have multiple conversion goals on them. The primary goal could be to purchase a product and the secondary goal could be to sign-up for a newsletter. Both conversion goals are worth something to the company, but obviously they are not both worth the same amount. If you have a landing page that is dedicated to getting users to sign-up for a newsletter, then you would want to use those beginning-of-the-buying-funnel keywords that typically don't lead to product purchases to direct them toward signing up for your newsletter.

Well, since these goals are worth different amounts to your company, you want to control how much of the marketing budget is spent on each and the manner in which it is spent. Here, you would create separate campaigns with separate budgets.

2. Awareness Let's say there are some keywords that are important to your business, but that do not directly lead to conversions. A keyword that has the word "reviews" in the phrase is a good example. If you have reviews of the product they are researching about along with your ability to sell it, then you may want to attract these visitors to your site in an attempt to create loyal visitors that come to you for their information.

Of course, many of these will eventually become customers, but for now it's all about awareness that your site exists and establishing a trusting relationship with your target market. Since these keywords don't directly lead to money in your pocket, you may decide you only want 10-20% of your marketing budget allocated to this market. So, you create a campaign with a separate budget.

3. Long-Tail Specific Typically, the more specific the search query, the further along in the buying funnel the searcher is and the more likely it is they know exactly what they want. If you service these users effectively with great ads and landing pages, you should have higher click-through and conversion rates and therefore be willing to pay more for them.

As you build this sort of campaign by finding those keywords, you will want to allocate as much of your budget to them as possible. Therefore, you would want to keep them in a separate campaign.

4. Networks If you want to reach both the Search Network and the Content Network for targeted keyword traffic, you can and should want to keep these in separate campaigns because the nature of each network causes potential traffic to behave much differently. Therefore, you want to have the flexibility to allocate a certain amount of budget to each based on their performance and be able to customize how you reach out to those users.

5. Location If the needs of users in different locations is unique or the marketing goals for your company in different locations is unique, you can separate campaigns based on the locations you are trying to reach and then customize each campaign for those specific users.

6. Devices Mobile users typically don't have the same needs as computer users. Most of the time mobile users are looking for information regarding companies rather than to seriously purchase something. This changes the way you treat each and should demand that you separate these users into different campaigns so that you can customize your targeting to them.

7. Time-Sensitive Goals If the nature of your goals changes at different times of the day, week or month, you should separate campaigns based upon those goals.

Every business is unique, so these are just some of the common reasons you would want to organize your targeting. Once you've laid out your unique marketing goals and how you want to segment the way you reach users, you need to know the features that AdWords contains that allows you to treat them differently. If you don't, you won't know how to correctly customize your targeting. Therefore, in my next post, we'll get to know some of the features a little better and how they might apply to unique campaigns.

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