Including City + State in Keywords: Local SEM

[alxvallejo]

I'm driving this question home:

Including the keyword+city, state abbreviation as a target keyword in your ad groups will generate a large list of long-tail keywords for your geo-target markets. Is this an effective approach or is it irrelevant since you already are specifying the geo-target locations in the campaign settings?

Many of my long-tail keyword+locations in AdWords have a poor quality score.

[SimpleSEOTips]

If I understand your question correctly I would expect that the most sane approach would be to create new campaigns and respective ad groups to target these very long tail keywords. By doing this you can create quite relevant and specific ad texts to include the city/state abbreviation with the headline of the ads.
With a new campaign/ad group structure just to focus on these terms you should also be able to keep the keyword seperate from the existing (shorter tail) search terms and identify traffic/conversion levels more accurately.
If you notice that the traffic levels on these terms are extremely low within the new campaign then it could quickly become very clear that the effort of optimising these campaigns aren't necessarily worth it and move them (the keywords) back into your main ad groups. If the quality score of the long tail keywords remains to be very low then it would be well worth looking at the landing pages you are targeting and making sure the keywords which each ad group contain are listed on the respective landing pages.

I hope that makes sense and somewhat addresses your query.

[alxvallejo]

Yes, thanks, and welcome to the forum.

So what we're really talking about is a huge list of ad groups. Not only will they be divided by city, but each city will have something like 4-5 ad groups associated with the various products/services.

This may prove to be unmanageable.

On the other hand, I've read that you should take your top performing _________, whether it be product, keyword, or location and make a separate ad group just for that top performer.

I read this in AdWords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson.

[SimpleSEOTips]

Thanks for the welcome too.

I would imagine the overall Adwords account which you will end up with will be enormous. However, I really wouldn't let this put you off.

Personally, I have had to contact my account manager in Google AdWords numerous times to ask them to increase the limit of campaigns on my account to allow me to achieve something similar to what I am suggesting.

It can seem exceptionally daunting to build out. However, if you are savy with the use of AdWords editor and become familiar with keyword multiplier tools such as (brothersoft.com/ppc-keyword-generator-46182.html) then you will get be able to build it with a lot less hassle than you expect. If you don't use AdWords Editor then it would be a complete nightmare to achieve.

To clarify, (assuming I am interpreting what you are hoping to do accurately) I would look to build out a campaign for each city and within the respective "city campaign" I would build out the Ad Groups:
Campaign - los angeles
Ad Group 1 - los angeles widgets
Ad Group 2 - los angeles red widgets
Ad Group 3 - los angeles blue widgets
Ad Group 4 - LA widgets
Ad Group 5 - LA blue widgets
Ad Group 6 - LA blue widgets

In the example above you might need to consider breaking out the best performing keyword from Ad Group 1 which might be los angeles widgets for sale and putting it into a new Ad Group (7 - los angeles widgets for sale) and making sure that your ad text is optimised for this term.

Once you have defined a campaign structure on paper before you start which you think is scalable then you will have a lot of control over the keywords and reporting functionality.

[alxvallejo]

Yes, paper is a good idea.

I think based on historical performance I will be able to construct a list of top performing cities of say ~10-12. The rest will be compiled into the generic ad groups (divided by product).

I have not seen any ads from my competitors utilizing this method so we may be at a cost advantage if all goes well.

Also, because of the data already compiled in the existing campaigns (The campaigns are actually split by Time of Day), I would need to restructure all campaigns.

So, a few questions:

A) By restructuring the campaigns using this method, is there any drawback from Google?
B) When you restructure an account like this, do you leave all the current ad groups as paused? Or do you delete them?
C) Also, I'm reading a great book, Winning Results with Google Adwords by Andrew Goodman, and he describes a case study where he actually had to get an AdWords representative on the phone to review his campaign to adjust the Quality Scores after making several changes. Does this still apply? I was seriously considering having them review my campaigns because, aside from neglecting to split by city (which I've heard does not result in a lower QS), all existing ad groups seem very relevant and tightly grouped.

[SimpleSEOTips]

Through the use of AdWords Editor you should be able to copy most of the settings (such as time parting) very easily across new campaigns.

To answer your questions as well as I can:
A) Yes to a certain extent there is. When you create new campaigns you will inevitably change a lot of the following which are core components of the AdWords (Search Network) Quality score:

* The historical Click Through Rate the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network -- not on Google
* Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
* The historical CTR of the display in the ad group
* The quality of your landing page
* The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
* The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
* Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
* Other relevance factors

However, if the goals are to improve the overall quality score then you need to decide whether a new structure to your account will allow you to manage and optimise it on a long term basis. If you feel this is true then you will benefit from a more effective approach to account management with a focus on improving the quality score.

B) I would leave them paused to revert back to if you wish to at any time. You can also view the historic stats of paused campaigns.

c) It's a very good book. You can of course try to contact a representative if you genuinely feel that you have exhausted all other possiblities. However, there is a lot of reading about the whole QS area which would be worth testing and experimenting against. The following are a few posts and an ebook I found quite interesting:

redflymarketing[dot]com/blog/10-ways-to-increase-your-adwords-quality-score-a-mini-case-study/

redflymarketing[dot]com/blog/how-to-improve-quality-score-the-ultimate-guide/

ppchero[dot]com/quality-score-handbook/

pages[dot]clickequations.com/21secrets.html

Hope that helps