Best Method For Setting Up A Campaign

If you are limited to $2 per keyword I would use as much keywords as possible. Go with long tail keywords.

Also, you want your quality score to be high because of this limitation so create ad groups that contain very related keywords only and use targeted ads and landing pages to increase your quality score.

If you are in a competitive industry you need to put more work into this compared to a rather low competitive industry as $2 might be too low for some industries and harder to get a better Ad Rank.

Here's some quick answers to your questions...

What have you found useful when setting up PPC? Looking at competition and seeing what doing right and what doing wrong. Like suggested, if on budget and in popular niche, look at longer tail keywords to keep per click down.

1 or 2 keywords per ad or more keywords per ad? Would suggest keyword insertion, but make sure ad will look right on longer keywords if using insertion.

1 campaign or multiple campaigns? suggest tight campaigns and multiple campaigns. At first, can start with one or two, then expand as add targeted converting keywords.

How many landing pages would you normally have for your ads. 1 per ad or 1 for a bunch of ads? You want to test different landing pages and make sure each one 100% relevant.

I have managed a Google Grant campaign before and believe me, it's not easy to “spend” $10,000 per month.


The key to PPC is tightly focused groups and appropriate ads to these groups. You don't for example do what I know an automotive parts company does and has one group with every keyword (brakes, wipers...) imaginable with the same generic ad and landing on the home page. Instead, make a group for each car model for each part such as brakes. This normally means one keyword per group. Note that that keyword could be in each match type so you'd have three keywords counting this way. You create and test two active ads in each group and landing on appropriate page. So a “Brakes, Ford Focus” group would have those words as keywords in different match types. Your ads would mention that product, typically in the headline, and have a hook so they click it. Any click should land on the page selling brakes that fit my Ford Focus.


A Google grant account is no different than any other really. You want to target keywords that are related to the product/service. The only grant account I managed was related to permaculture and I had many differently themed groups all related to permaculture. Still, even with $2 bids and a surprisingly high search volume I got near the monthly limit but never quite reached it.


It's unlikely you'll have enough monthly search volume for a non-profit to spend the grant building a campaign the proper way as above. You could try with non-related, current event keywords, or any high volume keyword to compensate. In effect, build an awareness campaign on the search network. The problem is that you'll get few clicks which means your QS will be low and thus pushing your ads down. Since your limit is $2 per click, you can't bring them back up by bidding more and being non-related, you can't get the QS up either. No clicks means you're not spending the grant and risking having it taken away.

Very Closely Related keywords per adgroup and if possible 1 keyword per adgroup.

Hi HangTenSEO,

Congratulations on getting those accounts, I'm sure it's an honor to work on some worthy causes.

Managing campaigns for a Google Grant recipient, is much like managing a campaign for any other commercial business. If anything it might be even more competitive because you will likely be competing with other Google Grant program participants.

I wouldn't focus too heavily at first on trying to spend every penny of your grant allocation, as the quality of your campaigns are important. If you just spend with reckless abandon to try to use up your grant money then your non-profit will miss out and you could end up putting the grant at risk.

In many cases you will be competing with other grant recipients, that will have the same budget and bid limitations. In those situations almost every worthwhile keyword will have many advertisers all bidding the maximum $2 bid, so the only way in to the top ad slots is to have a great quality score.

That means you need to have a smart segmentation strategy, a well planned account structure that will maximize your market segmentation strategy, and extraordinarily compelling ad text. And you must actively manage the account. Otherwise much of the grant money will be wasted.

Obviously you need tightly focused keyword lists in your ad group. There is no specific number of keywords per ad group that is universally the best, it varies for each ad group.

In some cases there are a bunch of closely related low volume keywords that make sense to include in a single ad group, and other cases you might be better off with a single keyword in your ad group.

It is possible to become too granular in your targeting. If you select an overly granular structure you will not not receiving enough data to optimize your ad group performance. The key is to find a balance between granularity and data set volume so that you can properly optimize your campaign performance. Don't go overboard in either direction, there is often a more optimal middle ground between granularity and data volume.

As a general rule, if a search term has a lot of volume it typically will perform well as a single keyword ad group (SKAG). On the other hand, if the volume is low it will be typically perform better as a part of a list of very similar keywords that collectively generate enough search volume to be optimized.

You simply cannot optimize without sufficient data. So combining low volume keywords that are very similar in meaning will give your an opportunity to optimize performance sooner and more effectively.

As to your question about landing pages, it usually benefits you to have dedicated landing pages, especially if they are part of a system used to test landing page variants. How many LPs that are needed are determined by the number of distinctly different offers your client has, as well as the number of different audience segments that require different marketing messages. Just expand into using more Landing pages as time permits and whenever it makes sense to do so, but make sure you are split testing your landing page variants and using data-driven marketing decisions.

HTH,

Don Burk