Sub Groups in Adwords, Improve Your Click Through Rate

As a company VR3 Media offer Paid Search marketing as a service, we set up and manage accounts for clients and have had a lot of success.

We also use Paid Search to market a couple of our own services, mainly using Google's Adword application to generate sponsored links on the results page. Using Adwords as a marketing channel for our 3D Design and Animation services has been very successful.

VR3’s website is not an e-commerce system so we have no hard and fast conversion rate to measure the effectiveness of a keyword, ad group or ad version within the paid search campaign. Reports within Google’s Analytics application will show what is and isn’t working and give you an ideas of changes that could improve your campaign(s). By segmenting paid search traffic data and setting ‘goals’ it is possible to measure the user habits of paid search traffic. One goal we have set up measures the amount of user who navigates to the 3D Gallery on the website. The gallery is not a landing page for any of the ad groups so it shows that users are interested enough to view more content on the site.

One of the key metrics within Adwords is the Click Through Rate (CTR), this is the percentage of users that clicked on your ad against the amount of times it was activated. We find the CTR to be a useful statistic for measuring the effectiveness of the campaigns keywords, cost per click and ad copy.

Relevant Ad Copy

One way of reaching a high and constant CTR is to break campaigns down into sub-campaigns (ad groups) by keywords you wish to target specifically, in this case 'architectural'. Each ad group has its own ad which means that you can write copy relevant to that keyword. For example, we have a sub-campaign called '3d architectural visualisation'. Within the keywords that will activate the ad are broad, phrase and exact matches all containing 'architectural' or 'architect' combined with, if possible '3d'. The title and the body of ad copy for this sub-campaign contains one if not two of these keywords.

Example Keywords

3d visualisation
architectural visualisation
[3d architectural modelling company]

The Resulting Ad

This has 2 positive effects on the overall effectiveness of the campaign, firstly, users are more likely to click on a link if the keyword is in the title or ad copy, secondly, it improves the quality score Adwords gives the keyword. The quality score is given based on the relevance of the search term to the ad content, the landing page and the initial search term. The better the quality score the less you pay when a user clicks on your ad.

It is worth experimenting with different ad groups to see if the overall campaign’s CTR can be improved. We have recently set up an ad group based on the keyword ‘3d designers’, again with relevant copy in the ad. After 2 weeks we will run reports and decide whether it is worth keeping or deleting the ad group.

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