Over the last few years, account structure has been one of the core topics of discussion amongst search marketers. Starting back in 2004, when Google opened targeting up so advertisers could opt in and out to their syndicated network or searches on Google.com, advertisers started creating one account to manage search and a separate account to manage content. It seemed revolutionary at the time, but the conversations have evolved, and now we’re talking about account structures in more advanced ways than we’ve seen before.

So what is the point of account structure? At a very high level, it is to allow advertisers to logically organize accounts to make management easier (know where keywords are, what topics you buy keywords around, etc…). While ease of management is important, it certainly isn’t valuable enough to warrant massive amounts of time and energy spent optimizing account structure. The real reason to focus on account structure is to improve quality scores.

Quality Score is made up of the following components:

• The historical click-through rate (CTR) of 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 URLs 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

The three areas of quality score that account structure most closely impacts are:

1. Relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
2. The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
3. The historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google

Strategically, the best way to make sure you are using account structure to achieve the highest quality score is to organize your account with small, highly-targeted ad groups. By creating small, highly-targeted ad groups, sometimes with as little as one keyword in an ad group, ads can be closely matched to be highly relevant to the keywords that trigger the ads. The more relevant your ads are, the higher your click-through rates should be. As higher click-through rates begin to improve your quality score, your actual costs per click should begin to decline, allowing you to bid higher–thus increasing click-through rates and volume, which allows you to raise bids again, etc….

 As a quick aside, it may not be reasonable to build all your keywords into very small ad groups. It can make it hard to manage an account and not add much value.

 Once you’ve figured out how to organize your accounts, you should spend time fine-tuning your landing pages. As with quality score, when you figure out how to improve your landing page conversion rates, you can afford to bid more per click which will drive up CTRs, volume, and improve your quality scores.

Tags: account structure, paid search, sem

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 10:44 pm and is filed under articles, paid search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.