Less Is More: 2 Areas Where PPC Campaign Segmentation Could Be Wasting Your Time
While segmentation can certainly be beneficial to your marketing strategy, make sure you're not just segmenting for the sake of segmenting.
While segmentation can certainly be beneficial to your marketing strategy, make sure you're not just segmenting for the sake of segmenting.
As time passes, marketers continue to get increasingly savvy when it comes to campaign strategy. With all the tools now available to us, we can market in just about any way we like. But just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. With increased segmentation, we open ourselves up to the following:
To avoid these issues, it’s important you make sure increased segmentation is a proper fit for your account. I’m going to run through a couple scenarios where increased segmentation can be helpful, but only if it fits your strategy. Otherwise, they could be wasting your precious management time.
On the whole, breaking out new campaigns for each country you’re targeting is a widely accepted best practice. Language, culture, and time differences are so large that it’s almost imperative you segment. But when you start breaking out individual campaigns by states or even cities, I begin to get nervous.
For some companies, creating a separate campaign or each state can be a huge win. Here are a few examples where state level campaigns might make sense:
In these instances, it most likely makes sense for you to have campaigns targeting individual states. You’ll be able to better craft your message, choose keywords, adjust bids, and choose landing pages based on these pieces.
But if you don’t fit into these categories or others similar, you could be opening yourself up to any or all of that list of time-wasting tasks above. For you, it might make sense to take advantage of geographic bid modifiers. Create a campaign and when setting up geotargeting, choose the individual states rather than the United States for your targeting, then simply adjust the bid modifiers for each state based on recent performance.
This strategy will allow you to minimize your workload on ad copy, keywords, and landing pages while still being able to take advantage of areas of strong performance and pull back in areas of weak performance. Sure you might lose a little control over individual keyword bids, but now you can spend that time working on other areas of your account that will produce bigger wins.
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads are a fantastic tool. I’ve got them enabled all over the place. But like geotargeting, they can create lots of extra work if you’ve got them segmented out for no good reason. Here are a few instances where it makes sense to segment out individual campaigns for RLSA:
If targeting your remarketing lists separately makes sense for your business, I’m all for it. Be sure you not only target users you want, but also exclude those that you don’t want in individual campaigns. Create a new campaign, choose your remarketing list you’d like to target, and set up for “Target and Bid” so you’re only targeting the users on that list. Next, make sure you’re using your negative audience lists appropriately. Your remarketing list should be added as a negative list on your regular campaigns. Depending on your business, it might also make sense to exclude your list of converting visitors from your campaigns.
But again, if your messaging, landing pages, or keywords don’t vary from your regular campaign to your RLSA campaign, you’re most likely wasting time optimizing each. Utilizing bid modifiers for RLSA lists can be just as powerful in this situation. Here, you’ll want to include your lists and choose the “Bid Only” setting as this allows your campaigns to target users who fit your other targeting criteria.
For the most part, there aren’t very many “wrong” ways to set up a PPC account. But there are certainly optimal ways dependent on your business. Be sure you’re looking at every angle before segmenting out campaigns and not simply segmenting for the sake of doing so.