Improving Adwords Campaign Management - Tip 1

 by: Tom O Brien

Adwords Campaign Management - Naming Schemes

Keep your campaigns and naming schemes simple and readable.

Dull as ditchwater it may be but when you expand your Google Adwords advertising you will as a matter of course have multiple campaigns and within each campaign multiple ad-groups.

Google Recommended Limits

Googles recommendations/limits are as follows:

• 25 campaigns

• 100 ad-groups/campaign

• 750 keywords/adgroup (although they will allow up to 2,000)

Although you will have a theoretical total of up to 5,000,000 keywords, you will never get anywhere near that.

Why?

This is a performance and scalability issue for Google - the more keywords in an account, the more processing power is required to see what keyword/advert combination should be shown.

If Google were to allow everybody to utilise their full complement of 5,000,000 keywords, Adwords quite simply would not work, screeching to a halt due to excessive load placed on their servers.

This is why in practical terms you will be limited to a fraction (perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 - somewhat more if your account is a 'good performer') of the possible total.

Regardless, even 50,000 keywords can lend itself very quickly to a lot of complexity so always rename your ad-groups and campaigns from the provided defaults to reflect 'their nature'.

"Campaign #1" tells you exactly 'what it is' but what you want to know is 'what it does'. Adwords Campaign Management becomes proportionally more difficult the more campaigns and ad-groups you construct.

Some people maintain a spreadsheet with notes indicating what each campaign and ad-group relate to. This is commendable but unnecessary.

Having the discipline to do this every time you construct a new ad-group/campaign doesn't take much time or effort but will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.