Having seperate Search and Content campaigns

[Paul_N]

I am aware that having two almost identical campaigns, one dedicated to the Google Search Network, and one dedicated to Google's Content Network, will give me much better control over the CPCs and ads for each network.

For people who use this approach, hows the best way to go about this?

Do you duplicate whole Adgroups? Just a few select keywords from the Adgroups? Just one or two keywords?

Also, when you have duplicate keywords in your account, I understand Google favours the Keyword that either performs better or has a higher CPC.

So what happens if all the keywords in a Content Network targeted Adgroup stop getting impressions because they perform better in your non-content targeted Adgroup? Does your contextual ad stop being displayed on the Content Network?

Or, does the system recognise that the same keywords perform well elsewhere in your account and so continues to serve the contextual ad?

Hope that makes sense!

[justshelley]

Do you duplicate whole Adgroups? >> Yes but I usually just duplicate the best performing or most profitable AdGroups/Products, not all of them.

CTR for content network / non-content targeted Adgroup? >> I never use the same bids for both. My personal preference is to save my higher bids for Google and then use very low bids for Content Campaigns. The lower bid should also keep you from having your ads compete against themselves in Google.

[Paul_N]

Thanks, that's just what I was after.

[eWhisper]

As with everything, test out your distribution and ROI under a few different scenarios, as depending on your account structure, less keywords in content can be better.

If you have an account where you try to capture all of the possible variations of misspellings, phrases, etc and have many thousands of keywords, you might be complicating your ad placement on the content networks.

By duplicating the group structure, but then only highlighting the main words in the adgroup and not all the variations can help Google to place your ads on the proper sites. If your product is "green widgets" and your adwords campaign uses a lot of variations like:

"greenish blue widgets"
"crazy green widgets"
"fun green widgets"

AdWords might match your ads to "fun widgets", "crazy widgets" and not just to the "green widgets" you're trying to highlight. Therefore, it can be useful to only use "green widgets" and negative keywords in a group to show Google the exact keyword you're really trying to match.

Of course, it depends on your site and what you're trying to accomplish. I'd recommend testing out multiple scenarios of keyword permutations based on your websites goals.