Campaign / Ad Groups Structure for Fin Svcs Niche Affiliate

[mocloy]

Hi,

We're an affiliate in the credit card space, promoting a specific set of credit card offers.

As it's a pretty narrow niche, not sure how best to think about structuring Ad Groups.

Our first idea is to set up 100+ groups with slightly varied themes for the product, i.e. low apr vs. 0% apr as separate groups, with the copy precisely reflecting each group, selecting similar keywords to appear (perhaps the same) in each Ad Group.

Stepping back, I'm wondering if it would be better to simply start with 5-10 more general Ad Groups with a longer list of keywords in each with a range of adcopy, and then narrow down when we get some keyword and ad copy performance data.

So the question is: for niche affiliates, what is the best way to think about Campaign and Ad Group structure?

Thanks!

[PPC Consultant]

I would go with the latter, have the ad groups start generating some impressions and clicks so that you can start building some history, then move the top KW with best roi to their own ad groups..
PS: if you just have a bunch of links on your LP, you'll get killed right away... Make sure you have plenty of unique content around those links..

[mocloy]

Hi there,

Thanks for your reply - this makes a lot of sense. Also, re: the LP, we have a blog / article section, plus a "what is" section, and an about link, privacy, terms, contact us, etc. Hope that this will be enough content - if anyone has a further point of view on the "enough content" benchmark to hit so as to not be Google slapped, would be great.

Thanks!

[PPC Consultant]

Mocloy, the unique content needs to to be on your LP. Having a blog/ message board / faq section will not effect the quality of your LP...

[mocloy]

sorry, yes - the blog, reviews, articles section is actually on the LP itself... sorry for the confusion...

[davewray]

I would have to respectfully disagree with PPC Consultant.

More tightly focussed adgroups will allow you to write tightly focussed ads (start with several ads for split testing), and specific landing pages for each keyword subset. This will allow you to achieve maximum possible CTR (relevancy) and with a highly relevant LP for each subset of keywords, your QS should be good right off the bat (according to Google, that is). Plus, later on it's less work tweaking/deleting non-performing keywords and adgroups....as opposed to trying to filter through adgroups with 2000 keywords...

So, my motto is: Put in the extra work now to reduce the amount of upkeep/work later on...

[mocloy]

What would your opinion be as to the best strategy if it were a test, rather than a longer term, known niche?

Say, if we wanted to test a sub-niche or another financial services vertical?

In a test scenario, better to go broad, or deep specific to the test?

Thanks!

[Miraculix]

For a test I use broad match with more keywords for a few days to
analyze the reports to get the exact keywords that I take in smaller adgroups

[dpam]

I agree with Davewray - there is only advantage to more focused adgroups. As I like to say they're ad-groups not keyword-groups; the point is to consolidate keywords which attract queries which are all relevant to the text-ads in that group (and the LPs they point to).

The broader the keywords the less likely/possible it is that the queries they attract will be directly relevant to the text-ads. This is true both for QS analysis and for users who are relevance matching using their own algorithms...

If you do it right, the more ad-groups the more targeted. The more targeted (in all dimensions) the better.