Is it time to rethink your Google Ads strategy?

Product-focused, keyword-only campaigns are a common type of campaign used in Google Ads.

If you sell vintage T-shirts for women, you might set up standalone keyword campaigns based on the keyword “vintage T-shirts women.”

For many B2C retailers, this approach works well. But for others, product-based, keyword-focused campaigns aren’t necessarily your best strategy. 

We inherited the Google Ads account of a new B2B client, for example and all of their campaigns were product-focused, keyword-only campaigns.

But after meeting with the client and analyzing their account, we decided to take a different approach – one that’s outperforming their previous strategy, hands down. 

In this article, I’ll explain what we did – and use it to illustrate why you might want to move beyond keyword-only campaigns.

Start with the business goals

We started this client engagement by sitting down with the client to understand their business goals. 

It’s an old-school marketing practice that seems basic but is too often overlooked.

When we talked to the client, we discovered a misalignment between their business goals and the structure of their Google Ads account. 

The account was set up by region, and each ad group housed thousands of product-focused keywords. Brand and non-brand keywords were intermingled within the same campaigns (another strategy I really dislike).

Organizing the account by region might have made sense at one time. But the company had changed. It had expanded the regions it served to encompass most of the U.S., yet all of its advertising focused on its “old” territory.

Further, the company had expanded its product line beyond farming and agriculture equipment to include construction equipment – and growing its market share in the construction industry was an important business goal for them.

You can see the problem: the Google Ads account structure we inherited made supporting the company’s goals challenging because we couldn’t target and measure campaigns to those goals.

For example, we couldn’t compare important metrics, such as cost per lead, for farming versus construction keywords. We couldn’t even compare how brand versus non-brand keywords were performing for the same campaign easily. Everything was jumbled together.

I’m always a little surprised that more attention isn’t paid to Google Ads account structure in general.

Google Ads Help, for example, discusses the three layers of Google Ads and even provides guidance on how to structure your account to get the most out of AI.

However, the importance of aligning account structure with business goals is missing.

Dig deeper: 5 ways to align PPC campaigns with business objectives

Restructuring the account to support business goals

With these issues and the goals of the client in mind, we proceeded to restructure the account.

Instead of organizing campaigns by region, we organized them by product categories. We also separated brand and non-brand campaigns.

With this reorganization, we could clearly see how campaigns in each sector were performing and created specific strategies for each one.

We also measured and compared important metrics, such as cost per lead in the farming sector versus the construction sector. The cost per lead was higher in the construction sector, and that was OK.

The client understood the importance of launching (or relaunching) a new product category. It required investment and an unwavering focus on long-term goals (versus short-term wins). This wasn’t the time to take our foot off the gas. 

Focusing on high-value keywords

In addition to restructuring the account, we also set about reducing the number of keywords in each ad group. 

We eliminated thousands of keywords, narrowing them down to a handful of only the most high-value, top-converting ones. In this case, less was more. 

With all of these account changes, we built a strong foundation from which we could not only launch and promote this new product category but also scale all product lines into the future. 

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Shifting to an audience-focused strategy

Our next step was to shift from product-focused, keyword-only campaigns to an audience-focused strategy.  

A disclaimer: I don’t mean to imply that focusing on products and targeting them via relevant keywords is wrong. Sometimes, that strategy works just fine. However, in this case, I was confident we could do more for this client by shifting our approach.  

Remarketing

How do you implement an audience-focused strategy? We started with remarketing. 

The client’s prior agency had some remarketing campaigns in place, but the targeting was narrow. They used product-specific URLs in combination with dynamic remarketing. 

As a result, the audiences were small and impressions were too low. It simply didn’t work. 

As we started to better understand how buyers interacted with the client during their customer journey, we tested remarketing to people who had visited the website at different times. We tested people who had visited the website within:

• The last seven days.
• The last 14 days. 
• The last 90 days. 
• The last 365 days. 

Note: You need to ensure these periods of time don’t overlap in order to draw comparisons. So, for example, if you want to determine if people who visited the site in the last 14 days converted better than those who visited the site in the last 90 days, you need to exclude the 14-day people from the 90-day group.

Customer lists

In addition to remarketing, we also introduced customer lists. This client had a goldmine of first-party data for all past farming and construction equipment purchases by product category.

This doesn’t happen all (or even most) of the time, so having this level of first-party data was a real bonus. 

With this data, we could market to prior and existing customers in a budget-friendly and targeted way, going above and beyond what we could do with a standalone keyword campaign. 

Dig deeper: How to combine Google Ads with other channels to retarget, nurture and convert

Obsess over your customers, not your products

By revising the account structure, focusing on remarketing and leveraging customer lists, we improved reach, conversions and revenue while staying within the client’s existing advertising budget.

We’re also helping the client future-proof their business by giving them new insights into performance and buyer behavior and enabling us to push and pull different levers to scale up the business when desired.

All of this is easier said than done. As hinted at above, you may not have enough volume for remarketing or access to first-party data. In that case, you may have no choice but to rely on keyword-only campaigns. There’s no shame in that.

But if you do have the option of shifting from keyword-only campaigns to an audience-focused strategy. It’s something to consider and test.