When participating in PPC marketing, you can always test thousand of keywords to see which are profitable, but there is no substitute to choosing the right keywords and structuring your campaigns properly. Doing so will make them much easier to manage and make them more favorable in the eyes of the “review teams.” As a result, you will experience greater overall success when you take the time to properly craft your pay-per-click advertising campaigns.

This article might be somewhat basic to those of you who have experience with PPC marketing, but for those that do not, it should provide a good amount of help. If you are still stuck in the days of grabbing all the keywords you can find and randomly dumping them into your account, you need to stop now. You are hurting both your short and long term chances at success. In the following paragraphs, I will demonstrate how you should be structuring your campaigns.

Develop a Rough Keyword Foundation

Before you can start building a PPC campaign, you need to have a fairly accurate idea of what keywords you will be including. I usually start by visiting my favorite keyword tool and typing in some general phrases. From the results, I will manually choose keywords that are related, “buying” words.

Avoid and take note of any keywords that do not fit into your target market or marketing plan. This can be longer phrases that include your keywords but have absolutely nothing to do with your market, or they can be phrases indicating that people are searching for something you don’t offer (such as free). You will use these as your negative keywords.

The amount of keywords you choose to gather is entirely up to you. I like to try and get a pretty exhaustive list to be sure I am getting a fair amount of traffic. You can, however, start off with only the most popular keywords (keeping the 80/20 rules in mind) and save the low volume keywords for later.

Group and Expand Your Keywords

Now that you have plenty of good keywords, it is time to group them. You will be writing individual ads for each set, so make sure you only group keywords if they are very closely related. It isn’t uncommon to have groups with only one or two keywords at this stage in the process.

Once you have your keywords organized into closely related groups, you can begin expanding them. Start by using your brain to create combinations of the words that are already there. You can break up some words (“blockbuster” becomes “block buster”), convert words to plural form, or add new words to the mix (such as buy, compare, review, etc).

After exhausting your brain for new keyword ideas, you can run then through an automated keyword expander to get the maximum potential out of them. The most common transformation is to create different match types (broad, phrase, and exact for AdWords) but you can do many other things to your keywords. I use a custom PHP script as well as a really cool windows application called Keyword Transformer (click here to download the free version).

You should do this for all of your ad groups, at least tripling your keywords by going from a single form to three different “match types.” It can be done all at once, or you can do it “on the fly” as you start building your campaign.

Put Your Campaign Together

The next step is to simply transfer your beautifully grouped keywords into ad groups within your campaign. You will be writing at least one ad for each group, but should be writing 2-3 so that you can optimize your CTR and get better positioning.

There are many ways that this task can be accomplished. For MSN AdCenter, I usually create my ad groups as spreadsheets and then import them into my account. For Yahoo Search Marketing, I just use their online interface because I think their service sucks and don’t use it very often. For Google AdWords, I prefer to use the AdWords Editor to avoid waiting for pages to load between every step.

The process from here on out is actually pretty simple and repetitive:

1. Create a new ad group, naming it after the keywords it will contain
2. Copy/paste the corresponding keywords into the ad group
3. Write a few good ads (some tips to make them better)
4. Apply some form of testing/tracking system (the how and why)
5. Save your new ad group
6. Repeat for each set of keywords

Conclusion

I touched on it in the beginning of this post, but I will say it again: not structuring your PPC campaigns properly will make them a nightmare to manage and could actually be damaging to the overall quality and trust that is assigned to them. It is also difficult and tedious to clean up a poorly structured campaign without losing some of the quality associated with ad/keyword history. Because of this, make sure you always plan ahead and structure your campaigns properly from the beginning.