How to Drive Efficiencies from a Holistic Paid Search Strategy

Understanding the Basics of a Holistic Search Strategy

A holistic search strategy involves looking at your search campaigns as a unified whole rather than as disparate parts. This approach focuses on consolidating data across campaigns and ad groups, enabling more effective decision-making and smart bidding optimization.

Benefits of Consolidation

Consolidating your search structure has several key benefits:

• Enhanced Data Collection: More data points are collected under fewer campaigns and ad groups, providing a richer data set for making informed decisions.
• Improved Bidding Decisions: With more data at your disposal, smart bidding algorithms can make more accurate predictions and decisions, potentially leading to better campaign performance.
• Simplified Management: Fewer campaigns and ad groups make it easier to manage and optimize your account, saving time by eliminating routine tasks and reducing account structure complexity leading to better clarity and less room for error.

Strategic Campaign and Ad Group Structuring

To maximize the efficiency and relevance of your campaigns:

1. Campaign Consolidation: 

If you have multiple campaigns that share the same goal, consolidate them into one. This not only streamlines management by reducing the number of campaigns but also improves data integrity for smart bidding. By consolidating the campaigns with the same goals, don’t worry about campaign-level assets relevance as you can set these assets at the ad-group level within the new consolidated campaign. This approach simplifies asset management and ensures that specific targeting and optimization tactics are applied more coherently.

2. Dynamic Keyword Insertion: 

Use dynamic keyword insertion in your ads to maintain relevance while consolidating more ad group-level data. This technique automatically updates your ads with the keywords in your ad group that triggered the search, helping to improve click-through rates and ad relevance. Also, DKI increases ad strength which can have an impact on the ad auction. 

For example, we saw an increase in CTR by 19 % for one of our clients thanks to more relevant ads after implementing DKI.

Also, it is best to use the maximum number of ad text assets and leave them unpinned. That way, you are helping Google to learn what asset combinations perform the best.

3. URL-Based Ad Group Structuring: 

Organize your ad groups based on URLs. Place all keywords targeting the same URL into the same ad group to enhance smart bidding’s effectiveness by helping it understand the theme of the ad group.

4. Keyword-Level URL Targeting: 

For extra relevancy, use keyword-level URLs. This allows you to direct users to the most relevant landing page based on the specific keyword, improving user experience and potentially increasing conversion rates.

5. Broad Match Keywords: 

In our experience, broad match keywords have been the most effective within a holistic search strategy. Broad match is the only match type that leverages AI signals, taking into account the other keywords in the ad group and the user’s search history. This aids in better estimating the likelihood of conversion. Keep in mind the broad match type is most effective when combined with smart bidding strategies – maximum conversions (optionally with tCPA) and maximum conversion value (optionally with tROAS). 

These settings help with fully unlocking the potential of broad match keywords. With one of our clients, we saw an opportunity to scale the campaigns and implement the holistic strategy. After fine-tuning the structure, we saw a 24.7% increase in conversions YoY in Q1 2024 while maintaining the same ROAS.

Scaling the Strategy

DSA campaign: 

We create a DSA (Dynamic Search Ads) campaign in addition to the general search campaigns. This helps us to capture other search queries dynamically. These new queries can provide us with relevant and new keywords that we may not have been using before in our account. Moreover, if any search terms start to convert in DSA campaigns but not in our classic RSA (Responsive Search Ads) campaigns, it signals that there may be problems with the ads, bidding strategy, or anything else. Also, you can scale the DSA campaign by adding your website’s blog page as a dynamic ad target to capture how-to related search terms which have often lower CPC.

FDSA campaign: 

Besides the general DSA campaign, we create a feed-based DSA campaign that focuses on capturing other product-related search queries. This helps us to discover synonyms users search for when looking for our products. Sometimes ads that directly contain the entire product name can be more engaging than RSAs.

Keyword champions: 

After some time, we look for the best-performing keywords (lowest CPA, highest CVR). After identifying those keywords, we remove them from the consolidated structure (and leave it on smart bidding just as it was) and insert them into a separate campaign. In this campaign, we use only exact keyword match types and manual bidding to maximize the impression share on those best-performing keywords. This helps us to drive the performance even more.

Challenges and Considerations

However, adopting a holistic search strategy also presents certain challenges that require careful management:

• A Need to Check Search Terms More Frequently: 

  Due to the expansive reach of broad match types within a holistic framework, there is a heightened need to actively manage and frequently update negative keyword lists to exclude irrelevant search terms. Especially the first days after adopting this strategy.

• Potential Over-Consolidation Risks: 

  While consolidation can simplify management and improve data quality, excessive consolidation may lead to less tailored ad experiences for different user segments. It’s crucial to find a balance to avoid diminishing the relevance and effectiveness of ads, which should always be in the first place.

• Optimal Conversion Requirements: 

  To fully leverage the capabilities of smart bidding with broad match keywords within a holistic search strategy, it is recommended to achieve at least 30 – 50 conversions per month. This conversion threshold helps in fine-tuning the algorithm to better predict and optimize bidding strategies, thus unlocking the full potential of the approach.

Conclusion

By adopting a holistic search strategy and consolidating your Google Ads campaign structure, you can create a more robust, data-rich environment for smart bidding. Implementing strategies like dynamic keyword insertion, URL-based ad group structuring, campaign consolidation, and advanced keyword strategies is critical in ensuring that your ads remain relevant and your campaign structure efficient. 

By scaling this strategy with F(DSA) campaigns and implementing keyword champions, you can capture additional relevant search queries and drive even more performance. Managing the complexities such as the need for frequent updates to negative keywords and ensuring adequate monthly conversions are vital to maximizing the effectiveness of this approach.

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