Ah, the new year. Time for New Year’s resolutions. Yesterday, the gym was packed with people, many of whom sadly will not last past Groundhog Day. Losing weight is the #1 New Year’s resolution.
But I’m not going to talk about that (although I could). I’m going to talk about the #2 resolution: getting organized.
We all have that one room in our house that’s disorganized. Stuff is everywhere, with no rhyme or reason. People often joke about tax records that are thrown into a shoe box. Ever tried to do your taxes that way? Ever tried to find a file on a computer with no subfolders? It can be done, but it’s time consuming.
The same thing goes for PPC accounts. Account organization is crucial for efficient PPC management, no matter the size of the account. For large accounts, it’s imperative.
Enter Adwords labels. Adwords labels help you organize your PPC account and quickly filter and view information in a number of different ways.
Campaign Organization
The traditional PPC account structure sometimes doesn’t go far enough to organize your account properly, especially for large accounts. You might have campaigns divided by network, country, language, product, and offer, for example. You can use campaign names for this: Search-US-English-WidgetA-FreeTrial, for instance. And this is exactly what I usually do. But what happens when you need to add even more dimensions to the mix? Super-long campaign names can get unwieldy. This is where labels come in. Add labels for the additional dimensions.
Results By Offer
Here’s another scenario. Let’s say that you’ve grouped campaigns by product line, and within each campaign you have multiple offers: purchase, trial, demo, and content download. And let’s say you want to see how each offer performs across the board. There are a number of ways to do this, of course, but one of the ways is to create a label for each offer. Then you can filter the data and view each offer’s stats individually.
Ad Test Groupings
One of my favorite ways to use Adwords labels is for ad copy tests across ad groups. If you’re running a pricing test across multiple products with different prices for each product, it’s nearly impossible to summarize that data in an Adwords report. But if you add labels to your ads, Price Point A, Price Point B, etc., summarizing the data is a cinch, especially if you throw it into a pivot table.
Remarketing List Organization
We all love remarketing. Large PPC accounts often have hundreds of remarketing lists. And Google doubles the number of lists by adding Similar Audiences – resulting in pages upon pages of lists to sort through. Adding labels to remarketing lists can help filter things down to a reasonable number. I label all Similar Audiences, just so I can filter them out when looking at my lists. I also create labels for lists specific to RLSA.
Other Uses
If you use any campaign automation, such as bid rules, you might want to label ad groups using them. Many advertisers use labels for locations, campaigns with bid adjustments, dayparting notations… the list is nearly endless.
Making use of Adwords labels will organize your account in a flash! Now, to get Bing to add them… How have you used Adwords labels to organize your PPC account? Share in the comments!
Great article, Melissa. I use a combination of labels and automated rules to pause and enable ads. Especially during the holiday season, using labels is a great way to easily ensure the correct ads (and promotions) are showing during the right dates.
That’s a great way to use them. Hearing this from a lot of folks on Twitter. Thanks for your comment Matt!
Nice article, Melissa! I love labels and could not imagine working without them. What I do not like is when u use more that 2, Google always displays a “+”, so u have to click to check them out.
I use labels for ad copies and keywords e.g.: brand/ non brand/ longtail/ high converting etc. So if you need a quick analysis on how all “non brand keywords” or “longtail keywords” function, this is a nice option.
Makes sense! Thanks for your comment!