Method Alpha Beta campaigns in Adwords

Traveling around the Internet in search of something new for Adwords, I came across an interesting method of organizing an advertising campaign. It is called “ Alpha Beta Campaign Structure ”. Coined and described by David Rajinsky, CEO 3Q Digital. The method seemed interesting to me, although quite simple. Let's see what he is and what is good.

The method assumes that the basis of the account structure are two groups of campaigns - Alpha and Beta. Suppose you have a new account without accumulated statistics and conversions. In this case, you can start only Beta campaign. This is a common campaign that has to be made according to all canons - a large pool of keys has been assembled, relevant ad texts have been written, and advertisements lead to landing pages.
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If you don’t do it yet, I highly recommend that you start the keys with the broad match modifier. By putting a “+” sign in front of any word in the key phrase, you will tell Google that you want to be shown only for those requests that contain your key with a modifier. For example, if I create the key phrase “+ buy + elephant + cheap”, then the ad will be displayed on such requests as “buy an elephant cheap in St. Petersburg”, “buy an elephant cheaply with delivery”, but not on requests “buy an elephant”, “ elephants ”, etc. It is important to remember that when using this modifier, Google also takes into account changed or similar variants of keywords, but not synonyms.

Installing the "bait" - create a Beta campaign

The keys that we created with the broad match modifier will serve as "bait" for us - we use them to catch real user requests and identify the best of them. Adwords has a great report called it - “Search Phrases Report”. It contains phrases that caused your ad to appear, and then click on it. To collect enough data in this report, you will need to let the campaign run for a while. Someone has a couple of days, someone has a few weeks - it all depends on the amount of RK and the amount of traffic involved. To get an Alpha campaign from it, you need to determine for yourself the parameters by which you will determine the request to a specific group: winners, losers and insufficient data. This can be the number of clicks and their cost, percentage and cost of conversion, ROI and so on. It’s almost impossible to give one recipe at all, you know why;) Be based on your experience and set at least some minimum threshold.

The next step will be the creation of an Alpha campaign based on the keys from the Winners group.

Orientation to "Winners" - the creation of the Alpha campaign

Your Alpha campaign is proven Winners. As noted above, there is no exact formula for their definition, just make sure that they are selected more or less correctly. In the Beta campaign, we set the keys with the broad match modifier. In the Alpha campaign, all keywords (based on real queries) will be set to exact matches. In addition, each keyword will correspond to a separate ad (see SKAg). This will allow us to create the most targeted and unique ads for each key. Ideally, of course, create a separate page for each ad, to further increase the conversion, but it is ideally ...

As a result, this campaign will combine high CTR, lower CPC due to increased QA, high conversion rate and the absence of junk requests. This should immediately affect your ROI;)

Defending Alpha Campaign

Now that you have a good Alpha campaign, you need to make sure that Google does not mistakenly show your Alpha requests in the Beta campaign.

Although Google helps us to say that having two identical requests in broad and exact correspondence, the server will give priority to showing the key in exact correspondence at the campaign level. But unfortunately, this is not always the case, and will affect the effectiveness of this method.

To solve this problem is quite simple - all the keys that we have selected for the Alpha campaign - we will set it as negative keywords in exact correspondence in the Beta campaign. The important point is to add negative keywords at the campaign level and not at the ad group level. So we’ll just completely avoid mistakes and give priority to Alpha campaigns.

Eliminate the "losers"

Creating a large Alpha campaign without simultaneously excluding ineffective requests from the Beta campaign does not bode well for us. The goal of the Alpha Campaign is to promote conversion requests and eliminate bad ones. So, as we have already analyzed the search query report, we already have a list of “bad” keys that need to be deleted. To do this, simply add them to the negative keywords to exactly match the Beta campaign.

We continue the search

The last part of the Alpha Beta campaign puzzle is the constant tracking of a group of requests for which you still do not have enough data to assign them to any group. Usually, the most "fat" requests are quite quickly defined in a specific group. But we also have a bunch of low-frequency queries, statistics on which will be collected for quite some time. It is the constant analysis of these keys that can give the effect of a “long tail” to your account, and a large number of such requests can have a significant impact on the level and cost of conversion for the better.

Summarizing

This method will allow you to significantly increase the effectiveness of Adwords campaigns, but do not stop there. To achieve the best results, do not forget to use geo-targeting, advanced customization of the show schedule and rates by day and time, use and test various extensions of ads that have now become quite a lot, etc. These and many other techniques will allow you to go even further in increasing returns from contextual advertising. But even in itself, the use of the Alpha Beta structure can be a good starting point for launching the Republic of Kazakhstan.

But in this method there is one big minus that I don’t like much - this is that almost all actions are quite routine and have to be done by hand. But Google gave us a great tool - Adwords Script. And with the help of it you can automate this business. In the next article I will tell you exactly how and give almost ready-made code with comments that you can immediately use on your campaign.

Thank you for your attention and high conversions to you!