Determining the most effective structure comes down to really understanding what the goals of your campaign are and how you will need to market to someone from initial awareness right through to the end purchase. Of course, it all depends on what you are marketing and the duration of the purchase decision cycle.

PPC Campaign Positioning

Each campaign should be positioned at a unique point in the purchase decision process; whether that campaign be:

• Awareness focused campaign aimed at filling the top of the sales funnel
• Influencing campaign to guide the prospective customer through to purchase or
• Closing campaign aimed at generating the conversion

The marketing messaging associated with the campaigns should mirror the stages in the purchase decision process from ad copy through to landing pages and offers. Regardless of the position in the purchase process, the customer should be prompted to take some form of action on a landing page.

PPC Campaign Structure

The structure of the paid search campaign will closely align to the associated metrics with each campaign. It would be unreasonable to expect that a campaign targeted at the early awareness stage of the purchase decision cycle would generate a direct conversion (sale), but starting the education and branding conversations are more reasonable goals. A soft call-to-action such as the download of an educational whitepaper would be appropriate in the early awareness phase. It is also important to remember that the amount of information asked for on the landing page form is in alignment to the value of the offer. The contact information for a prospect is valuable to them and therefore the more information requested, the more valuable the offer must be. Awareness campaigns may consist of broad terminology associated with the products or services, pains-based terminology, and even direct or indirect competitor’s terminology.

Understanding how individual keywords are positioned at each stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in defining the overall campaign structure. As stated, the goal is to create a seamless communication message guiding the prospect from the awareness phase through to conversion.

Maximizing Visibility

As with many other forms of advertising, visibility and frequency is key to effective marketing messages. Focusing all efforts at only a particular point of the purchase decision process would lead to high acquisition and high attrition or low acquisition and low conversions. We all know that the vast majority of conversions require multiple clicks (especially in high value B2B sales) and ensuring effective frequency of ads is important to remaining top of mind while providing reinforcing messages through the subsequent stages of the purchase decision cycle.

Defining the message and the offers that are most applicable at each stage of the purchase process will ensure that ads maintain a high CTR, while landing pages are effective at providing more conversion-focused offers such as demos or free trials. Should the sale involve an offline sales force, it is important to create a paid search campaign aimed at satisfying the informational requirements (IQ Needs) of the prospective client, while allowing the sales force do the relationship development (EQ Needs).

Controlling PPC Costs

Leveraging your campaign structure to control costs is about understanding how each campaign affects the other and ultimately leads to conversion. A keen understanding of the prospect’s path to conversion becomes necessary to developing the campaign structure. Knowing the value of each conversion or lead at the corresponding stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in bidding strategies as well as determining the appropriate budgeting requirements for each campaign. Several Bid Management tools are developing cross channel tracking technologies to assist advertisers with the determination of the value of associated campaigns. Multiple campaign attribution models are becoming more and more necessary as marketers attempt to become more intelligent about how to better balance visibility each stage of the purchase decision process.

As previously stated, frequency is important to paid search campaigns and therefore it is important to define the tactics to maximize that frequency. Most advertisers are in a deficit situation with regards to available budget versus available keyword search volume inventory. Leveraging day parting and geo-targeting can be effective tactics to concentrate the limited budgets into a smaller subset of the target to maximize frequency and coverage of the purchase decision cycle.

To learn more about effective PPC campaign management, attend our free webinar on September 30, at 11:00am PST (2:00pm EST). We’ll be talking with Maria Pergolino from Marketo about a successful PPC campaign that increased qualified opportunities by 300%.

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