Staying organized is the key to being successful with pay per click advertising, especially if you run several PPC ads across several different channels or niches. How do you keep track of it all?

Generally, you have three tiers of organizational structure for your PPC ads:

• Campaign Level
• Ad Groups
• Individual Ads

We will discuss here how to organize your campaigns if you run ad groups within the same niche and how to do it if you operate in several niches. First, within the same niche.

Let’s say your niche is widget sales. You have three campaigns running in widget sales and within each campaign you have three add groups. Within each ad group you have three separate ads. There are several ways you can organize your campaigns. Here is one way that we’ve found helpful.

Take your broad keyword categories for widgets and make those your campaign names. For instance, let’s say you sell automatic widgets, semi-automatic widgets, and manual widgets. Those could be your campaign names. Within each campaign you’ll have your ad groups. Break down your ad groups into phrase matched keyword groups. For instance, for automatic widgets it might look like this:

• Double-barrel widgets
• Single-barrel widgets
• Cannon-nose widgets

Under each of these phrases you could have a variety of options to narrow down your widgets into more specific categories. Don’t do that at the ad group level. Use the phrase match as an organizational element for your ad groups. For each individual ad, you could narrow it down further into the specific key phrase that you are targeting and that key phrase could be a broad match phrase, phrase match, or exact match. It could look something like this:

Ad Group Name = Cannon-Nose Widgets

• Ad #1 Keyword Phrase: Cannon-Nose Widget
• Ad #2 Keyword Phrase: “Cannon-Nose Widget”
• Ad #3 Keyword Phrase: [Cannon-Nose Widget]

Notice that in each case you are using the same keyword phrase but you narrow your focus in each individual ad by focusing on a match type of that phrase. You could have several such ads for the individual keywords that relate to the phrase match within that ad group. In other words, if that ad group focuses tightly on 5 separate keyword phrases related to Cannon-Nose Widget, you could potentially have 15 individual ads – 3 for each keyword, breaking them all down into a broad match, phrase match, and exact match ad units.

Now let’s examine an organizational structure for campaigns in non-related niches:

If you are involved in several niches such as Internet marketing, business franchising, and widget sales then you’ll want to separate your niches into campaigns by themselves. Within each campaign you’ll have a variety of ad groups related to that campaign. Those ad groups should be named according to some convention related to your broad match and/or phrase match keywords for that niche. For instance, sticking with widget sales again you could name your ad groups:

• Double-barrel widgets
• Single-barrel widgets
• Cannon-nose widgets

sticking with the phrase-match keyword phrases as above. Your individual ad units would then follow the same protocol as above for targeting a specific key phrase by broad, phrase, and exact match.

That’s it. Pretty simple. There are of course other ways to organize your campaigns. This is just one way that it can be done. What ideas do you have for organizing your pay per click campaigns?

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