Ok, So I have to admit that not knowing everything is really hard to admit, especially when I have had successful account structures that have saved money and has given many companies a way to invest in more channels.
I use a strategy when building Adwords campaigns called the Alpha Beta Structure ( see more ) It allows me to gauge broad keywords and create highly effective exact match keywords that could take them to very highly relevant ad text. For example if someone is looking for a “6 Foot Christmas Tree” I would send them to a relevant ad that talks about the keyword, with relevant pricing and a landing page that is closer to the funnel.
What Happened?
Well this structure completely tanked when set on a local market. It choked up the availability of keywords and hurt the positioning of these keywords, even when adding it to a bid management software like Aquisio it did not perform as well as a unstructured template they had before did. The account did not spend the daily limit, But it did well in regional accounts with way more geo targeting and competition.
“Well, now we know what not to do.”
Solution
Broad Modified! Yes! I know!
The whole account was set to broad modified, smaller campaign ad group structure, model numbers set to final URLS and so far it has blown away the competition and my past structure. So how did we do it? Well we separated each campaign by very broad themes, We then set each ad group based on most popular services and cut it down from there. Broad seems to work on local based accounts. My hypothesis is that exact match keywords choke up a lot of the possible “micro moments” search queries. There are so many adjectives that are not covered like “nearby” “by me” near my house” and our exacts were mostly “near me”
We are still gathering data and data mining analytics to find ways to optimize the account more, but stay tuned, We got some cool scripts our analyst wrote that we will share.