Last year, we took on a client in dire need of a campaign overhaul. Their Adwords account needed major mending due to Quality Scores of the lowest kind. It would be an uphill battle but we were intrigued and up for a challenge. If you missed it, please read Part 1: Quality Score Killers.
After pausing all of the old campaigns, we got to work on our strategy, keywords first.
We worried that if we launched new campaigns with the same keywords, we’d still get pinged with the same low quality score issues so we knew we should stay away from all of the original keywords. This was easy for the most part since the client was originally bidding on extremely broad keywords such as Boston, Greater Boston and Team Games for a business and website solely focused on team building programs.
On the other hand, we were in a serious jam when it came to the highly relevant keywords that we most definitely would want to continue bidding on such as team building programs and corporate team building. Since the irrelevant keywords dragged the whole account into the mud, even the highly relevant keywords were penalized.
What was the keyword strategy?
We decided to focus on the city and location targeting aspect of this business. The client provides various team building and scavenger hunt programs in 21 cities around the US. We created city specific campaigns with two adgroups: Team Building and Scavenger Hunts. All of the new keywords include the city names such as Boston team building programs and corporate team building Boston.
Our hope was that broad match would still pull in team building and scavenger hunt queries that didn’t include the city names.
Next, we’ll discuss how we handled landing page strategy.
