When we take on a brand new paid search account or start to manage an existing paid search account, the immediate and most fundamental task the Search team undertakes is hashing out the account structure. Solid and consistent account architecture makes campaign management easier and more efficient while enhancing the campaign’s performance, and the program’s growth.

The NetX Paid Search Team has developed a list of best practices to apply when evaluating account structure. Of course, every advertiser is unique and therefore every account will vary. But these are the best paid-search practices that we stick by, no matter what the account:

1. 1. Separate your campaigns by device: Keep the desktop campaign separate from the mobile campaign, which is separate from tablet campaign (which is separate from whatever comes next!)
2. 2. Separate campaigns by channel: Run search ads and display ads in independent campaigns
3. 3. Split Brand and Non-Brand campaigns: Keep brand terms in one campaign and non-brand terms in another.
4. 4. Use geo targeting: Set up the account to take advantage of localization, whether it’s international, national, regional, etc.
5. 5. Mirror the advertiser’s website: This ensures keyword scalability, simplifies destination URL implementation, and creates a consistent brand message
6. 6. Use standard campaign-naming conventions: This is critical for efficient management, cross-team knowledge transfer, reporting and analysis, and scaling
7. 7. Create tightly themed ad groups: This increases ad relevancy and click through rate (CTR), increases conversion rates, and allows for precise and targeted ad testing
8. 8. Have a back-up ad running: You never want to go dark if an ad gets disapproved
9. 9. Remove duplicate keywords: This decreases intra-account competition and increase your search ad campaign’s efficiency
10. 10. Separate ad groups by match types: This creates easy-to-tier bids and improves both campaign management and account efficiency

Jump ahead a few years and I anticipate that these 10 best practices remain just that: best practices for setting up your paid search accounts. If anything, as new products, targeting capabilities, and ad format are introduced, I believe this list will grow. It’s critical that our paid search accounts are capable of changing and expanding at the speed of the industry. This list is a great start to ensuring that your paid search architecture creates efficient campaign management, optimizes paid search performance, and enhances campaign growth.

Julianne Bohl is the Director of Search Advertising for NetX.

The Skinny

This is a great move for Facebook, who has come under pressure for low click through rates of its ads. Nothing increases user engagement like bribery. However, advertisers should evaluate the quality of these clicks and determine the true value of this traffic. I am skeptical that incentivized traffic will lead to the same quality of customers as non-incentivized traffic. This is not to say that the traffic will not be valuable…just that it may have a different value.

Facebook is a major player in the online display advertising market and their market share continues to grow each year. It is critical for them to find a way to make their ads more valuable for advertisers.

“Your phone should be a personal assistant. That’s clearly where we’re going,” says Chris Cox of Facebook. ‘Ambient awareness’ was used multiple times to describe device relationships (rather, the necessity thereof) in our near future. But when quizzed on specifics for what phones of the future will look like and how consumer interaction will differ in the coming years of innovation, Cox had this to say:

“People overestimate what’s possible in a year, and underestimate [what's possible in ] 5 years. These devices are going to be magical in 5 years.”

Some even speculate that ‘mobile’ will be come a meaningless word soon because we are inherently always connected. “The real frontier is what’s local,” speculates one commentator, citing the popularity of groundbreaking platforms like FourSquare. “I think Foursquare has done some amazing work with check-ins, but it’s early,” says Gundotra when asked if there is a clear winner in the location game.

“I think we’re building great stuff — there is no winner,” pipes FourSquare’s Crowley. “Think of where we are now to where we were 2 years ago. We’ve made the space more interesting. We’ve pushed things in a different direction. It’s experimenting in the space.”

Speaking of experimentation, Gundotra was asked what he thought Google TV will do what for mobile apps and his answer reads a bit like an upsell, stating that “the most exciting thing about it is that the same Android apps you use will work on the TV. Like Pandora, play it on the TV.”

Facebook’s Chris Cox got a little heat regarding the ever changing privacy controls pleging the platform. He was happy to report, though, that this week, Facebook will be rolling out “drastically simplified” privacy controls in an attempt to remedy what Facebook CEO Zuckerman has publicly called “missed marks.” Facebooks next challenge? “It’s hard to know what to invest in — a better Android app or Facebook Zero.” Facebook Zero is their new, “fast, free, global and mobile” data service.

For advertisers who wish to get the best ROI (Return On Investment) for their online marketing dollar the focus tends to shift to display advertising and whether or not they should keep spending in that category. We all know that display advertising (eg banner ads on websites bought on CPM or cost per thousand impressions) is typically the hardest online advertising initiative to measure. Comparatively, CPA (cost per acquisition) campaigns can be directly tied to ROI.

Therefore, when under pressure to justify every marketing dollar spent the inclination is to slash display advertising budgets and increase more accountable marketing channels such as affiliate marketing. At the surface this seems to make sense. However, if you take a holistic approach to looking at this situation you may find that display advertising plays an important role.

At NETexponent we have seen how display advertising can boost other online marketing efforts such as paid search and affiliate programs. We evaluate all marketing channels in order to get a holistic view of our clients’ online marketing effort. This outlook has shown us time and time again that spikes and dips in performance driven marketing channels such as search and affiliate can sometimes be directly related to display advertising efforts. When significant display advertising campaigns are running for clients we usually see a boost in traffic and conversions in other online marketing channels. Therefore, display advertising can play an important role even in ROI focused advertising efforts.

Measuring the impact of display advertising on other media channels and choosing the right allocation of marketing dollars is where the tricky part comes in to play. I am not advocating that all advertisers go out and boost display ad spending because it may not have the impact they want. It is true that even boosts in performance related to display could come at a price that is too high for advertisers. My main point is that companies should evaluate the impact display advertising has on other online campaigns and use that data to determine exactly how much spend to allocate to this channel in order to maximize online marketing ROI.

Google invested $3.1 billion dollars in the acquisition of DoubleClick and while I don’t normally make predictions for this sort of thing I think there are some interesting things we might expect to see in the next 12 months as a results of this deal:

• Free ad serving – just like they bought Urchin and gave away the analytics, one can easily see the value in giving away ad serving in order to get the advertiser adoption and data that Google wants.
• Free media planning and buying tools – Ad Planner is the first step, but real agency media buyers need a complete end to end solution. I expect Google will give this away as well in order to drive more online ad buying through their network.
• Integrated data / order attribution – Right now customers are hitting multiple advertising touch points such as display, search, affiliate, etc and marketers have the challenge of properly crediting each channel with their “share” of the order. DoubleClick already has this technology and I would expect this to be integrated into Google Analytics at some point soon.
• Behavioral targeting capabilities – This will be a tricky one. Google now sits in the middle of a massive amount of data and would have the ability to serve ads based on past search and browsing habits. There will definitely be privacy concerns and although the value to advertisers would be great, the consumer backlash could be a big problem.