When we start a new PPC campaign we have little to no idea what keywords, ads or placements will have a good conversion rate and produce the desired positive ROI, at least beyond our initial setup that is. The goal is to find what works and what doesn’t as fast as we can. When we do find what doesn’t work it is obvious that it is quickly removed from our campaign. We pause or delete keywords that perform poorly, rewrite ads with low click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates and exclude placements if they are content targeted. But what should you do with the stuff that works?
There is no doubt that we will want to preserve any element that is doing well on our campaign, and sometimes even give a boost with a few more cents per click. However, before we go ahead and do that we should apply a little methodology that is called Peel & Stick. Like the prevalent Copy and Paste, Peeling and Sticking is taking elements that work well on our campaign and creating a highly targeted ad group specifically for each of those elements.
For example: Let us say that we are running a search campaign for ‘widgets’ and you have an ad group – “Green Widgets” which has 7 keywords:
green widgets for sale
cheap green widgets
inexpensive green widgets
green widgets USA
green widgets online
buy green widgets
affordable green widgets
After a few days we see that the KeyPhrase “inexpensive green widgets” is doing extremely well, it has a high CTR, and made you 5 sales already. The next step should be to peel that keyword out from that ad group and stick, or create, a new ad group “inexpensive green widgets” dedicated for that KeyPhrase.
The benefits of peeling and sticking are:
- Easier to manage your campaign
- Increase the quality score of these keywords
- Write highly targeted ads for these keywords
- Have a better control over the bids of these keywords
If we run a content campaign or ad group we can also apply this Peel and Stick method, but instead of creating a separate ad group for the keyword, we create one especially for that placement, on Google AdWords we can even drill down to target a specific URL.
