I read an interesting article the other day which came to me in a newsletter. The link only works sometimes (really slow load time on the site causes the browser to time out) but I wanted to share it with you anyways!
The title is, “When to Restructure Your PPC Campaign or Completely Start Over” by Amanda Chaney.
She points out 5 scenarios which may lead you to have to make a decision to either restructure or start over:
1. Change of Direction – company is going in a new direction, with a new site
2. Client Evolution – long standing account may not be working anymore since the internet and search behaviors change.
3. Site Redesign – if the site is undergoing a redesign, so should the PPC account.
4. Reporting Reasons – companies may want to see data grouped differently, focus on certain aspects of their site etc.
5. Poor History – if the account has poor history such as poorly written ads or poorly organized structure.
I would like to give my input here.
If at all possible, I don’t think it is a good idea to start over unless you have to. There are a number of reasons for this:
1. Account history is a big deal – especially with Google Adwords. Google bases a lot of decisions on the account history and how the account has been managed in the past. Having a good account history will help and if you just go a restart from scratch, you will lose all the history. This is not only not great from Google’s perspective but just think about all the useful data you are losing. What can you use to compare the new data to? The account will have changed too much to compare it to the old campaigns so you have no real way of determining if the campaign is successful.
2. Making drastic changes when a client is making drastic changes to their website spells out trouble. We did this with a client of ours recently and here are the issues: they were getting a lot of conversions before they launched their new site and we redid their PPC campaign. All these changes were made and conversions dropped like a rock. We obviously had no way of knowing for sure if the problem was the PPC Campaign or the website. After about 3 months, we figured out that it was actually the site and not the campaign (CTR was much higher and more people were getting to the site but not covnerting). So be cautious when making drastic changes – either to your site or the campaign.
Small changes are better to make than big ones. The results may not be as obvious but in the end you know what changes made the difference.
So to recap, unless you really have to, I would always try to redesign rather than start fresh. What do you think?