Effective SEM - Using Approapriate Campaign Settings

Continuing on the theme of seven steps of effective SEM that I outlined in one of my previous posts, in this post I will  discuss the first step (Use Appropriate Campaign Settings) in details. (Note: the examples used in this post are all related to Google Adwords)

Structuring your campaigns appropriately is the first step in effective search engine marketing. Once you have decided on the number of campaigns you want to run, you need to be very thoughtful about the settings you want to use for your campaigns.  You could be wasting a lot of "impressions" unnecessarily if you are not using the right settings for your campaign.
So, how many campaigns should you have? That really depends (and yes I admit, I was a consultant in one of my previous lives! ). The key guideline to use is - a campaign should be a good "container" of related keywords and ad copies for a specific target audience. For example, if you have a product suite and potential buyers normally search for one of the products within the suite with certain key search terms, you could have a campaign with relevent keywords for a specific product within the product suite. Furthermore, if you are initally targeting buyers in North America and Europe, you could have one campaign for North America and have multiple language specific (e.g., German, Spanish, English) campaigns for the European audience.

Once you have decided on a campaign, you should be looking at settings related to a minimum of these categories - target audience, target geography, target date & time, bidding & budgeting:  

Target Audience
Who are the target buyers of your product/services? Is the demographics important to you? For example, do you anticipate that online users who might be searching for your product or services are usually in the age group of 25 through 50 years old?

Target Geography
Do you want to target your ads for all geographic regions? For example, within North America do you want to run the campaign for all the states.

Target Channel
Are you interested in running your ads in google and its search partners or do you run the runs in the Google's display network as well? Do you want the ads to run in all devices (e.g., desktop, laptop, mobile) or do you want to restrict to certain devices only.

Target Date/Time
When do you expect your buyers to be searching for your product/service the most? If you are not specific about the time you want to run your campaigns, you could be reaching your daily budget limit earlier in the day and miss out on some "serious" buyers in the later part of the day. Do you expect the potential buyers to search for you product/service over the weekend?

Bidding & Budgeting
Although you would be changing your bids and budget based on the effectiveness of your campaigns over time, you should set your initial budget and maximum CPC based on the expected search volume and competitive landscape.

As you start monitoring and measuring your campaigns, there are additional settings you could be looking at. For example, Google Adwords allows to you to specify how you want to "rotate" ads within a campaign (e.g., based on optimizing conversions). You can also restrict number of impressions to a certain maximum value per day or per ad group.