In this video, Derrick talks about the importance of using an Alpha | Beta structure in paid search.
The two goals of well structured Alpha Beta campaigns are:
1) Optimal Budget Allocations
2) Clean Keyword Data
Transcription
Derrick Turner: Hello. My name is Derrick Turner. I’m the Director of Services here at Augurian. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about Alpha-Beta structure and why we like it? The goal of this is to create leverage to ensure that we are able to allocate our budgets optimally to drive the best performance possible for a client., while at the same time being true to bimodal. Continuing to test to find new opportunities to add to the core.
Originally, the Alpha-Beta structure was something that was born in search. Basically, some typical patterns that you see in search is that there are types of keywords that perform better. Typically exact match. We want to ensure since we know exactly what we’re getting, most of the time with those searches and the results are dependable that we are allocating a fair amount of budget to these campaigns.
Typically between 70% or 80% but the goal here is to get dependable results and to maximize our ROI for the clients. However, being true to the bimodal marketing, we do need to continue testing. That’s where the Beta comes in. That’s basically taking the exact same keyword and using a slightly different match type to ensure that if a user uses that keyword, plus some other keywords that we’re learning, what might also lead to business?
Often that’s about 30% of the budget. Typically these keywords are less effective than our Alpha campaigns, but at the same time important because we can’t rely on Alpha campaigns forever if we want to grow. Search demand is finite. We need to continually be searching out for new opportunities to grow exact match keywords. Basically the reasons we do this in addition to just the budget breakdown is to keep data clean.
Google depending on how you set it up, it is very easy to muddy keyword performance data. As a result, if you’re using broad match, you might be getting many types of terms in your bucket in terms of what you’re buying every day and only select ones that are really driving the return and others are not. By using this structure ensuring that when we’re bidding on Alpha, those are always getting picked up by the Alpha campaigns. They are not being picked up by the Beta campaigns.
We could really get a truer sense of what our cost per acquisition is for individual keywords and make sure that were bidding accordingly. Thanks for joining today in this whiteboard session. I hope this was informative.
