By Mayank Tak | Lead, Business Innovations | ET Medialabs
Imagine a scenario where you have less than 1 lakh budget per month to run 300+ search campaigns: How would you ensure that you get the best results as each campaign needs some minimum budget to run to get a minimum number of conversion events for optimisation?
In this article, let us explain how you can target the best audience in such a scenario and maintain Search Impression Share, Absolute Top Impression Share with negligible impact on quality matrix such as bounce rate and Pages/Session.
Let’s take a scenario of one of our clients where they had three different services offered at Pan India Level however Search Ads had to be customized for each cities and so, there was a separate campaign for each city (In this case Approx. 100 cities) which meant 3*100 = 300 search campaigns. The challenge was the budget on all these campaigns had to be descaled from 8 lakh/month to under 1 lakh/month considering the descaling planned over the account.
To maintain presence on Google Search Ads, across a highly segmented campaign structure with such low budget, we:
- Split campaigns into campaign groups, one group for each category
- Then applied a different shared budget for each category group as each category had separate budgets and targets
- And finally, used Portfolio Bidding Strategy for each category group
Portfolio bid strategy is an automated, goal-driven bid strategy that groups together multiple campaigns, ad groups, and keywords and automatically sets bids to help you reach your performance goals.
Here is how the results looked like over a month’s time:
| Week | Cost with Tax | Search impr. share | Impr. (Abs. Top) % | Avg. session duration (sec) | Bounce rate (UA) | CPR* (Masked) |
| Week 1 | ₹190,990 | 27.49% | 27.59% | 141 | 17.81% | ₹121 |
| Week 2 | ₹76,511 | 34.46% | 32.01% | 135 | 21.36% | ₹127 |
| Week 3 | ₹20,988 | 32.06% | 30.94% | 111 | 20.67% | ₹100 |
| Week 4 | ₹14,641 | 33.24% | 30.68% | 120 | 19.41% | ₹130 |
*CPRs are masked here keeping the base for week 3 as 100
Thus, we were able to maintain presence on search ads on good quality audiences in all cities, at a much lower scale, all the while avoiding the limitation of minimum number of conversion events.
