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White Paper

Alpha Beta Account Structure Guide


The basic building blocks of any search engine marketing campaign are keywords. As John Battelle wrote in his seminal book on search engines – The Search – a search engine is nothing more than a “database of intentions.” As search engine marketers, the way we match customer intent with what we are selling is through keywords. For example, the intent of someone looking to get a home loan might be expressed through a keyword like “mortgage rates”; a person considering a camera purchase might type in “best new camera.”

Unfortunately, simply identifying great keywords does not automatically lead to SEM success. In fact, without the proper account structure, a perfectly good keyword can actually turn into a nightmare of unprofitability. We recently talked to a company that sold a sleep monitor – a device that measures how much sleep a person gets each night. They had purchased the keyword “sleep monitor”, a logical decision. Due to poor account structure, however, their ads were getting served (and clicked) on keywords like “put my computer monitor to sleep” – totally different intent, despite the fact that the words “sleep” and “monitor” were in the keyword.

At 3Q/DEPT, we’ve developed a process we call “Alpha Beta” to prevent this sort of problem from happening.

The process is a fool-proof way to ensure that your ads only show on profitable keywords and not on derivations that will only cost you money without results. This whitepaper provides a basic overview to the Alpha Beta process.

Is your keyword-to-query mapping ironclad? Do you have a process for testing and recognizing new keyword winners? Fill out the simple form on the right, and we’ll instantly email you a copy of our guide to Alpha Beta Account Structure, our proprietary method for capturing and controlling top keywords.

Simply fill out the form to get your copy right away!

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Chicago, IL 60606(650) 539-4124

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