“Peel and Stick” is a keyword management technique made popular by Perry Marshall. The concept has been around for at least 3 years. Its a derivative idea of the 80/20 rule, which Perry is extremely fond of, and for good reason.
Peel and stick only works if you have existing traffic data. If you have a brand new ppc account or even a new list of keywords to put into a new adgroup, it isn’t for you – yet.
If you have traffic data, or clicks, or conversions, its a terrific technique.
Here’s peel and stick in a nutshell: you find the top keyword in your account. You “peel” it out of its current adgroup and “stick” it into a new adgroup all on its own.
That’s the concept. It can be expanded to “peeling and sticking” your top 10 or even 100 keywords into their own adgroups. You can also move up a level and peel and stick your top 10 adgroups into their own campaign. You can decide what your “top” keyword is based on impressions, clicks, spend, conversions, or whatever other metric you’re interested in.
Usually, when people peel and stick, they’re doing it with a specific match type of a keyword within a campaign and they’re defining “top” as the keyword with the most clicks. They take a specific match type – for example, the exact match of “mortgage rates” and put it in its own adgroup. Usually this is done in search campaigns, but it certainly works on the content network, but maybe not as neatly because the content network is based more on keyword themes than on specific keywords and keyword match types. Your results may vary.
This is argueably a smarter version of the keyword management technique where you just take every keyword you have and put it in its own adgroup. You’ll end up in a similar place – with a lot of single match type of keywords in their own adgroups, but they will be keywords that merit their own adgroups.
A good example of a keyword that would merit its own adgroup is any keyword that got more than 10% of your account’s total traffic, sales or impressions in the last 30 days. If you’re running a really big, heavy-spending account (that’s spending over $10,000 a day, for example), its worth peeling and sticking any keyword that’s accrued more than $1000 of spend in the last 30 days. That $1000 is far less than 10% of total spend, but $1000 is certainly enough money to warrant special attention.
There’s an extra benefit to peeling and sticking that’s not usually talked about. Its in the analytics data. Analytics will give you some very specific, helpful info, but for some metrics they’ll only drill down to the adgroup level. So if you’ve got more than one keyword in that adgroup, you’ll be guessing which keyword is creating that specific analytics data. If you’ve peeled and stuck your money keyword into its own adgroup, that analytics data is unmuddied and actionable.
For a trick I never hear anyone talking about: when I have a client whose account is doing OK, but they want more volume, I peel and stick the top 3-5 keywords that are getting the most impressions, but either have rotten CTR or conversion rate. Its a bit of the flip side of peel-and-stick: instead of going after the top performers, I go after the top underperformers.
If you’ve polished the top performing keywords in an account to the point that doing anything more is silly, the only real way to bring the whole account average up is to work the bottom and the middle. Of course, you can also just decide to delete and negative out your worst performing keywords, but I find most people don’t want to do that. Once they’ve got the machine working, they want more volume, not less. But if you have to cut your cost per conversion by, say, 30% overnight, just killing (or pausing) the underperforming keywords would be a way to do it.
When you peel and stick, remember to use the same adcopy in the new adgroup as you used in the old adgroup, and least at the beginning. In a few days, write new adcopy that’s more focused on the keyword (if your ad copy isnt already perfectly laser-targeted to that keyword). Also remember to copy over all the negative keywords from the old adgroup. And finally, remember to remove and then negative out the keyword from its old adgroup.
I hate to tell you, but also remember that Google’s system may ding the performance or showing of your new adgroup and your “new” adcopy, simply because its new and has no history. I have heard of adwords managers peeling and sticking, then not deleting the keyword in its old adgroup for a week or two, just to let the new adgroup build up a performance history so the transition is less dramatic. This is yet another reason to keep a log of what you do, or to be extremely facile with the change logs in your account.
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