You down with MCC, Yeah You Know Me!
Aug 6, 2007 Google Adwords
Sick of all the incestuous search marketing acronyms yet? Well too bad, it just keeps getting worse. Now each search engine is actually making their own acronyms. My theory behind this is that they are trying to find out which account managers are really up on their reading, and penalize your quality score if you’re not. All jokes aside, an important tool in my everyday use is the “My Client Center” screen. Even if you don’t have multiple accounts within your organization, I’m going to tell you why you should.
The My Client Center (or MCC for short) account is ideal for account managers that handle several different Adwords clients with unique campaigns. This managed account platform allows search engine marketers the power to accumulate multiple individual Adwords account under one umbrella, and manage each individually using a Superuser login and password.
Why Should Small Advertisers Care?
If you’ve got a small shop and one account is all you really need, you may consider saving a lot of time by farming out your search engine marketing to a qualified Adwords professional. Cough-ECLIPSEO-Cough… Ahem. You won’t have access to the MCC account per se, but it’s important to know how it works. Your account will be governed by the same rules as larger corporations, so take what you will from the next section.
Why Should Corporate SEMs Care?
Corporate Search Engine Marketers have a lot going on. Most of us would rather put all our eggs in one basket, but there are a number of good reasons to split up your Google campaigns.
- Foreign Currency Fluctuations. As of writing this the Canadian dollar is more or less on par with the almighty US Dollar, but let’s face it: the US dollar will gain ground again, and push the Canadian dollar back down to the 80 cent mark sooner or later. It makes a lot of sense to get your currency woes straightened out right away, because your return on ad spend (ROAS) calculation will be nice and clean, regardless of exchange rate. Make a separate account for Canadian campaigns billed in toonies and loonies (ya, ya, I hear you yanks now, monopoly money), and leave your US campaigns in the Benjamins.
- Cap space. I haven’t introduced a lengthy discussion on the Google cap space, but I promise to get to it in coming weeks. Stay tuned.
- Local ads. Most of us in the North American SMB market will, for business purposes, have both US and Canadian mailing addresses (if not offices). Having your US and Canadian accounts billed to separate addresses will give you the ability to add that 5th locality line to your Adwords text ads. It’s a little thing, but it’s a nice thing.
- Modify Budgets. When you get tired of getting billed on your company credit card, you can work with Google billing to setup credit terms. You’ll be sandboxed for a while with the accounts team until you establish creditworthiness with “Big G”, but after a few months of decent spending you can apply to manage your budget and credit limit independently. I’ll delve into this in an upcoming post, but for now, understand that the machine that is Adwords takes time to process your requests to increase budgets, spend, and credit limit, so automating the process and removing your middleman (or middlewoman as is the case most often) account representative will save considerable time.
- Content network. Those two words have appeared a number of times over the past few week. Separating your content network campaigns may help for some analytics packages that group all content campaigns into one miscellaneous clump. Helpful to get a general overview, but not so good for micro-managing serious content bids.
- Quality score. In my experience, the US market is a much tougher nut to crack than the Canadian market. Traffic is nearly threefold for some campaigns, and prospects are finicky. If you’ve severely messed up your US campaigns and quality scores are through the basement, it might be time to consider separating your ROAS-challenged campaigns into a new Adwords account. Why would you throw all that juicy history away? Because your quality score sucks. Fixing your old crappy ads in a stagnant campaign might be harder than starting from fresh at neutral standing. The cat is out of the bag, new accounts get a neutral quality score that is easier to improve than a poor quality score. “Big G” won’t let you in on this secret gem without some independent testing first.
Stay tuned this week for more tips and tricks, and insider knowledge from a guy who lives, breathes, and bathes pay-per-click. Until next time!
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