Baidu search account setup process!

A good account structure, like a solid foundation, can make our superstructure more stable. It not only facilitates our data collection and organization, but also helps us to analyze and adjust accounts more specifically. Although the initial setup work may be boring and time-consuming, as the saying goes, "sharpening the knife does not delay the chopping of wood."

Our account levels can be divided from large to small as follows: Account > Plan > Unit > Keywords and Creatives.

1. Account level

At the account level we can make some settings:

1) Customer rights : Customers are divided into different star levels based on their average daily consumption. The rights and interests such as the total number of plans and total number of keywords are different for different star levels.

2) Budget : This refers to our daily consumption. There are unlimited budget and daily budget. The minimum daily budget setting is 50.

3) Promotion area : This is the promotion scope of our account. You can specify a region or set the entire region, accurate to the city level.

4) In addition, there are some settings at the account level, such as search intent positioning, Baidu Tieba traffic, search partner network, target customer follow-up, and other intelligent delivery settings, which basically do not need to be turned on.

2. Planning level

There are many things to set up at this level, so you need to be careful.

1) Daily budget : When the planned budget and account budget are set at the same time, the planned budget shall prevail; the consumption of this plan can be controlled.

2) Device type : Mobile devices first and computer devices first. Once set, it cannot be changed. When mobile devices are prioritized, you can set the bid coefficient for computer devices to control the consumption of computer devices; when computer devices are prioritized, you can control the bid coefficient for mobile devices.

3) Bid ratio : Without considering other coefficients, this coefficient can be used to control the consumption of mobile or computer devices; mobile devices are given priority, and the computer bid coefficient is set to 0.1 to maximize the control of computer device consumption; computer devices are given priority, and the mobile bid coefficient is set to 0.1 to maximize the control of mobile device consumption, but the coefficient is generally greater than or equal to 1; when the bid coefficient is 1, the bids of computers and mobile devices are the same.

4) Enable/Pause : Control the plan on or off.

5) Creative presentation : optimization and rotation. Generally, optimization is used; if you want to test the creativity, you can also use rotation testing.

6) Promotional business : that is, the industry to which your product belongs. Click this option and you can directly enter the search above.

7) Promotion period : the time period during which the account is online.

8) Promotional region : There are two options here, use the account promotion region or the designated region. If the account promotion region is used, it is consistent with the account promotion region. If the designated region is used, it is inconsistent with the account level. In this case, the regional scope of the execution plan level is used.

9) Negative keywords : Negative keywords and precise negative keywords are used to block invalid keywords. The number of negative keywords depends on the rights and interests of the account. Negative keywords mean that as long as the search terms contain negative keywords, our ads will not be triggered. Precise negative keywords, when the search terms and precise negative keywords are exactly the same, our ads will not be triggered. Newbies should use more precise negative keywords and less negative keywords to avoid blocking their own traffic due to unfamiliarity with the business.

3. Unit level

The unit-level settings are very similar to the plan-level settings, but there is a question of execution order involved here.

After setting daily budgets at multiple levels, the priority order of execution is: promotion plan > account. That is, when a function is set at a lower level, execution follows the lower level; if the function is not set at a lower level, the setting at the higher level is executed.

The same function is set up at multiple levels in an account, and their execution rules are as follows: keyword > promotion unit > promotion plan (keyword grouping) > account.

When the same function is set at multiple levels, the actual execution result is the collection of settings, which has a “+” relationship. This rule only applies to: negative keywords, IP exclusion.

In addition to the basic account settings above, there is our keyword part. Let’s continue reading.

4. Keyword Hierarchy

1) Expand words

There are many tools for expanding keywords, such as the keyword planner that comes with Baidu, which we often use. It generally recommends more accurate keywords.

There is also 5118, which is a paid software. The free version only allows you to download 100 copies. This tool can also expand many words, including some long-tail words. If you use this tool, I suggest you go to Taobao and find someone to download it for you for a few dollars. It is much more cost-effective than buying a membership.

Drop-down word. We open Baidu on our mobile phone, enter the product, and some keywords will automatically pop up below. This is also one of our ways to expand our keyword base.

Search term. We can also export the search terms in the account. These terms are all those with recent user activity.

2) Participle

Generally speaking, keywords can be roughly divided into these categories: brand words, industry words, product words, general words, and competitor words. Based on these major categories, we can further subdivide the keywords according to parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, question words, and long-tail words.

It can also be divided according to the stage of people's needs, decision-making stage, comparison stage, understanding stage, and budding stage.

The advantage of this division is that the keywords of each unit in each plan are targeted at a specific group of people, which makes it easier to write creative ideas, organize and analyze data later. The best thing is to combine the two methods. For some industries, the workload may be a bit large, but only when the foundation is laid can the building above be stable. Don't be bothered by it.

3) Keyword suffix

After the keywords are divided, each keyword should be given an "identity card" - the keyword suffix.

It can be a pattern like this: link #BD-YD-CP-0001CP=key00001. You can add it according to your preferences and convenience. We can perform batch operations in Excel for this process.

The purpose of adding a suffix is ​​to let us know more clearly which planning unit, project or product our conversation comes from, whether it is a brand word or an industry word, and whether the search word is related to our keyword. If not, we can directly modify the matching method of the word; it is also convenient for our data collation and analysis later.

5. Creative level

After uploading the keywords, we need to start writing our creative ideas. I will share a few ideas for writing creative ideas for your reference.

1) You can refer to the ideas of your peers , but don’t copy them. Instead, use your own talents to refine them.

2) Write according to the stage of people’s needs . People in the decision-making stage may focus on quality and technology; people in the comparison stage will pay more attention to the differences between products and which one will win in comparison. People in the understanding stage will pay more attention to the price, effect, etc. of the product; people in the budding stage want to know what it is and what it is used for. When we write, we can write around these aspects, which will be more targeted.

3) When writing creative ideas, it is best to be realistic. It is okay to exaggerate a little, but do not exaggerate. More importantly, do not violate advertising laws and some banned words.

The above is a general workflow for setting up an account. Next, let’s look at the bidding and matching methods.

1. How to quickly segment words

The keywords we have developed through various tools need to be processed in detail. The general idea of ​​word segmentation is as follows, taking the medical beauty industry as an example.

① First, divide the words into four categories according to the four stages of customer intention. Decision-making category, comparison category, understanding category, and budding category. First divide the major categories, and then subdivide each small category.

② The decision-making category can include: price, money, fee, experts, technology, etc.; the comparison category can be divided into: hospital, reputation, where, which one, brand, etc.; the understanding category is more, including function, effect, time, several times, several injections, pictures, videos, feelings, safety, recovery, etc. The budding category includes method, way, what to do, difference, reason, what is it, how, etc. Since the industries are different, just make some analogies.

③ After the above two steps, classify the length of the words. This depends on personal habits. I usually divide them into 16 characters, or 8 words. I consider 8 words as short, and those over 8 words as long tail. Classifying the length of words here makes it easier to bid and process word matching.

④ Generally speaking, under the same root word, the bid for short words is higher than that for long-tail words, and the matching method of long-tail words is broader than that of short words.

⑤ For some conversion-related words in the original account, we can pull them out separately and build a plan with lower prices and wider matching to strive for more traffic and conversions. We can roughly observe what kind of words it is, or what kind of word roots it is under, and then we can expand some long-tail words to further increase conversions.

⑥ When segmenting words, there will be words that cannot be segmented cleanly no matter how hard you try. Don’t get stuck in a rut here. In some industries with a large number of words, it is a waste of time to get stuck in a rut. As long as the overall direction is handled cleanly, we can make adjustments at any time in the actual delivery later.

2. How to bid for the keywords

As a bidder, our responsibility is to use the money given to us by the boss to create the greatest benefit for the boss; this requires us to spend every penny reasonably and make every keyword bid reasonable. So, faced with a huge number of keywords, how do you determine the bid for each keyword?

1) Based on account budget

Budget is fundamental. The larger the budget, the more room you have to maneuver; otherwise, it will be smaller. The bidding for keywords must be based on the budget. Suppose you only have a budget of 300, and you bid 10 yuan for a keyword, but it’s gone after a few clicks and there is no conversion, then the 300 yuan is wasted.

2) Focus on core business

We spend money to bring benefits, and the same goes for bidding on keywords. We also hope that these keywords can bring conversions. Therefore, we should try our best to spend our money on our core business.

3) Based on the customer intention stage

We have previously talked about the four intention stages of visitors. These four stages represent the visitors’ different purchasing desires. So, these different purchasing desires correspond to different parts of speech in the keywords. That is to say, we have to bid for keywords according to different parts of speech. For customers with high intention (decision-making stage), our price will be higher, for those with second highest intention (comparison and understanding stage), it will be lower, and for those with the lowest intention (embryo stage), our bid will be the lowest among the three.

4) Switch in matching mode

After determining the user's intention and making a bid, you also need to use matching methods to control traffic.

High-intent words generally have the highest bids and the narrowest matching methods. Since we pay a high price for this keyword in the hope that it can bring more accurate traffic and better conversions, if it matches some junk traffic, we will have to tighten the matching method.

For words with medium intent, our prices will be lower and the matching method can be slightly loosened, on the one hand to increase traffic and on the other hand to find potential conversion words.

For the words with the lowest intention, we want a low price, but we also have to be able to spend it. Although the traffic brought in may not be very good, it may occasionally bring some unexpected conversions, which is wonderful.

5) Conversion as a goal

Every dollar spent on a keyword is in the hope that it will lead to conversions.

① If a high-priced word is consumed for a long time but does not bring conversions, we should consider whether to lower the price or see whether the traffic brought by this word is relatively spam.

② For conversions brought by some low-intent keywords, we should increase the price as appropriate, because the conversion of these keywords may be unstable. If we raise too much, it may not be worth the cost.

③For keywords with long-term stable conversions, we can raise prices, grab some rankings, strive for more exposure, and grab more traffic. In addition, we can also expand some of these conversion words' long-tail words to increase traffic.

④ For some low-intent, low-bid keywords, if there has been no conversion for a long time and the consumption is low, you can raise the bid appropriately, but don’t raise it too much, and observe the situation for a few days.

6) Time as the axis

The bids for keywords are different in different time periods.

Generally speaking, the morning is a period of greater competition. If the budget allows, you can gain more exposure by modifying the time period coefficient. The afternoon and evening are the second most popular times. Traffic in the evening is generally larger, so the bid does not need to be too high. Just make sure there is a ranking and exposure, and prevent excessive bidding that causes unnecessary waste.

We can make a time period template to control these, which is very convenient to adjust.

7) Based on region

Some companies may have a wide business coverage. In this case, we can control different bids in different regions by setting regional coefficients.

8) Sales as a guide

Different companies and different customer service staff have different conversion capabilities. They may be good at converting visitors brought by this type of keywords, but not good at that type. At this time, we need to communicate with the customer service department to ensure that the traffic we bring can be digested by the customer service, otherwise, it will invisibly increase our costs.

The above descriptions of how to segment keywords and how to bid for keywords complement each other. Word segmentation paves the way for bidding, and bidding further consolidates the effect of word segmentation.

How to write creativity?

The book "Confessions of an Advertising Man" is written by David Orwig, who was once called "the advertising geek" and also the Pope of Advertising. In this book, he tells the story of how he, as an advertising man, ran his own advertising company and founded one of the largest advertising companies in the world (Ogilvy & Mather). Although the time is some years away from us, some of the essence of the book is still worth learning and studying.

Among them, his article "How to Create High-Level Advertisements" is very instructive for our current advertising creativity. The following is a part of the explanation:

1. The content of the advertisement is more important than the method of expressing the content

I feel that the inner qualities are more important than the form. The content of our advertising creativity should be real, specific, simple and easy to understand, so that our advertising can be more targeted when facing different audiences and people at different purchasing stages.

For example, the product's promise, effect, performance, special features, and discounts also guide us on how to create our landing page.

2. If your advertising is not based on good ideas, it will fail.

Our advertisements are ultimately meant to be shown to our audiences. With so many advertisements out there, how can we make our audiences choose yours among so many? This depends on whether your creativity can hit the audiences’ pain points, prompting them to click on and consult, and ultimately lead to conversions. If the click-through rate of your creative is always low, or if people are not interested in clicking on your ad at all, that is, your click-through rate is particularly low, then creativity is one of the parts you need to adjust.

3. Tell the facts

Here he said that in our advertising creativity, we should introduce our products' usage, dosage, efficacy, methods of use, precautions, recovery period, duration and other product-related information in as much detail as possible, and let visitors see the information they want to know as concisely as possible, rather than writing too much and not highlighting the key points.

4. Make your advertising contemporary

Creativity is not static. It must keep pace with the times and constantly innovate. For example, in the medical beauty industry where I am currently engaged, the hospital has different preferential policies every month, rebates for new and old customers, and there are also preferential activities for students during the graduation season. For different consumer groups, there will be different rebate policies for meeting consumption standards. Moreover, when facing numerous competitors in the market, we must highlight our advantages in this regard.

It is discussed here that we need to be flexible in delivering our advertisements when facing consumers of different age groups and classes.

5. If you are lucky enough to create a great ad, keep using it until it wears off.

My understanding of “reuse it” here is that if an advertisement has a good click-through rate and conversion rate, then your idea is relatively successful. You can draw on the style and highlights of this idea to sublimate other ideas and continuously improve the attractiveness of your ideas.

6. Image and brand

Among the many dazzling slogans, perhaps the only thing that can make the audience see the difference is the brand.

Most of the audience will compare and shop around. If your brand keeps appearing in front of them, it will give them a psychological hint: this brand’s advertisement is famous, so this brand should be bigger. In fact, it is more for the purpose of constantly establishing its own brand image and increasing brand exposure. Every company should pay attention to its own image and brand. Only when the brand is occupied can it occupy the market and truly achieve a good reputation.

7. Don’t be a copycat

In fact, this may not be very friendly to some novice friends. When you don’t understand the business and products in the early stage, the fastest and simplest way is to refer to and learn from the ideas of your competitors. Then, after slowly understanding them, you need to form your own ideas, make them different, have your own characteristics, and better highlight the characteristics and advantages of the products. Just don't keep copying other people's work.

I hope this article can help some friends who are just starting out in bidding!