Posted on August 25th, 2008 by Rick Maggio
Many of the clients that I’ve spoken with who have never tried to advertising using Google Adwords, a pay per click advertising channel, usually say they haven’t because they just couldn’t figure it out. Here’s a quick step by step guide to setting up your first AdWords account.
Step 1: Open a Google account. This is pretty easy. Go to www.google.com and click on the Sign in link in the upper right hand corner. You can follow the directions for starting a new account with Google.
Step 2: Start an Adwords account: Once you have an account with Google, you can open your Adwords account. Click on the My Account link from Google.com. Under Try Something New, click on Adwords.
Step 3: Start a new campaign: Under the Campaign Summary tab, click on the New Online Campaign link.
Step 4: Campaign setup – First you need to assign your campaign and AdGroup a name. In Google, a campaign contains one or more adgroups. For example, a campaign may be called Car Keywords and adgroups within this campaign may be blue cars, red cars and green cars. For our sample project, our campaign name is going to be Dry Cleaning and our first adgroup is going to be called Boca Raton Dy Cleaning. Don’t be too concerned with the way you name Campaigns and adgroups at this time. For most advertisers, it’s simply a way to organize your ads.
Two important things to remember are that your budget and your ad locations are both managed at the campaign level. So, if you want to set spending limitations on one particular group of ads, you’d have to organize them in their own campaign. Likewise, if you want to show one group of ads to users in one location and a different group of ads in another location, you’d have to create different campaigns.
Once your campaigns have been assigned names, go ahead and choose a language. The language you choose will, for the most part, only show to users searching in that language. It’s actually a little more complicated than this but you’ll get by making that assumption.
Lastly, if you want to change the locations where your ads will be displayed, click Change targeting. If you’d like to keep the default, skip to step 6.
Step 5: Ad targeting – Ad targeting allows you to select locations to show your ads. For example, if you decide to target your ads to Florida, only users searching from the state of Florida will see your ads. Google allows for fairly precise ad targeting so, if you decide that you only want people living withing X miles of your business to see your ads, no problem. Likewise, if you want all of Europe to see your ads, that’s fine too.
Type in a city name, state name, zip code, country region or anything you can think of and Google will help you add the correct locations.
Step 6 – Writing your ads – Writing a PPC ad is pretty straightforward. In general, your ads should include brief and clear information about your business. They should be brief because you don’t have much space and clear so that prospects know what to expect when they click. This is important so that only relevant searchers click your ad. Ads that are too general or contain false information often attract the wrong users. Remember, you’re paying per click so you want to do everything you can to make sure that everyone who clicks on your ad knows what they are getting into. If you have trouble with ad ideas, search for keywords relevant to the given campaign and see what your competitors have done.
As you add a title, description and URL to your ad, a preview will generate at the top of the screen. This previews shows how your ad will display to searchers.
FYI: In Google, your title can be up to 25 characters long and each description line can be up to 35 characters. where possible, use symbols instead of words. For example, the symbol ‘&’ can be used in place of the word ‘and’.
Step 7: Select keywords to bid on – Next, you need to select the keywords to bid on. To keep your costs down, insert only closely related keywords into each AdGroup that you create. In our example, I’d choose keywords closely related to Dry Cleaning. If my company also offered sewing serves, I would create a second AdGroup for those keywords. And of course, my ad would probably relate to sewing in the other AdGroup.
So, for the sample Boca Raton Dry Cleaning campaign, I use the Google screen shown below to come up with a list of keyword ideas. I’ll start by typing dry cleaning into the search box. Google then recommends several related terms which I can either choose to use or not.
By clicking the Add link next to a keyword phrase, your add will appear when a searcher types that term. In our example, our ad would appear only when someone in Boca Raton searched for the given term because we’re targeting Boca Raton.
Step 8: Set your budget – Now, we must select a budget. In Google, your budget is set on a daily basis. So, your ads will continue to run throughout the course of the day until your budget runs out. Then they will stop until the next day begins. In the beginning, start with a low budget, even $5 or $10 dollars a day. As you become more comfortable, you may decide that a higher budget is right for you.
Next, set the cost per click. The cost per click (CPC) is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for one click. In general, a higher cost per click setting will make your ad show higher in the search results, yielding more clicks to your website. My recommendation for your initial cost per click setting is to try $1.25. It’s a low enough number that won’t break the bank but will give you a feel for how many clicks your ad is going to generate.
That’s about it for setting up a pay per click campaign. Google does a great job at leading you through this process when you try it. My goal with this post is to get you acquainted and give you a quick introduction.
Check out the other pay per click blog posts of mine for more details on pay per click strategy and best practices. If you have any questions, post a comment or email me and I’ll try to help you out.
Tags: pay per click campaigns | Category Pay Per Click
