Website Design Articles :: Pay per Click Advertising

How do I set up an Adwords Campaign?

1. Read an overview of Google AdWords to become familiar with how it works.

2. Create a list of your Keywords - the words and phrases you think potential customers will enter into Google to find your product. Be creative. Use a dictionary or thesaurus to find alternatives or use Google's Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Read our article about how to create good keywords.

3. Separate your keywords into groups - create a group for each main
keyword or keyword phrase.

4. Check how popular your keywords are - use the free keyword research tool from Overture or take out a one-day subscription to Wordtracker to see how many times these keywords have been searched on in the last month. Add any related keyword phrases to the relevant group.

Making sure you include alternative words and phrases is vital eg 'cheap web design' showed 1933 searches whereas 'affordable web design' was 9885.

5. Check the competition - enter any of your main keywords in the Google search engine in quotes eg "website design" and see how many ads are displayed on the right side of the search results. This will tell you how many AdWord campaigns are running already.

If there are only a few Google Ads displayed and your chosen keyword is in high demand - ie your research showed there to be a high number of searches, you have the potential to create a winning ad campaign so congratulations!

6. Write your ad copy - look at the ads people are already using on Google to give you an idea of how to write them. Use your main keyword or keyword phrase in the title of your ad copy as it will be shown in bold if it matches the term entered in the search. You may even be able to include other keywords within the body of your ad. Here's an example of a typical ad:

Affordable Web Design UK
Small Business Specialists. Website
Design & Hosting from £175 complete.
lineofsite.co.uk/web-site-design

You can write three lines of ad text with a total of 95 characters, 25 for the heading and 35 each for the other two lines. Do not assume that the URL must be your home page. The page you direct visitors to (the landing page) should be relevant to the service your ad describes.

Write different ad copy for each of your ad groups each containing the relevant keywords.
https://m171.infusionsoft.com/go/dgmain/SC298787/">free 5 day email course about making the most of adwords and you can also purchase his Definitive Guide to Google Adwords which is highly recommended and works!

7. Create a Google AdWords account - there is a £5.00 activation fee for Google AdWords but after that, you decide how much or how little you are willing to pay per click and per day. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Decide in which geographic area you want your ads to display, choose a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) which can be as low as 1p for some keywords and set a maximum daily budget.

For example, if you set your daily budget for £2 per day at 10p per click, you will get a maximum of 20 clicks per day. Once you have reached your limit for that day, Google will automatically suspend running your ad until next day.

Your ads are shown throughout the day at intervals depending on the amounts set. Set the daily budget in relation to your CPC too low and you may find that your ads don't show up very often.

8. Create your other ad groups - each campaign can have several ad groups therefore to minimise your daily budget you should have one campaign containing your various ad groups. The maximum daily budget will then apply across all ad groups. It is often a good idea to start with 3 ad groups, then add the other ad groups later as you monitor your current campaign.

9. Make sure your landing page reflects your ad - ie the URL you direct customers to need not necessarily be your home page. If your keywords relate to your service offerings, take them to the page describing your services. Your customers are busy - they don't have time to surf your site looking for the tempting information which led them to click.

10. Test - monitor your AdWord campaign frequently and make the necessary changes to your ad copy, keywords or bid prices to improve your clickthrough rate. Google has a comprehensive reporting facility and automatically tracks the clickthrough rate for each of your ads. If keywords show as inactive then either improve the relevance of your ad to its keywords, increase the CPC to the suggested amount or delete the keyword.

If you follow these guidelines for creating your Google AdWords campaign, you will soon attract plenty of quality visitors to your web site.

Always remember though that attracting visitors is only part of the equation - your return on investment relies on your ad accurately describing the services your website offers.

See:
Choosing Good Keywords