Creating an AdWords account is simple. However, running a successful AdWords campaign is a completely different ball game. Maintaining your ad position and ensuring a high CTR requires careful planning and analysis. You need to be prepared to spend the time to do it properly. Don’t skip any steps in the process. The reality is that to set up each campaign will take a significant amount of time - up to 10 hours for one campaign if you do it properly. However, once it is set up the campaign is very easy to run.

There are a few basic guidelines that can ensure the success of your campaign. These are discussed below.

Optimization Tips

• Optimize the daily budget - It is crucial that you optimize your daily budget. You don’t want a situation where the number of clicks exceeds your daily budget and as a result your ad is not displayed for the rest of the day. Google AdWords recommend an amount to set during the account creation process. If you calculate your Return on Investment (ROI) carefully, and you set your maximum bids much lower than the amount of revenue you get per person who clicks, then you will always want to maximize your daily budget.

 

• You are always trying to attain the highest possible position for your ad whilst spending the least amount of money. The ad position depends on your bid-per-click and the average click-through rate of your ad. Later on in the membership site, we will see various strategies for attaining high positions with minimal budget.

 

• Create focused ads. Your Ads should be compelling and target a specific audience group. Your keyword list is the most important aspect of your Search Engine campaign. The key is to select targeted and relevant keywords instead of general or broad ones. You will also need to use as many keyword variations as possible such as plurals. More on this later.

• Try to always include the keyword in the title of your ad. This will give the users an impression that your ad is relevant to their search. Create multiple ads within an Ad Group and include one or more keywords in all the ads.

 

• Always highlight unique aspects of your product or service in your ads. This will make your ad an attention-puller. Experiment with the content of your ad and see what works best for you.

 

• Use a call-to-action to prepare your audience for what you want them to do. Make sure that this phrase is unique and specific to your business so that it is more informative and compelling and distinguishes you from the competition.

 

• Make sure that your landing page is relevant to the Ad. A user will only click on your Ad if he/she is interested in your offer. If the landing page is irrelevant to the Ad, it will only irritate the user.

 

• Analyze the performance of your Ad using tracking tools. Eg: Google itself provides tools to check your click-through rates. Apart from this, there are many more tools that offer a comprehensive analysis of your Ad campaign. These are discussed in detail in this membership site.

We discussed earlier the importance of tracking and analyzing the performance of your Ad. This is very crucial for running an Ad campaign successfully. Although, we would be discussing various strategies to analyze and improve the performance of your Ad campaign later on in this section, let us now examine a tracking tool provided by Google AdWords. These can be accessed from the AdWords Control Center.

Signing up for Google AdWords is simple. The whole process of creating and activating an Ad can be done in 5 steps. These are discussed in detail below.

Step 1: Choosing the target language and country

Google AdWords offers an option of choosing from 5 major languages including English and Spanish. It provides you an option of choosing from as many as 250 countries. You can select as many countries as you wish. However, it makes sense to choose only those countries that are relevant to the product or service that you are selling.

The Click Through Rate (CTR) for English Ads targeted at non-English speaking countries is very low. This will affect your Ad rankings for all countries which means that you want to choose your language and choose your countries very carefully.

Step 2: Create Ad Groups

The next phase is creating your Ad. Google AdWords comprises of the following:

• The Headline (only limited number of characters allowed)
• Description Line 1 for the Ad
• Description Line 2 for the Ad
• Your display URL. For instance, www.yourcompanyname.com
• The destination URL, which is the landing URL to which the ad clicks through.

Once you have designed the Ad, click on the "Create Ad and Continue" button. The next step is to select a group of keywords for your Ad. This is a very important exercise. Guidelines on what kind of keywords to select in order to get maximum click-through are given later on in this book. Moreover, you need to make sure that the keywords are in accordance with the guidelines provided by Google itself. Ignoring these guidelines may result in rejection of your ad. A more detailed explanation of these guidelines is given in the section on "Making sure that your ads get approved".

You can then add the keywords for your ad. This is a very important step and we will go into more detail on it later. These are the keywords which determine when your ad will show up on the search results.

The final step of this phase is to choose the currency you will be paying in and set your maximum cost-per-click (CPC). As stated earlier, Google provides a tool that estimates the position of your ad and the click-through rates for each keyword. You can use this tool now by putting in CPC amount and clicking on the "Calculate Estimates" button.

This will tell you how many clicks you can expect your Ad to receive and the ranking of your Ad (1 to 10). You can experiment with this tool to get a good idea of how much you need to spend in order to get the desired ranking. The minimum amount allowed per click is 5 cents.

Once this is done, you can save these settings. You are now given the option of creating a new Ad with a different set of keywords and headings or continue to Step 3. Please note that you can always come back and create additional Ad groups.

Step 3: Specify your daily budget

This is one of the most useful tools of the Google AdWords program. It allows you to set a daily budget. You can set a maximum amount to spend daily on your campaign. For instance, if you set your daily budget at $5 and the CPC as $0.10, you can have a maximum of 50 click-throughs daily for your ad. Once this number is reached, your ad will not be displayed for the rest of the day.

You can always increase or decrease your daily budget.

Step 4: Sign Up

In this step, you create your Google AdWords account. You will be asked to enter your billing information, Email address, and a password for your account. Finally you need to review and accept Google AdWords Terms and Conditions in order to create your account.

As soon you click on the button for creating an account, you will be sent an Email asking you to verify your Email address in order to activate your account.

Step 5: Activate your Ad

This is the final phase of the sign up process. You need to verify your email address, log in to your account, and submit your billing information. Your ads will begin running on Google immediately after you’ve entered your credit card information.

With Google AdWords you can create Ads that appear in boxes on the right hand side of the normal Google listings. Google AdWords works on the principle of Pay-per-click. This means that you only pay if a surfer clicks on your Google AdWords ad. The key is choosing the right keywords for which your ad will appear.

An interesting aspect of this program is that you are allowed to bid for each click. For instance, you can set a limit; let’s say 5 cents, for each click. Based on your bid and the relevancy of the keyword, your ad will be ranked and listed in Google Search listings. Google AdWords provides a tool that will tell you the amount you need to set to attain the top ranking for a particular keyword. You may choose an amount higher than this to be ranked at the top position, or you may choose to bid a lower amount and be ranked lower.

There is no minimum monthly charge to run an AdWords campaign. However, Google does charge you a $5 activation fee. Google AdWords also provides tools for tracking the performance of your Ad.

You can also choose your daily budget, geographic targeting, syndication preference, as well as start and end dates for your Ad campaign’s.

Google AdWords is one of the most popular Pay-per-click programs. It has earned rave reviews from experts ever since it was established. Ads are displayed to the side of the regular listings on Google. There are more than 200 million searches every day, so your Google AdWords advertisements reach a vast audience. Also, unlike free listings, ads show up on a growing list of Google partner sites as well.

When you create a Google AdWords ad, you choose keywords for which your ad will appear and specify the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click. Your ads start running within minutes after you submit your billing information.

Google AdWords has been considered by most experts as a highly effective Pay-per-click (PPC) program. This is what The New York Times reported on Google AdWords recently:

"Sales went from 10 / month on eBay to 120 with AdWords, almost overnight by the sound of it. The retailer, VavraItaly.com retailer sells imported suits and from their site, the average price looks to be around $400. So that’s in the neighborhood of $48,000 revenue per month. Vavra Italy "expects to spend $60,000 this year on Google search ads". With a $5,000 monthly spend, that puts her Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) at $9.60 (nearly $10 of revenue for every dollar spent on AdWords)."

Google AdWords has a lot of advantages that can be exploited to ensure a successful marketing campaign for your website. Some of these are:

Demographic targeting

You can set the demographics for each of your keywords. So if you are looking for visitors from a specific region or in a particular language you can tailor your advertisements accordingly.

Ease of Use

The program is pure self-service online. The advertiser opens an account with a credit card, writes up the ad, and then chooses the words that will trigger the advertisement.

The advantage of paying per click

One of the biggest advantage of Google AdWords is the value it provides to advertisers. They pay for actual clicks on their advertisements, not each appearance of the ad.