How to Set Up a Successful Google AdWords Campaig

by: Herman Drost

If you are looking for a fast way to market your products or business, then Google AdWords is a great solution. You can set up an AdWords campaign within a few minutes and be making good money within days.

What is Google AdWords?
These are small pay per click ads that are displayed on the right side of Google search results. The ads provide highly targeted text or image ads based on what words people use to search for your product.

Steps involved in setting up an AdWords campaign?

1. Read an overview of Google AdWords
(https://adwords.google.com/select/) to become familiar with how it works.

2. Find a product or service to promote that is in high demand. This can be an affiliate product or one of your own products. Don't create and promote a product which has no demand. Do your keyword research first.

3. Keyword research - try to think of the main keywords people would enter into a search engine that is related to your product. Then use the keyword research tools below to see how many times these keywords have been searched on in the last month. Also research alternative or similar keywords.

Google Adwords Suggestion Tool
Keyword Sandbox

Overture Suggestion Tool
Overture Suggestion Tool

Wordtracker
Wordtracker

4. Create ad groups - create an ad group for each main keyword or keyword phrase. Use Wordtracker to research another 10 to 20 keywords related to your main keyword. This will enable you to target people who are specifically using those words for searching. Now you can create a number of different ad groups for each main keyword.

5. Check the number of AdWords campaigns - enter any of your main keywords in the Google search engine and see how many ads are displayed on the right side of the search results. This will tell you how many AdWords campaigns are running already.

If there are only a few Google Ads displayed and your targeted keyword is in high demand (high number of searches), you have the potential to create a winning ad campaign.

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

Effective Web Site Promotion
Promotion strategies for
marketing your product or service
www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion

You can write three lines of ad text with a total of 95 characters. The Display URL has a 35-character limit. The Destination URL can be up to 1,024 characters and is the actual web page users will land on after they click on your ad.

Write different ad copy for each of your ad groups. You never know which one will pull the best.

7. Create a Google AdWords account - there is a US$5.00 activation fee for Google AdWords. After that, you decide how much you are willing to pay per click and per day. You can choose a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) from US$0.05 - US$50 and set a daily budget as low as 5 cents USD or as high as you want.

For example, if you set your daily budget for $50/day/ad at 10 cents/click, you will get a maximum of 500 clicks/ad. Once you have reached your limit for that day, Google will automatically suspend running your ad until next day.

8. Test and monitor your AdWord campaigns - start with 3 ad groups, then keep the other ad groups for later as you monitor your current campaign. Make the necessary changes to your ad copy, keywords or bid prices to improve your clickthrough rate.

Google automatically tracks the clickthrough rate for each of your ads. To identify how many of your customers clicked through to your site from your Google AdWords ad, use a unique tracking URL for each ad. This will also give you an indication which ads and keywords converted the most clicks to sales.

To use tracking URLs, just place the following parameter at the end of your URL: ?referrer=source.

Example: If your URL is: www.your-domain.com, your tracking URL could be www.your-domain.com/?referrer=Google

Once you've created your tracking URLs, you can get your traffic data from your Web server logs or from third party tracking software. Your log file has an entry for each click to your site. Just count the entries where "Google" (or another source reference) appears in the referring URL.

The tracking software I use is Adtrackz:
http://www.adtrackz.com

Here you can set up any number of ad tracking campaigns and
easily view them all on one page.

If you follow these guidelines for creating your Google AdWords campaign, you can quickly attract thousands of visitors to your web site or affiliate program and generate instant sales.

Resources:

Google AdWords Tips:
https://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting (http://www.isitebuild.com/) Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles at: subscribe@isitebuild.com 
You can read more of his in-depth articles at:
http://www.isitebuild.com/articles
 

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