Learning How to Set Up Your Google Adwords Campaign for the First Time

An article for beginners to adwords discussing about how to setup google adwords campaign. Value precautionary steps before running it live.

When you gonna setup a campaign for advertising either your own business through Pay per Click (PPC) or working for a client in order to earn maximum return on investment (ROI) you have to consider a several things before you get started. Definitely, advertising with Google Adwords is an effective way for promoting a product, service or website but achieving the set goals through it is not a simple deal. This article will help those who are novice to PPC Advertising. 

Consider the following points to learning about how to set up your google adwords campaign. It is worth studying if you are new to search engine marketing using google adwords.

Signing Up for Adwords

Before you start with Adwords you must have to sign up for Google Adwords to move further. If you already have a Google Account, you can sign it in and find Adwords in Products section otherwise you have to go to http://adwords.google.com and sign up. You don’t have to bother for using different email address for it if you already have a Google Account.

Setting Objectives and Foresee Targets

Its up to you that you focus on per click cost (CPC) or want to limit your campaign for a daily or monthly budget while planning to invest but you must set what your objective is. Mostly, it will be subject to the nature of your business/website. 

If you are setting up campaign for a business, your objective will be to increase the sales from your targeted regions. If you have to make campaign for promoting a website, your objective might be to increase sign ups or any activities on your website. In case you have to increase the sale, you could setup your objective like getting minimum 2 sales within a week with consuming maximum $50 as your budget.

Whatever it is, important thing is to set it and foresee what target you have to achieve.

Structuring Your Adwords Account
The next deal is how to structure your adwords account.

Campaign(s) >> Ad Groups >> Ad Copies + Keywords

Structuring your Adwords account is very crucial and important to the effectiveness and achievement of your Adwords Campaign objectives. 

Therefore, first you need to create a new campaign with the basic settings you have to go for. You have to put your daily budget, target locations (countries, states, cities etc) and other basic settings. You can create a new campaign in your account from 'Campaigns' tab clicking on 'New Campaign' button as shown in the visual (Click on image for enlarged view).

Create New Campaign

As you have created your campaign, you would have to make your account structured by creating Ad Groups and identifying keywords for each Ad Group.

You can make ad groups by gathering related keywords in the ad group; it depends upon your product or service that how many ad groups you need to create.  

Let’s assume you have a line of bags which you have to promote for sale through Google Adwords. You have following types of bags which you have to sell:

- Tote Bags

- Shopping Bags

- Gift Bags

- Grocery Bags

So you would create four ad groups namely Tote Bags, Shopping Bags, Gift Bags and Grocery Bags. For each Ad Group you will select the keywords and insert into the relevant Ad Group. Let’s take an example as for Tote Bags you would select ‘tote bags’, ‘quality tote bags’, ‘promotional tote bags’ and so on.

You will repeat the insertion of related keywords for each Ad Group. Not necessarily select the same keywords for each Ad Group but select keywords by Keyword Tool of Adwords which will show you Max CPC, number of searches monthly/globally and other useful details for your keywords.

Creating Ads in Your Ad Groups

After picking up the final keywords you have to create ads that will show on Google when searched in the regions you targeted in your campaign.

Consider grouping the keywords that are closely related so you can make separate ads for those related keywords and to avoid messing up within the list of keywords and ads. This will also help you organize your campaigns and to gauge performance of keywords, ads and Ad Groups as well. It is a useful practice to create Multiple Ad Copies to test which ad copy performs better so you can continue with the better performing ad copy and drop the one with lower performance.

It must be at least 3 or more ad copies can be perfect to control the situation. This helps out Google in finding out which type of ads have been the best CTR and it begins showing the ad more. Soon after a complete week is over, you can delete the less effective ad and use some other ad having different text. You must keep trying to beat the existing winning ads.

Keep Monitoring the Campaign Performance

Optimizing campaigns by the time is the key to success towards your objectives of ppc advertisement. Do not underestimate its importance and keep check on your campaign and upcoming statistics of clicks, CTR, impressions and other segments.

Keep making changes in your keywords, finding out search terms to check if there is need to put any words into your negative keywords list. Keep optimizing your ad copies and moving ahead to an ad copy which maximum CTR. Keep eye on your daily budget and bids of the keywords, altering them smartly for efficiency and effectiveness of your campaign. 

Also, never forget the landing pages of your websites and make sure your landing pages are perfectly relevant to each of your keywords. Checking Bounce Rate of your Campaigns is also a good option to analyze the time, visitors stay on your landing pages. You can check by associating your campaign with Google Analytics.

Seems you can set up your Adwords Campaign to achieve your business objectives.

P.S. Please share your thoughts and leave comments for this write up. You can discuss any other question or topic on adwords forum.