Your first campaign

Start screen

Let’s have a further look into the startscreen. The menu-ribbon on the top shows following elements:

  • Home: This contains your Account Snapshot page, an easy-to-read summary of important account information. You can customize this page to get a view on the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns.
     
  • Campaigns: Here's where you'll spend most of your time when you're managing your AdWords account. You can create and edit campaigns, ads, keywords and campaign settings. In the performance summary graphs at the top of the page, you'll see an overview of how your campaigns are performing. You can also download the tables containing your performance metrics as reports.
     
  • Opportunities: Find keyword, bid and budget ideas that can help improve your campaign performance. Recommendations for improvement of your AdWords campaigns (best practices). Campaigns have to run some time before you can make use of this tab. Can be topics such as budget recommendations, extra keywords to add, analyze competition using benchmark data. You can make use of a Campaign Bid Simulator.
     
  • Tools and Analysis: Find account tools that'll help you manage and improve your account. Use advanced reporting tools to locate potential issues and fix them before they become issues. Access to Google Analytics (you need to create a Google analytics account and link it to your AdWords account. Google Analytics will provide you with statistics and information about the behavior of visitors on your website. The linking of the 2 accounts will enable you to measure conversion up to keyword level. (By the way, this tab is not intended for reporting, that’s under campaign).
     
  • Billing: Enter and change your billing details, see your entire billing history and print invoices you might require for your accounting department.
     
  • My account: Control your personal information, such as your sign-in information and user preferences. If you choose to, you can use this tab to invite a friend or colleague to manage your AdWords account.

Source and read more about this on: https://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en-GB

 

Creating campaigns with ads

The process flow to set up and manage a marketing campaign consists of following steps:

  • Create a campaign
  • Choose the campaign type that's right for you
  • Choose your location and language settings
  • Choose network settings
  • Choose your device targeting options
  • Choose and control your bid and budget
  • Choose an ad format
  • Choose your keywords and placements
  • Managing multiple campaigns and ads
  • Understanding your campaign status
  • Understanding your ad status

So now will will try to follow this process flow, and walk (at least a part of) those steps.

To keep it easy, lets have our first try using the Google Wizard: Select "Campaigns", and click "Create your first campaign":

 

 

Create Campaign & ad group

  • First set your Campaign Type: Here you define where your advertising will be shown: on SERP pages (and search partners if selected), on the Google Display Network, or both both (=default, called “search network with display select”).  Also “online video”, e.g. showing in the YouTube network is possible. For our “simple” first go, we will go for the easiest scenario: “Search network”.
     
  • Then define a name for your publicity campaign. For example, suppose you have a bicycle web shop, you campaign name could be “spring 2013 campaign”.
     
  • If you only want your ads to appear an the Google Search Page, you have to deselect “Include Search Partners”. In most cases, you can just leave this selected.

 

Desktops & laptops, mobile devices and tablets

  • Where do you want your publicity to be displayed upon. On all computer devices, or only Tablet Pc’s, Smartphones,... Think about this, decide and set the values accordingly

 

Locations

What is the advertising region your ad should cover ? You can specify a list of countries. Clicking “Advanced Search” gives you access to possibilities such as radius targeting: here you can indicate a circular region around your sales offices.


 

Bidding and budget - Bid strategy

We have not set up measurements for CR (conversion rate) yet. Because of that, it’s for the moment not yet useful to look into the advanced options of this section. The default behavior of Google is to set automatic bidding (“AdWords will set my bids to help maximize clicks within my target budget). This is somewhat fishy, as you then leave it to Google to set your price. It’s like going to a car dealer and accepting his first price offer without any negotiation. Especially for selections such as “CPA” it’s better not to do this. You can set in this section a maxium CPC value you are willing to pay. And you should set your daily maximum budget.

 

 

Ad Extentions

Below "Bidding and Budget", you see a section called "Ad Extensions". You can skip this one for the moment - we will cover this topic in a separate chapter (4 Ad Extensions) Save this phase, and you will jump to creating the first linked Ad Group:

 

Creating the Ad Group

Now you can write your text ad to be shown in the Google Search Network. Give this Ad Group first a name, and then start designing your ad Headline and the 2 lines of Description text you can place. Depending on the length of your text, it can be displayed as a Side ad (less room) or a Top ad. You will see immediately the result as you type.

The Display URL is the url that will be displayed in your ad. In many cases, you will want to refer here to your company home page. The Destination URL is the page you will jump to if the ad is clicked. This can be different from your homepage. It is a good idea to set up a dedicated landing page for this URL. The only requirement Google has is that this Destination URL should be in the same "domain" as the Display URL (so you can't have one for "MyCompany.com" if the Display URL is "YourCompany.com")

 

Linking keywords to your Ad

After defining the text for your advertising, you will notice a paragraph asking for your keywords. Your ad will be displayed when people enter the keywords you list here. Only use here keyword strictly related to your ad (you don't want to pay per click for non related stuff)

 

Billing data

Google will start insisting that you pay... But as long as you don’t want to activate your ads, no payment is necessary. So that’s just what we will do for this training exercise. But if it’s for real, you will have to start with a prepaid model (just like a prepaid phone card):

 

Prepaid

  • to a Google bank account.
  • Once the prepaid amount consumed, advertising stops immediately
  • You can pay by credit card, bank transfer,...


Postpaid

  • Prerequisite: “good payment history” (>=1500 Euro/month spending @ Google) to switch from prepaid to postpaid
  • Credit-card, incasso (incasso proof required)

 

(you skip this billing aspect as activity...)