What Are The Rules For Creating A Google AdWords Campaign?

There are no specific rules for creating an AdWords campaign and the process can be approached in different ways. However, there are basic tasks that anyone looking to setup an effective campaign should follow.

 

AdWords has a number of campaigns types. Whether you have a website, landing page, App or video that you’d like to promote, this is all possible in AdWords.

 

For each there’s a process to follow in setting up the campaign. Following them will help you create targeted Ads that convert at a high rate.

 

Search Ads are the primary campaign type. You see Search Ads when you do a search on Google or one of the Search partner sites. With these you use keywords related to your products or services to show ads to your target customers.

 

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Like other campaign types, a Search campaign should always begin with research. First research your target customers to understand what their needs and wants are and then research the keywords that they use to search for your products or services.

 

Here are some key steps to follow when setting up your search campaign types:

 

Keyword Research
There’re a number of ways to conduct keyword research. The first and most obvious is to use the Keyword Planner tool in Google AdWords. This free tool will help you discover the keywords that people are using to search for your products or services.

 

Next download your keyword list in Excel and group them into tightly themed groups. This will help to achieve good Click Through Rates (CTR) and Quality Scores. You should start with phrase and exact match keywords only. And use this tool to find negative keywords too.

 

Another way to find keywords is to use a keyword spy tool to look into your competitors keywords. This will help to find keywords that you may not have thought about. One such effective tool is Spyfu. It’s not free, but can be insightful and reveal your competitors ads, keywords and positions.

 

Next, you should create your ads and align them closely to your ads. Make sure each keyword grouping has between 3-5 ads. This is good for testing purposes and to target customers effectively.

 

Budget Allocation
Your keyword research will give you a good indication of what budget amount to allocate to your campaign.

 

And you can use a forecasting tool in the Keyword Planner to get an idea of what your average bids will be and what budget to set.

 

It’s important to set the right budget to help you quickly identify the best ads and keywords. A low budget will take longer to identify opportunities. And you’re unlikely to appear for the best searches if your budget is low and you are ranking low.

 

Campaign Setup
Next you should create the campaign. You’re not yet ready to upload your ads and keywords. That will come a little later. At this stage you’re focusing on creating the campaign in AdWords only and adding the primary settings.

 

Some of the important settings you’ll add at this stage are:

 

⁃ Campaign Name
⁃ Campaign Type (A Search campaign)
⁃ Location targeting
⁃ Budget
⁃ Bid Strategy
⁃ Ad scheduling (when ads will run)
⁃ And others

 

Having setup your campaign, you should now pause it. This is to prevent ads from running as you create or upload your ad groups. It’s best to pause it and then when all Ad groups are ready and you’ve reviewed them and are happy, then you can activate them.

 

This may also be important if you need to get approval from a client or a manager in your organisation before the Ads are activated.

 

Ad Extensions Setup
Next, setup your most relevant ad extensions. This includes primary ones such as sitelinks, callouts, call and location extensions. Also include structured snippets, location extensions and price extensions were applicable. They make your ads standout in the search results.

 

Sitelinks for example point to other important pages on your website. You can include a description too besides just the headline. However, the description only appears when your Ad is in the number one position.

 

 

Ad extensions can be added at the account, campaign and ad group level. Account level is usually the best because you can quickly assign them to all applicable Ad campaigns.

 

Ad Group Setup
Now, go back to your spreadsheet where you’ve mapped out your ads and keywords into different ad groups. Using the free AdWords editor tool, you can quickly upload these into your AdWords account.

 

Next, check your Adwords campaign to see if all is as it should be. Now your campaign is ready to go live, but there’s one final step.

 

Negative Keywords
Add the negative keywords that you found during your keyword research. You can add them at the campaign level or account level. However, as this is a single campaign, it’s ok to add them at the campaign level.

 

 

These help to block any searches that aren’t relevant. And they’ll save your budget for more effective searches.

 

Launch Campaign
Finally, it’s time to go live with your campaign. Click the enable option and your ads will be available on Google within a few hours.

 

Find out how and AdWords Expert can help you create an effective AdWords campaign.