B. Working with a Campaign on AdWords
 Mapping Out Your Campaign
The
first step in building a campaign on AdWords really doesn’t involve
AdWords at all — it requires only a pen and a piece of paper.
This is where you need to ask yourself a number of questions about the campaign you wish to run on AdWords:
- What market niche have you selected for your campaign?
- Which specific product or line of products within that selected niche will be marketed through this campaign?
- In which specific geographical region (city, state, region, nation, or worldwide) do you plan to run your campaign?
- Do you plan to run this campaign in English, or in a different language?
- Do you plan to distribute your campaign through search engines, content sites, or a combination of the two?
- Do you have a specific budget in mind for your campaign?
You
can organize your campaign around any one of these variables. But until
you have these variables in place, your campaign has nowhere to go.
Creating Your Campaign in AdWords
AdWords makes it easy for you to enter a new campaign. Here are the steps involved:
Access your AdWords account, which will take you to your account’s main page, as shown below.
Next, click on the Campaign Management tab, and click on the subtopic “Campaign Summary.”
Then, click on “New online campaign” on the right-hand side of the page.
When
you click on “New online campaign,” a drop-down window will appear that
gives you the option of either working with keywords or working with ad
placement.
Which of these options is better?
If you want your ad campaigns to be connected with particular themes or concepts that keywords represent — for instance, if you are selling an ebook about poker and you want your ad to appear wherever poker is being discussed — then you want to work with keywords.
If you want the ads in your campaign to appear at a particular place –
for example, you are selling a cooking ebook and you want your ad to
appear on food-related sites on the Google Content Network — then you want to work with placement.
Best
of all, if you want to work with keywords and then decide at a later
date that you want to work with placement instead, you can make that
switch. Or, you can add placements to your campaign and work with both.
You then undergo a five-step process:
#1 – Choose your selected language and location for your target audience (the default setting is English and the United States, respectively), as shown here:
#2 – Insert the text of your ad and the URL to your landing page in the fields provided. Google will automatically confirm the URL before taking you to the next step, as shown below:
#3 – Indicate the keywords with which the ad should run, as indicated below:
#4
- Set both your daily budget (how much you are willing to spend on this
ad each day), and the maximum amount you are willing to pay every time
a Google user clicks on your ad:
#5 – Review all your data and save it. In a short period of time, your ad is ready to be posted via AdWords.
For
subsequent campaigns that are keyword-based, you can copy and edit
settings from a previous campaign, thus trimming the number of setup
steps to one.
The Campaign Summary
Every time you sign in
to your AdWords account, the Campaign Summary subtopic within the
Campaign Management tab will appear. The Campaign Summary page includes
a table that provides important details about the campaigns under your
account, and all of these columns are customizable.
- Campaign Name – a list of your campaigns, with each name linking to a breakdown of the ad groups within the campaign and other statistics.
- Current Status
- indicates one of five possible designations for the status of each
campaign: Pending, Active, Paused, Ended, and Deleted. More on this in
the Campaign Status section.
- Current Budget -indicates the daily budget you have set up for each campaign.
- Clicks – tells you the number of clicks the ads in your campaign have received.
- Impr. – states the number of impressions your ad has received on Google or its network sites.
- CTR – gives you the click-through rate of each of your campaign ads.
- Avg. CPC – indicates the average cost that you accrue for clicks on your campaign ads.
- Avg. CPM – outlines your ad cost per 1,000 impressions.
- Cost – is the total cost that your campaign ads have accrued during a time frame of your choosing.
- Conv. Rate
- gives you the conversion rate for your campaign ads; that is, the
number of clicks that resulted in actual conversions for you.
- Cost/Conv.
- indicates the cost per conversion you received during your campaign;
this is attained by dividing the number in the Cost column by the total
number of conversions.
In addition, the Campaign Summary enables you to do the following with your campaigns.
- Search across your campaigns, ad groups, and ads for particular words or phrases.
- Create a new campaign via the link above the Campaign Summary table.
- Receive
alerts for important information regarding either AdWords in general
(such as new features) or your account in particular.
- Change the status and settings associated with an ad campaign.
Campaign Status Designations
As
mentioned in the previous section, you can give your campaign one of
five possible status designations. Here are the details for each status
designation:
- Pending – Your campaign is set up but not yet running
- Active – Your campaign is running normally
- Paused – Your campaign is temporarily suspended and not running (note that “Paused” is not the same as “Ended”)
- Ended – Your campaign has passed its end date and is no longer running
- Deleted – Your campaign has been deleted
The
Pending and Active settings are self-explanatory; Pending is before
your campaign goes live, while Active is your campaign’s current
operation.
While the other three designations imply different
status levels, possibly indicating the degree to which your campaign is
over, all three will prevent your campaign ads from running on Google.
Reactivating your campaign ads from any of these designations is
relatively simple:
- To reactivate ads from Paused status, go to the Campaign Summary table, check the box next to the name of the campaign, and click the Resume button.
- To reactivate ads from Ended status,
go to the Campaign Summary page, check the box next to the name of the
campaign, click “Edit Settings,” and adjust your campaign’s end date
next to the “Will run until” section.
- To reactivate ads from Deleted status, go to the Campaign Details page via clicking on the campaign name, and click on the “Undelete Campaign” link.
Daily Budget Settings
While
you can determine when and under what circumstances your ad can show on
Google, it takes a sufficient daily budget to maintain that freedom of
choice. If instead your daily budget has reached or is close to
reaching its max by noon, your ads generally won’t appear — period.
Your Campaign Summary page can give you an idea of how well your daily budget is meeting the performance of your ads:
- Go to the Campaign Summary page.
- Set the date range above the table to yesterday.
- Compare the Current Budget and Cost columns. If the latter exceeds the former, your ad has likely stopped running during the day, whether by your choice or not.
You
can also adjust your daily budget by going to Edit Campaign Settings
and clicking on “Recommended Budget.” The result is a budget estimate
from Google of what the cost would be to pay for all the clicks your
ads are expected to receive if they received full exposure during the
day.
Bear in mind that “Recommended Budget” is just that –
recommended. If the amount recommended is so high that you wake up in a
cold sweat at night if you commit to that level of spending, then don’t
do it.
Google never charges you more for a day’s worth of ad
clicks than what you designate your daily budget to be. However, Google
also will occasionally run your ad more often on heavier traffic days,
if Google determines that such exposure would help your ad succeed. Not
a bad deal! |
