Adwords Campaigns

Perhaps the most important aspect of Adwords Advertising is Adwords campaigns. Perfect Adwords campaigns bring in a lot of traffic to your site.

To create a new Adwords campaign, first you find a product/service to promote. If you already have a product or a service, check the demand by performing extensive keyword research. Now start researching the keywords that has viable traffic. The easiest way to find out those keywords is to check the keywords your competitor is using to rank for. Ideally go for the biggest competitor in your niche and see what he/she is doing to bring traffic to his/her site.  You can use Google Adwords Suggestion Tool, Overture Suggestion Tool, Wordtracker to perform keyword research. Alternatively you can use desktop software like keyword elite to perform extensive keyword research. After doing the keyword research, consider the following steps to create an Adwords campaign:

1. 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.

2. 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 AdWord 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.

3. Write your ad copy - look at the ads people are already using on Google to give you an idea of 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.

4. 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.

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

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.