How to Create Your First Google Adwords Campaign

Have you seen those Free Advertising Credits ads Google has been running for their Adwords program? Seems like they’re everywhere these days. If you haven’t done an Adwords campaign before, those credits are a good way to start. But once you’ve claimed your credits, the Adwords system can seem a little intimidating.

Here’s a quick and simple guide to creating your first campaign.

1. Decide On Your Objective

What would you like to accomplish with your first campaign? Would you like to boost sales of a particular product? Increase newsletter sign-ups? Get more traffic to your blog? Pick just ONE goal for your campaign. Keep it focused. Keep this goal in mind when generating your keyword list and your Adwords ad text.

2. Select Your Keywords

This is one of the most important and critical-to-success parts of your Adwords campaign. A keyword or keyword phrase is what people type into the Google search box when they’re looking for something on Google. Since Google charges you per click, good keyword selection equals paying less for better quality traffic. Bad keyword selection can mean paying a lot for visitors who don’t convert (sign up/buy/etc.).

There are a couple ways you can do this, but we’re going to keep this simple with the following steps:

First – Brainstorm a list of keywords you think might be a good match for the campaign – go more specific than broad with these. Remember to keep these strictly in line with the goal you’ve selected for your campaign.

Bad keyword: recipes
Better keyword: vegetarian brunch recipes

Second – Use the Google Keyword Tool to help you see the competition for those phrases, the estimated monthly search traffic, and ideas for additional keywords (generated by Google – thanks, Google!). You can either enter your brainstormed phrases into the keyword box OR type your own URL (or a competitor’s – sneaky) into the URL box for some ideas.

Generally speaking, you’ll want to avoid broad matches and go with either exact or “phrase” matches for keywords. Broad matches for the search term grape (for example) could display your ad for all of the following searches: “grapes of wrath” “how to turn grapes into wine” “grapes nutrition information” “how to remove a grape stain,” etc.

Also, the higher the competition for the keyword, the more you’re going to have to pay to get your ad displayed in an optimal position – for your first campaign, stick to keyword phrases that Google reports as middle-low competition (as displayed by the green bar in the Keyword tool). You can use Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool once you have your keyword list to get estimated daily cost-per-click data based on your budget.

If your products/services are only relevant to a specific geographic area (only ship within the United States? only see clients in the Atlanta area?) – make sure to limit your campaign geographically as well. In the Google Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator, you can do this under ‘Advanced Options’ to help keep your campaign research relevant. Local Monthly Search data in these tools are not entirely local – local here means country-specific search data – not state or city. Though data just by state or city won’t be reflected here in your research, you can limit your actual campaign to just display to a more specific region (Google just can’t predict the specific search volume at that level).

Copy and paste or download the keywords you’d like to use for your campaign into a document to save them for your actual campaign setup – do the same with the text ads you write in the next step.

3. Write Your Text Ads

Keywords are important, but if your text ad doesn’t get anyone to click, your Adwords campaign will get you nowhere! Keep these things in mind when writing your text ads for your campaign:

First – Google your selected keywords and see what your competitors are writing for their ads. Do NOT copy them – make yourself different! Pick out what makes your product/newsletter/blog different. Satisfaction guarantee? 100% organic? Over 1,000 subscribers?

Second – Write in Initial Caps (first letter of every word is capitalized) – not ALL CAPS. Google blocks ads that contain ALL CAPS and could potentially kick you out of their program for repeated terms violations. Initial Caps is the standard.

Third – Keep it to the limit. Google has strict character limits for their headlines and ad text so you may have to get creative with some of your wording.

Generally speaking, Google text ads limit you to (including spaces):
Title – 25 characters
Ad Text – 70 characters
Display URL – 35 characters

Fourth – URL selection. Your display URL (the website address that appears in your ad) can be just your standard website address if you wish but your destination URL 9 times out of 10 should NOT be your homepage.

What’s your goal for your campaign? If it’s newsletter sign-ups, your ad should link to a sign-up page. If it’s to increase sales of a specific product, your ad should be taking me to that specific product page.

Don’t rely on your visitors to find the page you want them to find – drop them on to it. This page is called your landing page – the more relevant your landing page is to your Google Adwords ad, the higher quality score you’ll get from Google (this can help place your ad higher than your less relevant competitors).

4. Create Your Campaign

Sign in with your Google account at https://adwords.google.com to create your campaign based on the prep you’ve done in steps 1-3. This is easiest when you use the account you used to sign up for Google Analytics. Haven’t set up Google Analytics for your website yet? Check out my simple how-to guide.

After signing in, Google will ask you to set your PERMANENT time zone and currency preferences. You will not be able to change this for this Google account in the future, so pay attention to this step.

From here, Google walks you through the campaign setup process. Use the research and prep you’ve done in steps 1-3 to fill out your carefully chosen keywords and ad text. For your first campaign, you can keep Google’s defaults for most options so don’t sweat it (just pay attention to location limiting options if your customers aren’t global).

Your campaign will not begin until you’ve set up your billing information – even if you’re using a free Adwords advertising credit code, Google wants your billing information in case your costs-per-click go beyond your credit.

5. Connect Your Campaign with Analytics

Have you set up Google Analytics for your website yet? If not, check out my simple how-to guide for setting up Google Analytics for your website.

Connecting your Analytics account with your Adwords will allow you to see where your Adwords visitors are going once they click on your ad. Are they immediately leaving your website? Do they click around? Are they buying/signing up/staying on your blog? This information will enable you to make intelligent and informed adjustments to your campaign.

Click on the tools and Analysis menu and select Google Analytics – Google walks you through this simple step. Just make sure your Adwords account has admin access to your Analytics account.

6. Set Spending Limits & Monitor Your Campaign

Google will allow you to set spending limits on your campaign during your setup – with a daily budget and/or setting maximum cost per click. If your budget is really strict, be conservative with the daily budget as Google averages this out over a longer period (your average daily budget limit should be met over a month but on an individual day your daily spend could be higher). Budgets can be altered at any time under campaign settings.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell Google to stop your campaign after X dollars are spent. You’ll have to monitor it yourself fairly regularly (or pay someone else to) if you’re concerned about not going above a certain limit. You can attempt to automate this by computing an end date for your campaign based on your total campaign budget/daily budget and set a campaign end date in Adwords but this won’t be perfect or guaranteed to keep you exactly under your budget.

However, regular monitoring is good for your campaign because it can allow you to incorporate more keywords (Google often offers suggestions), drop keywords or ads that aren’t converting or make other improvements to your campaign.

7. All Set!

You can do a lot more with Adwords with more complicated campaign structure and more advanced keyword research, but following these steps will give you a good start working with your first Adwords campaign for website traffic.

Have any questions or tips of your own for setting up a first Adwords campaign? Let us know in the comments!

Would you like some more customized help with your first campaign? Shoot me an email or get in touch. I offer $100 in free advertising credits to clients creating their first Google Adwords campaign.

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