You should already have decided on your target location, your keywords, your ad text, and your budget before you begin to actually set up your Adwords campaign.
There are often special offers available for you to try out Adwords using Free advertising credits.
If you don’t have a Google account of any kind, you first must create a Gmail account. Your username and password for that account is then the same, and is used for all Google products.
We do not recommend using a personal account for these purposes, but a dedicated business account. Setting up a Gmail account is Free.
Once you set up your Gmail account, you create an Adwords account using the credentials for your Gmail.
You can set up your account as an automatic payment account using a credit card. You are billed as clicks are accumulated and your card is automatically charged either once a month, or when you reach a fixed billing limit. For most small businesses it ends up being monthly. A manual prepay account is also an option.
You then need to determine the geographic area for you offer. Unless you are selling nationwide, you should limit the area where your ads appear to the areas a majority of your potential or target customers reside.
Paying for clicks from potential customers that are not in your target geographic area is not very productive and does not yield a good ROI. We suggest getting a map or printing one out and highlighting where you believe your potential customers are located. Possibly using multiple colors to designate the highest to lowest potential as customers.
There are multiple ways within Adword to designate your target areas. Choosing the best methods can make or break your ROI for a campaign.
Once you have set up the geographic area, you need to set up your keywords. Those are the words you actually bid on. You should choose words or phrases that you believe your potential customers would type in their search box to find the goods or service you offer.
This is the most critical part of setting up your campaign, choosing the proper keywords. You should spend a significant amount of time thinking about the right keywords before you actually set up your Adwords Campaign.
Once you have chosen your area and your keywords, you need to think about your actual ads. They are what your potential customer will see if they type in a matching search word or phase. An ad contains a Headline about a dozen characters long. It contains two description lines each about 35 characters long.
The words in the Ad should be as relevant as possible to the keywords you have linked to the ad. The higher the relevance, the less you will pay for the click. You are rewarded for relevance.
The ad can also contain a link(s) to your website, or a icon that the reader can click on to see your phone number. Or on some smart phones, a click to call button that actually dials your phone number. Remember you are charged only for any clicks, not how many times your ad is viewed.
Again, if you have a link to a webpage, you are rewarded for relevance of the words and phrases used in your ad to the words and phases used on the web page you link to. You are also rewarded for having a higher percentage of those who actually click on your ad compared to how many times your ad is shown. The more clicks your ad accumulates, the lower your cost per click may go.
There are also numerous free extensions to your ad based on your business listing in Google Places, and a Google+ page ( a Facebook competitor). Both the Google+ page and Google Places listings are Free, so don’t forget about creating them later.
You also have to set up a budget, deciding on the bid for each keyword and any overall limits such as setting a daily or monthly maximum budget expenditure limit so your ads stop being shown when you reach that limit. This helps limit your potential overspending.
There are numerous enhancements available beyond the basic features, but this would set up your basic campaign.
When you finish setting up your Adword campaign , if you have a website and have not already set it up, you should also set up the Google Analytics tool on your website. By adding a few lines of code to each page of your website, you can get detailed reports on all visitors to your website, not just visitors that are directed there by paid search. This tool is FREE and extremely valuable for finding out about who and when someone visits your website.
Once you have the campaign set up, you should regularly monitor it to see its results, your billing, and to tweak your keyword bids, your ads, your billing limits, and your location settings to create the best possible ROI.
After a few months you can decide if the cost is worth the results, and whether or not to continue the campaign.
If it all seems too complicated and time consuming, Partners In Profit will set up your ad campaign for you. We can also regularly monitor it and tweak it once it is set up, and administer it within your desired guidelines using your feedback, if you choose.