Previous posts showed you how to format an Adwords ad, using keyword research in Google Adwords, and basic Google Adwords strategy. Today, I’ll talk about actually creating the ad in the Google Adwords system, which isn’t all that intuitive.
To help, here’s a YouTube video from Google to help you get started with Adwords.
Budgeting
Now, this may seem a little backward to you, but it’s really the best starting place. You need to answer these questions before you even start creating your first ad:
1. What do you hope to achieve with a Google Adwords campaign?
- Increase sales?
- Drive traffic to your website?
- Gain more followers/ fans to your social media?
Remember, goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely). These goals are really the starting point for creating an ad. Be realistic and calculate a budget based on expected results to match your goals.
2. How much can you afford to spend on Google Adwords?
Because it uses a bid process, it’s not easy to spend a specific amount on your campaign and it’s very easy to go over your budget. You choose keywords and establish maximum bids for those keywords then Google serves up your ad and charges you every time someone clicks on your ad. It’s very easy to rack up $1000′s in charges in a short period of time and setting a maximum per day is not a hard stop. So, monitor your ad throughout the day to see how it’s performing and how much you’re being charged. You can then pause your campaign when it reaches the budget you’ve set.
Create Your Ad
First, you create ad groups for ads related to similar keywords. In the case of Zappos we discussed earlier, they might have 1 ad group for women’s shoes or they might break it down even farther to an ad group just for sandals. The idea of grouping is based on the notion that you want specific keywords based on your keyword analysis which we discussed in an earlier post.
Be sure to read Google’s editorial guidelines because Google is very unforgiving of any breach of their policies. Each ad is approved, by robots, before it appears. Using certain terms, may trigger and human review. Google will disqualify your ads and the message informing you is pretty cryptic, making it hard to figure out what you’ve done wrong or fix the problem. Be aware, FREE is a word likely to get you in trouble if the landing page (URL you’re sending folks to) doesn’t prominently deliver on the promise of FREE.
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