Steps to Setting Up an Effective Google Adwords Campaign

Google Adwords Basic 5 Steps
To be honest, I don't understand even these basics but I wanted to keep these notes as they'll give me a place to start my research and I'll fill in as I get more detailed answers to the questions raised below.

1. Understand the economic fundamentals of your campaign

• What’s your conversion point? In other words, what is your goal? Are you trying to get someone to sign up for a newsletter, make an on-line purchase, pick up the phone ...? For instance with one of my businesses - an  Orange County babysitting service the conversion point would be when a visitor to our web page picks up the phone or sends us an email.
• How do you value that conversion? What is it worth to your business, and what can you afford to pay for it? That's a tough one for our babysitting service, since we don't know how many hours a parent will book a babysitter or if they'll be a repeat client. The lowest value would be $10, generally it would be $10/month and is often $40/month or more.
• Is your conversion tracking set up properly? Since we ask every new client how they found out about us I would say that serves as our conversion tracking? Maybe we need to be more detailed about it but at what point does maintaining spreadsheets become so time-consuming that it interferes with running your business?

2. Start Small, Repeat, and Expand
Pick a subset of the products you sell, the locations you can target, or the terms you can use within your campaign and start there. Repeat within that smaller subset, then start to apply your early findings to the creation of new parts of your campaign. Okay, big question - how do we determine the terms we can use within our campaign? Then how do we repeat within that subset, apply early findings ...? I'm lost at this point. Do we use the results from our Google keyword search tool findings that we used to help set up the posts on our blog? I'll answer these questions in another post.

3. Understand Campaign Settings
You don’t need to start splitting up all your groups into separate laptop/desktop and mobile campaigns but you do want to understand the levers available to you as you create campaigns from the start, or you might be setting up a messy campaign structure that will be hard to go back and alter later on.

4. Pay Attention to Campaign Basics
Start simple and focused, and become more refined over time. There are really five key areas where you want to be spending your time and optimization efforts early on:

• Search Query Mining - Pay close attention to placements and search queries and be aggressive with negatives.
• Account Structure - Keep your keywords tightly grouped within ad groups and understand the difference between search ad groups (really tightly relevant terms) and display ad groups (broader themes).
• Ad Creative - Write strong ads and test different types of variations.
• Landing Page Design - Create a strong landing page.
• Bid Management - Monitor your bids to be sure you’re spending your money in the right places.

Think About the Way Your Campaigns May Grow
With everything from campaign settings, as we mentioned above, to the structure of your ad groups to the way you’re creating display ads you want to try to think as much early on about how you might best scale your campaign later. If you’re starting small and focusing on a specific region, you might be best suited to start to think about a geographically driven account structure from the get-go. When you’re increasing budget and trying to target a wider variety of terms how will your account’s structure and your process need to change to help achieve scale?

By focusing on fundamentals and thinking proactively about how your campaign might best scale, you’ll be able to achieve success out of the gate with your campaign, and then when you make use of some of the more nuanced tools and settings and features within AdWords, you’ll be layering additional efficiency on top of an already profitable campaign, rather than trying to make small tweaks to a hopelessly flawed account.

About the Author: Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM, a boutique Boston SEO and PPC agency offering search marketing consulting services including pay-per-click account management, a comprehensive SEO audit, content marketing services, SEO reputation management and link building services for a variety of specific niches such as B2B SEO.

Article Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/30/google-adwords-basics