Creating Your First Campaign

Once you are ready to create your first campaign, proceed by clicking on — you guessed it — Create your first campaign . Campaign

Ad campaign settings step.

Campaign Settings

Before you go on to the next step you’ll need to take care of a few

things.

1. Be as descriptive as possible for your campaign name. You could, for example, use your main keyword topic as the name of your campaign. If you advertise in multiple countries, you could also include the country code in the campaign name, such as AU, SG, US or UK.

Under Location, Languages and Demographics:

2. Select the targeted country or countries by clicking Select one or more other locations. Next, select your chosen languages for the campaign.

3. Networks, devices, and extensions. It’s important to choose the Network carefully because you don’t want to mix Content Network and Search Network. As described earlier, the Content Network displays ads on Google’s partner websites. The Search Network displays them in the Google search results pages. Uncheck the Content Network option .

Specifying your network.

If you choose Devices, make sure to test out your actual website on an iPhone or another smartphone before opting to display ads in mobile browsers.

4. Bidding and budget. Even if this is the first time you’ve used AdWords, choose manual bidding for clicks to give yourself a greater level of control over the campaign. Knowing your cost per click ahead of time will

allow you to determine whether or not your campaign is

Setting your budget.

potentially profitably, given the price point of your product or service. Allowing AdWords to automatically bid to maximize your clicks can lower your return on investment. To work out your daily budget, take the amount you are willing to spend per month and divide it by 30. 

If you are not sure how much your daily budget should be, put in a low figure. Be safe in the knowledge that you can revise it upwards later. 

Under Position preference, delivery method (advanced), don’t change anything for now. It’s not recommended to alter these settings until you are extremely familiar with how Google AdWords works. 

Under Advanced Settings:

5. Start date/End date: It’s very important to set an end date because if you don’t your ads will run indefinitely — or until you max out your credit card!

6. Ad scheduling: leave it set to Show ads all days and hours.

7. Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping. Leave these settings at default. 

Click Save and continue, then click Create ad and keywords.

Setting your ad scheduling options.

Ad Copy

Though we have the ability to create image ads, let’s stick to text for now. Each text ad has four available lines:

1. Headline: maximum of 25 characters including spaces.

2. Description line 1: maximum of 35 characters including spaces.

3. Description line 2: maximum of 35 characters including spaces.

4. Display URL: maximum of 35 characters. Destination URL specifies the page you want people to be taken to when they click on your ad.

Though there are plenty of different ways to create a good text ad, common sense suggests that the ad should:

1. Be specific and relevant to search queries and the content of your landing page. For example, if someone searches for “free flash templates” they are unlikely to click an ad for “$49 Flash Components”.

2. Clearly and concisely explain unique selling points. What makes your product, service or website different from all its competitors? Maybe it’s your super-fast delivery, high quality, rock-bottom prices, or your 100% money-back guarantee?

3. Be led by your current promotions (if you have any). For example, if you’re running a sale, you should mention you’re giving a 10% discount.

4. Be time sensitive, meaning the searcher will miss an opportunity if they don’t click.

5. Represent your brand accurately. The style and tone of your copy should reflect how the customer should experience your product or service. If your brand is serious and authoritative,don’t load your ad copy with smiley faces and exclamation points.

6. Comply with Google’s guidelines. In most cases you’ll satisfy this requirement without even trying, but if you’re unsure, make sure to read the guidelines for what is acceptable to advertise.

In addition, your ad copy should serve as a filter for traffic. You pay for every click, so you need to get a return on your investment for as many clicks as possible. Don’t use cheap tricks to attract people to click, only for them to find your site, service or product isn’t relevant to them, or not what you advertised. You’ll only end up paying for clicks that don’t lead to purchases.

Next, let’s look at some real-life ad copy. Go to the Google home page and type in “local florist”. You can imagine that someone would use that search phrase when looking for a service to help them find florists in their area. At the time of writing this, the following ads appear on search results page for http://google.com.au .

Sample search results for “local florist”.

You can see that results are displayed more prominently at the top of the search results, and less prominently to their right. The ads at the top have parts of their title in bold, which is very good

for catching your eye. They display their unique selling points clearly in each ad’s descriptive text: huge range, same day delivery, etc. On the right, we see another ad for the same keyword .Unfortunately, this ad isn’t relevant to someone in Australia searching for “local florist”. The lower relevance of the ad copy would result in a lower Quality Score (see the “Understanding Quality Score” section later in this chapter), which might explain why the ad is stuck in the right-hand sidebar, rather than being displayed with the most relevant advertisers at the top of search results.

Making Your Ad Bold

Words in your ad will appear in bold when they match or closely resemble the user’s search query. We searched for “local florist” and the headline for one of the ads was “Find Local Florist”. It displayed it as “Find Local Florist” because the words in bold were also in our search query.

For the same search query, one of the ad headlines was “UK Florists”. Though we searched for florists singular, the plural version of most words will also appear in bold.

If we accidentally searched for “shangrri la” and the display URL for one of the ads was “www.shangri-la.com”, this would partially display in bold. Common abbreviations and misspellings of search

terms will also often appear in bold.

A few things to note:

1. Taking advantage of the ad bolding feature is the only way for your ad text to appear in bold. You can’t manually create bold, italicized, underlined, or any other kind of formatted

ad text.

2. Any part of your ad has the potential to appear in bold, including the title, body, and display URL.

Your ad copy can strongly affect how likely people are to clickthrough to your landing page. Google has provided this helpful table of suggestions for ad copy testing, and comparisons you can make to review your ad.