Setting Up a Google AdWords (Pay Per Click) Campaign for your Website

You can sign up with Google AdWords to run a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign around chosen keywords. This can increase the number of visitors to your site. You only pay for the actual clicks.

The basic process is:

Understand how to check the profit for a PPC campaign
Do keyword research
Setup your AdWords account
Setup your AdWords campaign(s)
Link your Ads to Landing Pages
Setup conversion tracking for successful sales
Monitor

Overview

It is relatively easy to setup an AdWords campaign. Running an effective campaign is a bit harder.

Keep in mind OM4 offers Premium Services to setup and run AdWords campaigns for you. And you can also hire an external service provider to do the same.

But that said, it is possible to learn how to setup and run AdWords yourself. This article provides some tips and resources for you.

Keyword Research

Not all keywords are equal. Some will never be searched and will therefore never deliver visitors. Others are searched all the time, and therefore very competitive (and expensive). Before you start your AdWords campaign, do keyword research to identify the important keywords for your business.

Popularity is one consideration. But you should also consider buying intent. Do the search terms suggest someone is searching to buy a product or service? If so, they could be better search terms than those that represent a search for information.

Use these free tools from Google:

Sign Up

Signing up with Google AdWords is free. Once you have set up your first campaign, Google will ask for your credit card details to activate your ads. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Creating Campaigns

Within your AdWords account, you work with:

Campaigns. Use campaigns to manage related Ad Groups. You use a campaign to determine which country (or countries) your ads will run in. Until you understand the Content Network, go and turn it off at the Campaign level (Google will opt you in automatically, and try to persuade you not to opt out). Use Campaign Summary, Edit Campaign Settings to do this.
Ad Groups. Use Ad Groups to manage related sets of Ads. Each Ad Group has one more ads, and one more keywords. In general, keep your Ad Groups pretty tight. One buying idea, one ad group.
Ads. Write at least two ads for each ad group. Make sure your headline is closely related to the keywords – and preferably use the keyword in the headline. You will be able to compare the click through rates of each ad, and write new ads to try and improve on the best performing ones. Each Ad needs to nominate a landing page within your site (see below).
Keywords. Add keywords to your ad groups. Use square brackets for exact match and double quotes for phrase match keywords. For example, [shiny buttons] will match searches on shiny buttons only, while “shiny buttons” will match searches on red shiny buttons or shiny buttons red.
Daily Budget. Set a daily budget to cap your AdWords spending. This is important to make sure you do not spend more than you intend.
Bids. Set a default bid for each Ad Group, and where required set individual bids for each keyword. Review the Traffic Estimator to see what position your ad is likely to achieve for a specified bid.

While the concepts are relatively easy to understand, learning how to apply them effectively can take time. You will find many self-education resources on how to use Google Ad Words availalbe on the web. If you intend to setup and operate your own campaigns, it will be worth investing some time in learning more about how it all works.

Landing Pages

For each Ad, assign a Landing Page within your website. To increase the effectiveness of your campains, create landing pages that match the ads you are using.

A Landing Page can be any page in your site. A good Landing Page will catch your visitor’s Attention, engage their Interest and build Desire, and offer a clear call to Action. Your call to action could be an email contact form, or a offer a product or service for sale.

Conversion Tracking

To track the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns, you should identify the page that a visitor goes to after a successful conversion.

Use your AdWords account to set up Conversion Tracking and collect your conversion code. Paste the conversion code into your conversion page.

In the case of a PayPal payment for example, your conversion page would be the Payment Confirmed page that the visitor is returned to after a payment.

In the case of an enquiry based conversion, you can activate the Cforms plugin and then use the Dashboard, CformsII to create the enquiry form. Create a custom ‘Thank you for your enquiry’ (or similar) page using WordPress to use as your conversion page. Use the Core Form/Admin options for your Cform to set your conversion page as the ‘Alternative success page (redirect)’.

Note: if you are using a standard OM4 website, you may need to request special approval to save the conversion code, as by default our sites will strip out Javascript as a security measure. Just drop us a note in the forums indicating your site and that you want to use Google’s conversion tracking and we’ll activate your user for this purpose.

OM4 Premium Services

OM4 Premium Services are available to:

create a Google AdWords account for you
do keyword research
establish a Campaign and 3 Ad Groups, each with 2 ads and exact and phrase match keywords
link to the most appropriate landing page for each Ad Group
setup Google Conversion tracking

You will need to login and enter your credit card details to activate the campaign. Your credit card details are not accesible to OM4 at any stage.

Review the service offerings here: