It is important to understand the structure of your Google Adwords account before creating particular Google Adwords campaigns. Namely there are three levels:

• Your account
• Ad campaigns
• Ad groups

The first one, Your Account – there you have set your email address, password and billing information. Within each Campaign, there are particular settings common for all its Ad Groups, such as the daily budget, geographic and language targeting, distribution preferences and end dates. On the third level you create ad variations and keyword groups which are stated just for that Ad Group.

We recommend that you structure your ad groups based on the individual products you offer.

First enter your keywords list that you have created earlier. Notice that with Google Adwords, you have the possibility to format your keywords with the four types of keyword matching options:

Broad matching: for example => your. Your ad appears each time users search on these keywords, whatever the order or the other search terms.

Phrase matching: for example => “your”. Your ad appears if the keywords are all present in the right order, regardless of other search terms.

Exact matching: for example => [your]. Your ad only appears if the keywords are all present in the right order and no other terms are searched for.

Negative matching: for example => -jobs (use the “minus” character). Your ad for “your” only appears if the word “jobs“ does not appear in the search query together with “your”.

By using these matching options in your Google Adwords campaigns, you should be able to produce well-targeted results.

There are three critical situations you might come across when you track your Google Adwords campaigns regularly – and here we also provide solutions to the possible issues:

1. Problem: You are getting low/no impressions.

Solution:

a/ Check in “My Account” whether your billing options are set up correctly. Google will notify you of any issues, anyway.

b/ Check your minimum bid and daily budget settings and if you want to have your ads shown more often, make sure the budget per day you have set is enough to cover the cost of all clicks you are getting.

c/ If a/ and b/ are not the issue, you probably want to expand your keyword list to make sure it consists of keywords that are being searched a lot. Google Keyword Tool will help you do this – and you will find it in your Campaign Management in the section called “Tools”.

2. Problem: You are getting lots of impressions but low/no clicks.

Solution:

a/ Modify your ads, make sure they follow the structure as given above and check they include your main keywords.

b/ Make sure that your keywords are not too general, so that they are being searched for quite often, but not so often in relation to your offering.

3. Problem: You are getting lots of clicks but low/no conversions.

Solution:

a/ Check that your conversion tracking code is in place – when you go to your Thank You page and view source, you should see it there.

b/ Optimise your landing page better – as described above – make sure that within the first fold of the screen you can see a clear call to action, benefits and that everything is as simple and clear as it gets.

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they might get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalisation and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

With Google Adwords, you can also create your personalised reports in only a few minutes. Click on the tab “Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign or the whole account.

In order to save money, you can delete keywords from your list which do not convert into sales. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targeting them.

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After a few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords. Your ad should include these keywords. In the same way, if you detect any under performing keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google also has a built-in “conversion tracking” tool that’s linked to AdWords.  You put their code in the “success” page on your website and along with your CTR statistics, Google will then show you the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report, or contact you, or take any action you set as a conversion.

This is the crucial point of tracking your Google Adwords performance. Since conversions are what you are aiming for, you should always check that their number and value is growing from week to week.

Creating your first Google Adwords ad. Its role is to generate traffic on your website; therefore it must attract customers’ attention. You have to motivate people to click on it. You must be concise, accurate and clear for you have restricted space. Be careful, characters include spaces as well. Here is the structure of ads in Google Adwords:

Headline (max.25 characters)

Description line 1 (max. 35 characters)

Description line 2 (max. 35 characters)

Display URL (max. 35 characters)

Destination URL (max. 1024 characters)

This way of creating ads is recommended by most Google Adwords experts:

• Always include your exact keywords in the title of your ad. If searchers see the keywords they entered in the title of the ad, they will likely click on it.
• The first description line should contain your most important benefits to grab customers’ attention and to force them to take action.
• The second line should list features – what exactly people get after clicking on the ad. Moreover, I suggest you put a call to action to this line.
• The display URL can be used as well – after your domain address you can put anything.
• Your home page may not necessarily be the best one for all your ads so your URL destination address should mirror the content and purpose of your ad.

Before starting to write your ad and your description, just have a look on these useful tips:

• Get inside the customer’s head. What are your customers looking for? What do they expect?
• As you have limited text space, avoid terms like “a”, “the”, “of”, “at”…
• Use words like “new”, “free”, “limited offer”, “discount” to attract clickers.
• Avoid superlatives like “the best product…”, “the most wonderful …” or “the top of…” It is too basic and not pertinent.

It is a good idea to run two ads against one another in a campaign. After you get at least 20 clicks, delete the one with the lower CTR and write a new one to replace it. Google will automatically alternate your ads according to their CTR.

To create a new ad, just click the link “Create Ad Variation”. Enter your new ad, and then click “Save new ad”. Google will alternate your different ads throughout the day.

Repeat the keyword in both the ad title and ad description to improve your chances for a click.

Once you’ve setup your keywords and your first ad in Adwords, next step is to decide on your daily budget. Choose the budget which fits to your resources.

Place your bid as well. Your bid price is your maximum bid price, which means you will not necessarily pay that all the time. You will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you.

Google will suggest a bid amount; however, it is not compulsory to follow their suggestion. Just place the bid that you can afford to pay per click and which will get your ad listed within the first four positions in Sponsored search results. To find the most relevant bid, use the traffic estimator by clicking “Estimate Search Traffic” – it will give you some idea on the amount of clicks you can expect per day, the position of your ads among the others and how much you will be spending.

I would suggest you place higher bids when setting up your Google Adwords account. That will help you generate traffic on your website rapidly and therefore to figure out which ads work well and which ones don’t.