Set up an Adwords Account & Campaign in 15 minutes or Less

Tue, Nov 3, 2009

Strategy, Traffic

   Written by: Susan Tatum

We’re talking about pay per click advertising for software and technology marketers. You know you need to do it and the place to start is Google – even if for no other reason than Google controls around 77% of the search market.
Google makes it beyond easy to set up and manage an Adwords account. The interface is intuitive and the learning center has videos on just about any question you could ask.
But, for those of you who don’t have time to watch a bunch of videos, here’s the easy way to do it:
1.Go to http://adwords.google.com and click on Start Now.
2.Select Standard Edition and click Continue.
3.If you already have a Google account, select I have an email address and password I already use with Google services like AdSense, Gmail, Orkut, or iGoogle. You’ll be given the option to use your existing account or create a new one just for Adwords. If you don’t have an account, select I do not use these other services.
4.Fill in your email address, password and the verification characters and click on Create Account. Or type in your existing user name and password and click on Continue.
5.Select the currency you’d like to pay in and click Continue.
6.You’ll get an email with a verification link. Click on that link and you’re ready to start creating your campaign – and of course to hand over your credit card info.
The following steps are a guide for the mechanics of setting up your campaign. The finer points of generating keyword phrases and keyword groups, writing and testing your ads, setting your budget and developing landing pages are covered elsewhere.
1.Click on Create Your First Campaign.
2.Select the language your customers speak. You can choose multiple languages but I’m going with English for this example.
3.Under Target Customers by Location you choose where you want your ads to run. Google will use the IP address and some other magic to show your ad only to searchers in that physical location.
4.Click on Continue and now you’re ready to create your first ad.
5.Type in your headline, two lines of body copy, your display URL (this is the address that will show on the ad) and the destination URL (this is the actual address of the webpage where the searcher will be sent). Google restricts the number of characters you can have in each line and the maximum number is clearly indicated.
6.Click on Continue and immediately create a 2nd ad. Change the headline, the body copy or the display URL. You always want to be testing 2 ads against each other.
7.This is also the page where you’ll enter your keywords. Just put a few keywords in the box under Choose Keywords. You can modify these keywords later – before you start the campaign running.
8.Click Continue and enter your daily budget. You can get this number by deciding how much you want to spend monthly and dividing by 30. So, if you want to spend $500 a month, you’ll enter $16 into the daily budget field.
9.For Maximum Cost Per Click start with $0.50 – we’ll adjust that later.
10.Click on continue. If you haven’t set up your billing info yet, you’ll be given another opportunity to do it now.
11.On the next page, make sure that your campaign is NOT active. If Google has automatically activated it, just click on Pause Campaign. You have some tweaking to do before you start running your ads.
Now you have an Adwords account and the beginnings of your first campaign. Next we’ll look more closely at creating those ads.
Technorati Tags: Adwords, Google, pay per click, technology marketing, software marketing

This article was first published April 2, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

We’re talking about pay per click advertising for software and technology marketers. You know you need to do it and the place to start is Google – even if for no other reason than Google controls around 77% of the search market.

Google makes it beyond easy to set up and manage an Adwords account. The interface is intuitive and the learning center has videos on just about any question you could ask.

But, for those of you who don’t have time to watch a bunch of videos, here’s the easy way to do it:

1. Go to http://adwords.google.com and click on Start Now.

2. Select Standard Edition and click Continue.

3. If you already have a Google account, select I have an email address and password I already use with Google services like AdSense, Gmail, Orkut, or iGoogle. You’ll be given the option to use your existing account or create a new one just for Adwords. If you don’t have an account, select I do not use these other services.

4. Fill in your email address, password and the verification characters and click on Create Account. Or type in your existing user name and password and click on Continue.

5. Select the currency you’d like to pay in and click Continue.

6. You’ll get an email with a verification link. Click on that link and you’re ready to start creating your campaign – and of course to hand over your credit card info.

The following steps are a guide for the mechanics of setting up your campaign. The finer points of generating keyword phrases and keyword groups, writing and testing your ads, setting your budget and developing landing pages are covered elsewhere.

1. Click on Create Your First Campaign.

2. Select the language your customers speak. You can choose multiple languages but I’m going with English for this example.

3. Under Target Customers by Location you choose where you want your ads to run. Google will use the IP address and some other magic to show your ad only to searchers in that physical location.

4. Click on Continue and now you’re ready to create your first ad.

5. Type in your headline, two lines of body copy, your display URL (this is the address that will show on the ad) and the destination URL (this is the actual address of the webpage where the searcher will be sent). Google restricts the number of characters you can have in each line and the maximum number is clearly indicated.

6. Click on Continue and immediately create a 2nd ad. Change the headline, the body copy or the display URL. You always want to be testing 2 ads against each other.

7. This is also the page where you’ll enter your keywords. Just put a few keywords in the box under Choose Keywords. You can modify these keywords later – before you start the campaign running.

8. Click Continue and enter your daily budget. You can get this number by deciding how much you want to spend monthly and dividing by 30. So, if you want to spend $500 a month, you’ll enter $16 into the daily budget field.

9. For Maximum Cost Per Click start with $0.50 – we’ll adjust that later.

10. Click on continue. If you haven’t set up your billing info yet, you’ll be given another opportunity to do it now.

11. On the next page, make sure that your campaign is NOT active. If Google has automatically activated it, just click on Pause Campaign. You have some tweaking to do before you start running your ads.

    Now you have an Adwords account and the beginnings of your first campaign. Next we’ll look more closely at creating those ads.

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