I have seen many small companies try and fail at successfully running a Google adwords campaign. A lot of these companies complain that Adwords is only designed for large companies with fat wallets and enormous budgets. What if I told you that I know someone that made a ton of money off of Adwords and this person only started out with a total of $4,000, now this person is a multi millionaire, would you think I was lying? Well I’m not. There are plenty of people who made a ton of money off of Adwords.

Unfortunately not everyone knows how to do this and what’s even worse is that even more people have never studied the delicate balances of Adwords before plunking down a crap load of money on it.

Well we will change that today, won’t we? I am going to give you some of the important basics of running a successful Google Adwords campaign and I am gonna also point you to some other resources that will be tremendously helpful to help you continue and maintain your campaign.

Before we start this tutorial I want to make sure everyone has all of the necessary configurations in order to run a successful campaign. Here are the precursors that you must have in order to follow along with this tutorial:

1) Must have Google analytics installed. If you do not have analytics installed then here is a tutorial on how to set analytics up. How To Set Up Google Analytics.

2) You must have Google analytics e-commerce tracking installed on your website. This is a very essential step when tracking how much money you made off of a particular keyword or set of keywords. If you do not have e-commerce tracking installed it is going to be very tough to track your keyword revenue. I have found a couple websites that have tutorials on how to set this feature up. Here they are.

Analytics Market

Google Support

While I know this can be very hard for some newcomers to set up. Graphic SEO does offer a service to set up e-commerce tracking for you (shameless sales pitch ). For more information on this service please contact us at 866-949-5152 or through our contact page at http://www.graphicseo.com/contact-us/ .

The very first thing you must do is find the Hot Words in your industry. The best way to do this is to find out what your competition is bidding on. An extremely important tool that I use while checking the competition out is SEMRush. The great thing about SEMRush is that they will provide a list of EVERY keyword that your competition is bidding on in Adwords and give you a very good estimate on how much they are paying per click. SEMRush takes a lot of the guessing out of the keywords that you should be bidding on. Here is a sample report of what you get with SEMRush. SEMRush provides a free service in order to get your feet wet but my recommendation would be after tinkering around with it for a bit sign up for an actual paid, PRO+ Adwords ($49.95 per month) is the account that we use with them and believe me, it has saved us a ton of money. Remember don’t be cheap, if you are gonna be spending money with Adwords your gonna be dropping money anyway, you might as well have the right tools in order to better optimize your campaign.

After discovering which keywords you will be starting off with start coming up with different variations of these keywords. If you are an e-commerce site that is selling products your best bet would be to come up with long tailed keywords. You want to target your product pages first. Use the exact title of the product and build on that title. Use words like buy and shop in your keyword variations. make sure to come up with the 3 and 4 word keyword phrases. For example if I owned a flower shop and my landing page looked like this:

The first thing I would use as a keyword is the title off of the page. The next step I would take is to add a list of keywords that I come up with off of the title. So my list would look something like this: one dozen daisies in a vase buy one dozen daises buy daises in a vase buy 12 daises in a vase buy a dozen daisies I’m sure you get the gist of it by now. By the time you get finished with this list you should have at least 10 keywords for that landing page. Try to come up with as many different combinations of keywords as possible. I would then follow suit by repeating this exact same step with every product in that category. however, if you are starting out on a small budget then the best bet would be to start out with about 5-10 landing pages. The next step that we are gonna take is to properly set up your Adwords campaigns. The way I usually do this is to break my campaigns up into groups. Again If I were selling flowers I would break my campaigns up as follows: Ringers Vases Daisys Tulips Roses Notice!! I set up one of my campaigns as Ringers. The reason why I do this is that when I am running a campaign there are some words that convert better than others. After I see a word doing well in a specific category I like to move it over to the ringers category. What this does is helps me to focus on the words that are making money, and what better way is there to focus on them words than having them all in one spot. Now the first and most important thing that you want to do when setting your campaign up is to go into every campaign and click the link up top that says “edit campaign settings”. After going into this you are gonna want to make the necessary adjustments to your campaign. While  I cannot say what every one of those adjustments might be (every business is different) I can say one thing for sure. Make sure you click on the tabs that say networks and un-check the boxes that say content network. Your screen should look like this:


The reason we are taking the content network out of the equation is because the content network is something totally different than the search network. I always keep the 2 separated along with any other Adwords professional. Unfortunately this tutorial is not a tutorial on Google’s content network it’s a tutorial on the search network. Maybe I will write a tutorial at a later date explaining the content network. So the next thing I want to do while we are still on the edit setting page is to go into the category called devices. It is located directly beneath the networks tab. Here is another screen shot:

After we set our campaigns up there is one important element that a lot of people overlook, unfortunately this is an important element that if not done properly can cost you a great deal of money. This element is, setting up a negative keyword list. Yes that’s right you must tell Google the keywords NOT to rank you for in Adwords. I know it’s great to rank in as many categories as possible but there are certain words that will kill you if you are not careful about filtering them out. Such word may be words like Free, second hand, used etc.. Here is a screenshot of a campaign that I am currently running. The following are a couple of resources that will give you a pretty good idea about how to add campaign negative keywords:

Here is a list of campaign negative keywords so that you may download.

Also here is a very old but good video to watch

Okay so far we have found our keywords, setup up our campaigns and, punched in our campaign negative keywords. Next lets start setting up the ads.

Ads are very tricky to set up if you don’t know the correct techniques to use. I have one technique that I use that has always made my campaigns a complete success. Here is the format of the ad (Again we use the flower shop example)

Title = product name
1st line = brief description
2nd line = call to action & savings

Lets say I want to set up an ad for a purple tulips landing page. This would be what the ad would KINDA look like. Remember I am rushing right now:

Shop Purple Tulips
Large selection of Purple Tulips
Buy Now Save 20% & Free Shipping
www.mysite.com/purple-tulips

As you can see, I start my title out with a call to action word which is Shop. I then go on to start my first line out with a very brief description. Finally my second line shows a slew of call to actions and incentives. But wait I did not end it there, I made sure that in my display URL I included the keyword purple-tulips. Always make sure to display your keyword in the display URL. Studies show that properly formatted display URL’s play a role in your overall click through rate.

Now that we have set the ad up, the next thing that we must do is set the pricing up. A good way to do this is to use the on page traffic estimator tool to see an estimate of how many visits a day you will be getting along with an estimated cost per click. Now this is where it gets a little hairy. The best way that I have found NOT TO LOSE ME MONEY is to play it real safe when setting this part of the campaign up. First we wanna take the profit that you will make off of your selected product. In this example I am going to say that my profit is $10.00 off of a dozen purple tulips. I will now take that number and multiply it by the average conversion rate on the internet, which is (give or take) 2%. So lets take 0.02 and multiply it by $10.00

10 * 0.02 = 0.20

This will be the maximum that I am willing to pay per click on this item and just to make it a little bit safer I am not going to take it to the max. The bid I would start out with would be something like $0.15 until this particular Ad group is weeded out for keywords that aren’t converting.

Now all that left to do is add all of our keywords. After adding this ad group, repeat the above steps on every other ad group.

For now we are done. Now we wait a couple of days and begin to manage our campaigns. To do this, what I do is open up Google analytics under one tab and open up Adwords in another. In Analytics click on all traffic sources then click on all keywords. After opening up all of your keywords the next step would be to click on the e-commerce tab so that you may see all of your revenue and conversions thus far. What we are looking for is simple. We want to find the keywords with the most clicks and find out if they are converting well? If yes move them to the ringers campaign so that you can keep a closer eye on them. If no, delete them. Okay let me expound on this a little bit:

If a Keyword is Converting
What we waant to do with this keyword is to move it over to the ringers ad campaign that we set up in the beginning. Also another this to check would be the conversion rate. If a word is converting at 10.00% we can then take that conversion rate and re multiply it by the original profit in order to come up with a better bid and to achieve higher placement in the Sponsored Listings.

If a Keyword is NOT Converting
We will want to check how many hits this particular keyword obtained. If it was only 3 clicks just leave it alone because it is not a good enough sample to make an assumption. The best way to do this is to let a keyword get about 50-100 clicks before making any kind of final ruling on it.

Okay that is all for this tutorial. I will write another tutorial within the next couple of days explaining how to manage an ongoing campaign. If you have any feedback please feel free to share it as I am always open for discussion.

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