Creating a Keyword Targeted AdWords Campaign

Now that you know the basic layout of your Google AdWords account, it’s time that you create a keyword targeted campaign which means a campaign that you use keywords to advertise. Before you start a campaign, please read over the following things which are very important for you to know.

General Info

Keyword targeted advertising is the most common type of advertising with Google AdWords. This is the type of advertising you see most often on Google, it is what most people think of when they hear about AdWords. When you are searching Google, the AdWords advertisements are displayed on the top and/or right of each Google search page. You can see an example of what they look like to the right of this paragraph.

Things to Remember

Please remember these two things before you start your account. Although there are things that are more important these things can severely hurt beginner advertisers.

Obey Google’s Rules

Google’s advertising policies are very strict. They will notify you via email and/or by a message in your account whenever there is something wrong with your account or your advertisements. If you do not fix what they notify you about, then you may become banned by Google. Don’t expect this to be a temporary ban, either. If Google decides to ban your account, they will not accept any of your payments from any credit card you enter. Each time you use a different credit card in a banned account, that credit card will also be declined by Google AdWords. If you ever use that credit card to pay for another AdWords bill, even if it is in an active account, that AdWords account will also become banned. If you ever do become banned, you will not be able to receive traffic to your advertisements and you will need to call Google to get it fixed.

Don’t Ever Completely Change Your Target URL (Destination URL)

If you are a beginner or even an expert with Google AdWords, you should know that occasionally the website you are advertising for will temporarily go down. The absolute worst thing you can do when this happens is to quickly change your Text Ad’s Destination URL to another website which sells a similar product.

Why shouldn’t you do this? Even though switching websites will prevent you from having to pause your Account, it will make your Quality Score go to 0.0. Basically, your quality score is what Google uses to decide what you pay for each keyword, it keeps your keyword(s) activated, it ranks your advertisements and it determines how often your text ad is displayed in Google Searches. Your Quality Score in Google is similar to your Credit Score in real life. You want it to be as good as possible because it saves you money. By changing your target URL, this will reset your quality score, causing your traffic to go way, way down. If you absolutely have to change the URL, I would recommend pausing the campaign you don’t want and then create a new campaign. Then, using Google’s Copy & Move keywords tool, copy all of your keywords to the new campaign you just created. It may take 5 minutes longer than changing your URL but your Quality Score will be the exact same for your new Campaign as it would have been if you changed the URL in your old Campaign, PLUS your old text ad’s Quality Score will not be affected so you can later unpause that campaign to receive the same amount as traffic as before. (I’m sorry if some of the terms in this paragraph were confusing to you. I realize that I haven’t talked about the Quality Score yet, but it is important that you know what not to do).

The only time(s) when you should change your Destination URL is when you have created a brand new campaign or AdGroup and you are testing new merchants and advertising new products.

Setting up a new Keyword-Targeted Campaign

Here are the Step by Step instructions on how to create the perfect Google AdWords Campaign. If you already have a campaign running, I suggest you read over this, because you will find things you will want to improve. If you are thinking about starting a new campaign, simply read over these steps as you create your campaign because these steps are in chronological order and will significantly help you. If you set up the dummy campaign, I would recommend starting a new campaign from scratch (just keep your dummy campaigned paused for now).

The Very Beginning

Before you do anything, I want you to have a website selected that you want to advertise. If you haven’t picked one yet, go ahead and find one. If you need to, you can look towards the beginning of this guide to help you through the process of finding a good website.

How to Know Which Keyword Groups and AdGroups to Have

Grouping keywords together isn’t just important for Google, it also helps increase click through rates and conversions. Each keyword group should have it’s own AdGroup, this way you can have very specific text ads (I explain this more later). In this section I am going to show you how to know what keyword groups you want to use for your Google account.

First, you will need to use Google’s Keyword Tool. Click on the link below to open Google’s Keyword Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

When the page has finished loading you should see something similar to this:

Now click on the tab titled “Site-Related Keywords”.

It will prompt you to enter a URL. Simply enter the main URL of the website you want to advertise for.

If you’re doing this with a ClickBank ID use the following example to get the main URL for the website, because entering your Hoplink address will not work.

Enter your affiliate hoplink into your internet browser’s address bar.

If you were promoting Google Money Pro you would enter a similar address into your address bar: http://NICKNAME.googlemp.hop.clickbank.net

When the page loads you will notice that the address in the address bar will change. It will change to the website’s main URL. If you were promoting Google Money Pro it would look similar to this web address: http://www.gmoneypro.com/?hop=NICKNAME

The URL you want to enter into Google’s Keyword tool is the main URL, so you will just need to copy/paste or simply type this URL into Google’s Keyword Tool.

So the address you enter in Google’s Keyword Tool should look similar to this:

Just below where it asks you to enter the URL, you will see something that says “Chose data to display:”. In the box next to this select “Keywords Search Volume” and click on button titled “Get Keywords”.

Google will now search the webpage to find the keywords which are the most related to that website. The page will change and will list several columns of keywords when Google is finished searching the website.

If you look near the top of the results you will see something that says “Showing keywords grouped by these terms:”. In my search the following keyword groups were shown:

Google may show more or less keyword Groups for your webpage, so don’t worry if your results look different from mine.

Write down these groups on a piece of paper because you’re going to create a new AdGroup for each keyword group.

Since each one of these groups is eventually going to be its own AdGroup, each AdGroup is going to contain keywords only closely related together. For example, one of my AdGroups name “adwords” will only contain keywords that have the phrase “adwords” in them. We will get more into finding keywords later in this guide.

Starting Off

Now, you will need to create a new advertising campaign.

First you will need to login to your Google account and to create a new keyword campaign, click the link “Keyword-Targeted” campaign.

Naming Your Campaign And AdGroup

You will be prompted to name your campaign. Your campaign name is what will be displayed on the first screen when you log into your Google AdWords account.

Since you will most likely have several campaigns, when you name your campaign you will want to make sure it is a unique name that will let you know exactly what you are advertising in that campaign. I do not recommend advertising for several different products within one campaign. If you plan to advertise for two different products or websites, make two different campaigns one campaign for each. If I were advertising for Google Money Pro I would name my campaign “Google Money Pro” or “GMoneyPro.com”.

Next you will need to name your AdGroup. This shouldn’t be hard to do because you’re going to name your AdGroups the same as the keyword groups Google created for you (we mentioned that you should have written these down). In the example above I would name my AdGroup “Money Maker”, because that’s what Google named the keyword group that contained all of the keywords that contain the words “money maker”. So go ahead and name your first AdGroup the same as the first keyword group Google created for you.

Remember, you will have several different AdGroups within one Campaign, so name it something that will help you know exactly what keywords are in that AdGroup (don’t name it something like “AdGroup 1”, “AdGroup 2”, etc). Proper naming will help make your advertising within that campaign even more organized.

For example, if I was about to generate a list of keywords for dog training, I would name my AdGroup “Dog Training”.

Choosing Your Advertising Language

This is where you will choose the language your advertisements are going to be written in. This is also the language your advertisements will be displayed in.

I recommend watching the following video from Google that gives you more information about choosing your advertising language and locations:

Choosing Languages & Advertising Locations

Target Customers by Location

This is where you will choose how you want your advertisement to be displayed. It can either be displayed in:

If you remember, I mentioned this earlier in this guide when we were setting up the dummy campaign. I would recommend Countries and Territories because they bring the most traffic. If your product or service is only available in a small area, then I would choose the Regions and Cities or the Customized option.

Here’s what my page looks like. When you’re finished simply click on the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page.

Choosing Advertising Locations

After you hit continue you will choose the countries you want to advertise in (if you selected the “Countries and Territories” targeted option.

When you are deciding where to advertise your product, remember that if it’s only available in certain countries (like Paid Surveys, Seized Auctions, etc.) you should only advertise in the countries where it’s available. Otherwise you’re wasting your advertising budget.

Don’t ever advertise any product world wide or in any countries that don’t speak the same language the webpage is written in. If you do this you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

In my opinion the best countries to choose for advertising English advertisements and products are in the following list. Remember, you don’t have to choose these countries. These are the countries I’ve had the most success with.

After you click on the Continue button you will be taken to a page that will ask you to create a text advertisement. I will get to that in a few paragraphs, but if you want to know how to edit your campaign in the future, read the section below:

Campaign Management

If you ever need to go back and change some of the settings you’ve applied to your campaign, please read below.

Editing Your Campaign

You can always add or remove the countries you’re advertising in. If you ever do want to edit the countries you advertise in or any other campaign information, just do the following:

1. Click on your “Campaign Management” tab.
   
2. Click on the campaign you want to edit.
   
3. This will take you to a page where you can view your AdGroups. Near the top of this page you will see a link titled “Edit Campaign Settings”. Click on that link to edit these settings.
   

The edit campaign settings page will look something like this. Here you can re-name your campaign, change your daily budget, decide where you want your ads to be displayed, choose which language you want, and pick which countries/cities/etc. you want your ads to be displayed in.

Campaign Settings:

You will want the following settings to be applied to your account, so in the “Campaign Settings” page of your account do the following:

Delivery Method – Make sure your delivery method is set to “Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible.”

Ad Serving – Make sure “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” is checked.

Now click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of your Campaign Settings page to save these changes.

Writing Text Advertisements

Now you should be to the point where you will need to create your text advertisement for the website you’re going to be advertising on Google.

I recommend watching the following video by Google which explains text advertisements:

Creating a Text Ad

Successful Text Ads do the following:

1. They get to the point with the title. They quickly tell what the product does.
2. They attract attention.
3. The text ad description assures the user that the product will do what they want it to. They answer the most common questions to convince the web surfer to click on your ad.
4. They are clear, well written, specific, and compelling.

There are 4 different parts to a text advertisement:

Title/Headline – The title is the first line of the text advertisement. It’s job is to attract attention to the text advertisement so the web surfer will read the rest of the text ad.

Description – The description is the second and third line of the text advertisement. The description’s job is to convince the user to click on your text advertisement in order to visit the webpage you’re advertising.

Display URL – The display URL is the fourth line of the text advertisement. This is the web address that the visitors will see when they look at your text ad. You don’t want this web address to look strange (don’t use weird numbers or letters in your web address), instead you want it to look easy to remember and short. If you were an affiliate for Google Money Pro, then you would make your display URL www.GMoneyPro.com. Your visitors will not be going to the Display URL address, so don’t enter your affiliate hoplink here. Instead enter the main address of the website you’re advertising.

Destination URL – The destination URL is the web address that the web surfer will go to when they click on your text advertisement. The destination URL will not be visible by the web surfer so it can be long and contain weird letters and numbers. The destination URL is where you will enter your affiliate hoplink.

Things You Should Know:

1. You are not required to have “http:” or “www” in your display URL.
2. Google will not let you capitalize all the letters in all your words, but they will let you capitalize the first letter of every word.
3. The website must not require additional software to load (example: your landing page cannot be a .pdf).
4. Back button must be able to go back from your destination URL to Google with one click.
5. You can’t have websites that mirror other websites that are advertised for the same keyword (example: having the same pictures and text but using a different web address).
6. The website you are advertising cannot have a pop up or pop under ad (unless it’s a dynamic ad, which means it hovers over the webpage and when you close the webpage the ad disappears).

Some Do’s and Don’ts for Text Advertisements.

1. Don’t insult the web surfer. No one is going to click on your advertisement if it makes them angry.
2. Don’t give away too much information. For example if you are selling Printers for $40 and your competition is selling Printers for $35, do not mention your price in your ad.
3. Use exclamation points carefully, Google only allows you to use one, so if you use one make it count.
4. Don’t mention things twice in your Ad. You have limited space and you will want to use as much of it as you can.
5. Don’t use a business name or webpage name in the Ad, unless it is well known with the subject and will help to increase your Click Through Rate.

Some Things You Should Do:

1. Do whatever it takes to make the web surfer interested in your advertisement, unless it is one of the things I mentioned NOT to do.
2. Capitalize the first letter of each word in your text ad’s Title (except for articles and prepositions) and capitalize the first letter of important words in your text ad’s Description.
3. Look at the other advertiser’s ads on Google who are selling the same product as you. See which advertisements you would most likely click on and try to reproduce the parts of their Ad that you like.
4. Ask the web surfer a question, tell them what you have, do whatever it takes to get their attention.
5. You will want to have “Call to Action Phrases”. These are phrases which make the user want to click on your ad. Example: “Try Our Online Program Today”.
6. You will always want your ad to be clear, well written, specific, and compelling.
7. Use as much text space as possible. You don’t want your advertisement to look empty.
8. Google limits the amount of space in your text ad, but you can add more space by adding short abbreviations for your words like “&”, “w/”, “w/o”, “+”, “-“, etc.

Writing Your Title/Headline – Your title should attract attention from the other ads to your ad. One of the best ways to do this is to include keywords in your title.

Why would including a keyword in your title attract attention to your text ad? Because Google bolds any keywords in your text advertisement. You may be thinking, I’m sure my keyword list will contain tons of different keywords…how can I possibly get all of those keywords to fit into my title? Well here’s the answer…you don’t need to contain every single keyword in your title, you just need your title to contain the main word or phrase that every keyword in your list contains.

It’s a good thing that you grouped your keywords together with Google, because since all your keywords in each keyword group contain the same words you’re just going to need to put the most common words that appear in all of your keywords in your text ad’s title.

Look at some of the keyword groups Google recommends for one of my websites. If I were to look at all of the keywords in the group titled “money maker” I would notice that every single keyword contains the words “money” and “maker” in it. This means that if I were to add the words “money maker” into my text ad’s title, the phrase “money maker” will always be bold when my Advertisement is seen on Google. This is because every keyword in my AdGroup has the words money maker in it.

So what should you do? You should add this word (or words) somewhere in the title of your text ad. Most of the time this word is the same as the title of the keyword group Google created.

So for my “Money Maker” AdGroup I will want to use the words “Money Maker” in the title of my text ad so Google will bold those words which will attract more attention to my advertisement.

So here’s what my title will look like:

Online Money Maker Job

Now I just need to know what words to include in my description. Since my title talks about a job that makes money and is online, I will need to include more information about this so people will click on my advertisement. If I don’t address or give more information than the title, then my ad will appear uninteresting. So here’s what my title and description will look like:

Notice how I talk about making money online without using the same words as the title. This will seem more attractive to the web surfer because it will not seem repetitive. Also look at how I added the words “Limited Time”. This let’s the web surfer know that this may be the only time they will see this advertisement and they should click on this ad to view the offer before it expires.

Understanding the Click Through Rate

One important thing you will read and hear about a lot is your ad’s Click Through Rate (also called CTR). Your CTR is basically the number of people who click on your ad out of 100. So if 100 people see your advertisement (this is called 100 impressions) and two people click on your ad your CTR will be 2%.

Text Ads with a high CTR will increase your Quality Score. I will talk about your Quality Score later, but basically it is the formula Google uses which determines whether or not your keyword is inactive for search, your keyword’s minimum bid, and your text advertisement’s position/rank in the search results. So basically a high CTR will increase your overall position. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be very difficult to increase your CTR.

Basic Techniques That Help Boost CTR:

• Start your ad’s title with words like “How to…” or “Here’s…”. Example: “How to Sell Your House” or “Here’s Discount Laptops”. If you try hard enough you can start any title this way.
• If possible, try to start your title with a verb to help make a statement. Example: “Download Unlimited Music” instead of “Unlimited Music Downloads”.
• Ask a question in your title. Example: “Does Your Dog Disobey You?”
• Increase your ad’s position by raising your Max CPC.
• Include keywords in your Advertisements title or description.
• Always test new text ads to help find which advertisements generate the highest CTR.

Now that you know about Click Through Rates, you should get some basic information on how to create an overall very effective text advertisement.

How to Attract Attention

Here are some examples of text advertisements which will most likely get a majority of the attention from web surfers.

Here are some examples of my real life Text Advertisements:

Notice that all of the text advertisements have the first letter of almost every word in the title capitalized to attract more attention to the text ad. These text ads are nearly two years old but today these text ads would also have the first letter of almost every word in the description capitalized.

After you finish writing your ads you will want to make sure that Google automatically optimizes your text ads so the ads with the highest CTR receive the most impressions.

You can now go to your Campaign settings and check ‘Optimize: Show Better Performing Ads More Often’ which I explained how to do earlier in this guide.

You may hear that having this option checked can hurt your overall CTR. The reason being that since your advertisements are each displayed equally at first, there is a chance that an advertisement which usually performs poorly can receive a random click. If this is the case, then Google will think that advertisement is performing better than the other ads and Google will display that ad more often. Even though this may be true in some cases, it doesn’t usually happen. In my experience, Google has done a very good job in determining which advertisement to show the most.

Unless you are strictly testing two separate advertisements against each other and you want to run each ad exactly 50% of the time, then I would recommend having the “Automatically optimize ad serving for my ads” checked.
You will need at least 2-3 different text-advertisements per AdGroup, make sure that they are each different. After three days (it may need to be more or less time depending on the amount of traffic you are receiving), compare your results between the text ads, delete the poor performing ones and replace them with newer text advertisements. Keep doing this until you are satisfied with your CTR results.

Making Text Ads More Profitable

Most of the time, people think that you can just create an AdGroup and check on it one or two times to see if it’s profitable or not. If it’s profitable, people leave it and don’t mess with it. And if it’s not profitable, people will either pause it or delete it. In this section, you will learn how to make all of your AdGroups more popular by adjusting just a few settings in your campaign, no matter if they’re already popular or far from it.

Before you can start to use and implement these techniques, you will need to have conversion tracking enabled and working in your Google AdWords account. If you don’t have conversion tracking enabled you will just be adjusting these settings in your AdGroups at random because you will not know which AdGroups need it or not and there would be a good chance that you could be editing a profitable AdGroup making it less profitable. So, before you continue, make sure you have conversion tracking enabled, and working in your AdWords account.

Little Tricks of the Trade…

Of course, you can’t be an online advertiser for as long as I have been without learning tricks and techniques that allow you to make any AdGroup, Campaign, or Account profitable…so here they are:

Adding Certain Words in Your Text Advertisements:

As you should and probably know by now, the words in your text advertisements are very important. They can cause your Ad’s CTR to drastically increase or decrease, they can increase your sales or refunds, and they can even cause your account to get banned by Google.

If you have the right words in your text advertisement, they can make your ad extremely profitable…and of course this is what I’m going to show you how to do.

Making All Text Ads More Profitable

Let’s face it, the reason text ads are unprofitable is because you’re spending too much money in advertising to get a sale. The only way you can spend too much in advertising is either because your keywords bids are too high (we talked about this earlier) or because you’re receiving too much traffic that’s not buying your product.

There are two types of people who click on text advertisements in Google. One type are those who are looking to buy something and the other type are those who are just browsing or want to get something for free. You only want the first type of people to click on your text ads. So, how do you only get people who want to buy your product to click on your text ads?

Here’s what you can do:

1. Remove all words in your text ad that cause people to click on it. These words include: “Download”, “Free”, “Warning”, “Try”, “Sale”, “Wholesale”, etc. Using these words will cause a lot more people to click on your text advertisement who are not looking to buy your product.
2. Don’t use Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
3. If your text advertisement is just a little unprofitable, then add words like: Buy, Order, Purchase, etc. These words tell people that they are not going to get anything for free and it will cause less people to click on your advertisement who don’t plan to buy anything.
4. If your text advertisement is really unprofitable then you will need to add your price in the advertisement. Be sure to include your currency sign (in the US this is the $). Including the actual price in your advertisement will do two things. First, it will tell people not to expect to get any free information off of your page so it will stop people from clicking your advertisement who don’t plan on buying anything. Second, it will stop people from clicking on your advertisement who want to see what your price is. This means that everyone who clicks on your advertisement will know you’re not giving away freebies and they know what your price is. This means that they are actually interested in purchasing your product.

What If Your Text Ad Has A Very Good Conversion Rate…

If you’re lucky enough to have a text advertisement that is converting very well (I usually consider this over 2-3% conversion rate…that’s a sale for every 30-50 clicks), then I recommend you take advantage of this opportunity while it lasts.

This means you should try to get more traffic to your text advertisement.

Here’s What You Should Do:

1. Make sure all of your keywords are displaying on the first results page. The first results page is rankings 1.0 – 8.0. Don’t aim for the #1-3 positions, these are very expensive and don’t offer that much more traffic (In My Experience).

Be A Smart Advertiser

Here’s a Question…Would you rather:

A. Sell $100,000 online each week and spend 89,392.83 in advertising? You would make $10,607.17 each week.

B. Sell $22,000 online each week and spend $10,192.96 in advertising? You would make $11,807.04 each week

Becoming successful online isn’t about how much money you can sell each day, it’s about how much profit you can make. If you chose the letter A, you would make $10,607.17 profit each week. If you chose the letter B you would make $11,807.04 each week. That’s a $50,000 per year difference.

That may have not been a difficult decision to make right now but if you were having $100,000 deposited into your bank account every single week, just the thought of having that number drop to $22,000 would worry you even if you knew you were making a little more profit.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Google also has an uncommon feature that may be useful for writing text ads. This feature is called “Dynamic Keyword” insertion. This is where you can put a piece of code into your text ad (either in the title or the description) and whenever someone types in a keyword, the keyword they entered would be displayed where that code is.

Here is the code:

{keyword: default title} – Put this into your text advertisement to make the keyword the searcher types in appear in your ad in all lower case. The “default title” I have entered next to the code is what will be displayed if the web surfer’s keyword is too long to fit into the title.

If you want for the keyword to appear in all capitals then use the following code: {KeyWord: Default Title}.

Here is an example of this in action.

Lets say you are selling Cheese and you specify the following for your title to display “Free {KeyWord: Cheese}”

Sometimes people have a little bit of confusion with dynamic keywords. For example:

{KeyWord: example}

When you insert this into your advertisement, you do not change the “{KeyWord:” part at all. You keep it this way. The only part you change is the text which comes after the “{KeyWord:” part. This text is not the keyword you want the dynamic setting to be applied to because it will be applied to all of the settings in your AdGroup. Instead, it is what will be displayed if the users search term is too long to fit into the title/description of your advertisement.

Don’t forget, you can put text before and after the brackets “{ }”.

Benefits

The best thing about Dynamic Keyword Insertion is that you will display the search phrase in your title and if you can do this properly, it can significantly help to increase your CTR. If done correctly, you can achieve CTRs of 3% or higher.

It can also allow you to advertise for trademarked terms (sometimes Google doesn’t allow this). If you do use dynamic keyword insertion to get around some of Google’s policies or rules, then you may get in trouble by Google.

Here’s how to get around trademarked terms. One common trademarked term is the word “iPod”.

So, let’s say you have the following dynamic keyword code: {Keyword:MP3 Music Sale} inside your title. Here’s how your title will appear if someone searches the following keywords:

Disadvantages

If the user enters a search phrase that is longer than your title, then the advantages of Dynamic Keyword Insertion is useless because it will not apply.

Sometimes, confusing results can appear which deters potential customers from your webpages.

It’s rare to see dynamic keyword insertion receiving high CTR’s on contextual advertising.

Unfortunately, these reasons are why I do not recommend using this. If you have a product which this will benefit you, then I suggest trying this technique. If you use this technique, I would recommend using it very carefully.

When you have finished writing your Text Advertisement, click the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page. Google will check your text advertisement to make sure it isn’t breaking any of their guidelines. If it does, they will tell you before the next page and will tell you how to fix it. If your advertisement doesn’t break any guidelines, then you will go on to the next step.

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