Their Way Or My Way…
I do a LOT of Google Adwords advertising, and I’ve found that one of the biggest problems with it can be Google itself. As I create and place my ads, Google tries to help me…they give me options that are minimal at best. Google is not allowing me to get the full effect of their own AdWords program.
In other words, they are not allowing me to get the most bang for my buck. Technically, they are tricking me into being very ineffective by limiting my options.
Let’s take a look at what I call, “standard Google AdWords.” When you type a word or phrase into the Google search box, for example, Internet Marketing, a page comes up with search results. The first listing on the page and the bottom listing are Google Ads.
If you look just to the left of the URL, in the ad, you will see the word “Ad” these are what I call standard Google ads. This is one of the key elements that makes this advertising powerful; you have the ability to have your ads displayed for the exact keywords people are searching on.
One of the first things Google would like you to do when setting up your account is to allow them to automatically charge your credit card for your advertising campaign.
I don’t like this. I want more control of my payments, so I upload money to my account rather than give them a credit card. You can do it any way you wish, but I personally like to add money to the account.
This is one of the key elements that makes this advertising
powerful; you have the ability to have your ads displayed
for the exact keywords people are searching on.
Let’s look at two ways to set up your AdWords account:
- Google’s way
- My way.
You’ll see why my way is much more effective.
When I set up a new campaign, the first thing I do is click the “Search Network Only” option. This allows me to create a standard Google ad.
Let’s go step-by-step and set up a campaign. Please use this as a guide only. One thing is certain, Google will make changes by the time you read this, so you may not find things in the sequence I listed them, or you may find them labeled differently. Don’t despair, by searching a bit you will be able to find everything.
GOOGLE’S WAY
Campaign Name:
The first thing you need to do is name the campaign. Use a name that means something to you. For example, I’m setting up a campaign as I write this. I’m naming it MU Trial – STD – keyword phrase (then insert your keyword phrase).
I’m using a name that identifies the campaign for me. This one tells me that it’s for Marketing University (MU) trial, and it’s for a standard (STD) campaign.
Now, I have to determine what keyword phrase to use. In this case let’s use “Affiliate Marketing”. So, my campaign name is: MU Trial – SDT – Affiliate Marketing.
Type:
This box already says, “Search Network Only,” and I leave the “Standard” check box button highlighted.
Networks:
“Google Search Networks” already has a check mark next to it. But you’ll see that “Include Search Partners” is also chosen. I “uncheck” this option.
Devices:
Here it says, “Ads will show on all eligible devices by default.” For the time being I’ll leave this alone and address it later.
Location:
In this example I just choose United States.
Language:
For me, I choose English.
Bid Strategy:
Google wants you to use “Automated Bid Strategy” — DON’T USE IT! Instead use, “Manual CPC”. Make sure Enable Enhance CPC” is checked. (It’s located just to the right of “Manual CPC.”)
Default Bid:
This is where a lot of misconceptions occur. We’re bidding on Standard Google AdWords. The odds are you will NOT get 10, 15, 20 cent bids. I usually bid $2 here. I know I’m overbidding for the keyword phrase.
I’m guessing that I will actually pay around $1, but by putting $2 here, I’m just saying I’m willing to go that high, if needed. So, this is what your willing to pay, it’s not what you’re actually going to spend.
Budget:
This is how much you’re willing to spend per day. I’m conservative here. I’ll put $20 for my daily budget.
Ad Extensions:
Don’t check any of the “Ad Extensions”, leave them blank. Click “SAVE AND CONTINUE.”
You will be taken to the next page. This is where you’ll be asked to enter your landing page. It will then scan your landing page and try to determine what it’s all about.
What you want to do is click on the “My landing page isn’t ready” option and type in the keyword phrase you want to rank for which in this example is, “Affiliate Marketing” and then click “Search”.
Google will come back with several different types of keyword ideas. But, in this example, I’m only interested in those that have the phrase “affiliate marketing” in them. Why? It’s very simple—it will increase our quality score.
Under each of the group ideas that were displayed, you’ll see a link that says something like, “53 keywords” or some number of keywords. Click this link under each group of keywords that contain your keyword phrase and look through the suggested keywords.
Uncheck all those that don’t have your keyword phrase in them (in this case, “affiliate marketing”). You will then be left with only keywords that have your phrase in them. Then, click the link that says, “Add to campaign” and these will be added to ad group number one.
Then go to the next ad group idea that contains your phrase and, once again, unclick those that don’t apply and click the button that says “Add to campaign” to add these to ad group number two. Just keep repeating this until you’ve gone through all the qualifying “ad group ideas”.
You’ll notice that a new keyword “ad group” is added each time you do this.
Once finished with this, click the “Continue to ads” button.
As you create the ad, make sure your keyword phrase is in every ad created in order to increase the keyword quality score.
Create Ad:
In the “Final URL” box, type in the URL where you want to send this traffic. Then skip past the “Headline” and go down to “Path” and put in your keyword. There are two boxes, so I’ll put keyword phrase “affiliate” in the first box and “marketing” in the second box. Then, go back up to the “Headline” boxes.
In this example I’d put something similar to:
“Like Affiliate Marketing? Try”
(That’s about the limit of characters we can put into Headline #1.)
For Headline #2, I might put something like:
“Marketing University for $1.00″
(Look to the right to preview your headline.)
Then, I’ll go to the description and might use something like:
“Try Armand Morin’s Marketing University For $1. Access 350 Hours of
Video Training”
(This brings me to within one character of the limit for this box).
Then click, “Create Ad”.
What Google now does is show you two versions of the ad. On the left-hand side, they show you the ad as you created it. On the right hand they show you a secondary ad that they create from your primary ad, which is a good idea.
If you click on the secondary add, you can modify it. I might go in and
change the headline to read something similar to my other ad:
(Line One) “Marketing University”
(Line Two) “Learn Internet Marketing”
Once you’re satisfied, click the “Save As” button. Directly underneath the ads you will see two symbols—one looks like two sheets of paper, one over the other (to make a copy of the ad) and the second is a trash can to delete the ad if you don’t like it.
I’m going to duplicate this ad by clicking the option that says, “Copy to all ad groups”. Do this for both ads. Now we have both adds for all the ad groups we previously created. Click “Save and Finish.”
There are more steps.
Click the keywords tab at the top of the page. And click the little square that chooses ALL the keywords. It then creates all the keywords you created. Click “Edit” and then “Change Match Types” (from the dropdown menu).
Google will have the match type set at “Broad Match.” You want to set it to “Phrase Match” so click the “Phrase match” button. Then click the blue “Make Changes” button.
When I set “Devices” during the initial setup, it didn’t give me the option to change devices so I mentioned that we would address it later. Well, now is the time for that.
Go back to the “Settings” tab (top of page) and click it, them scroll down to “Devices.” You’ll see that is has defaulted to “All.” I’ll change that by clicking on the “Change devices bid adjustment” link.
This takes me to another page where I select, “Mobile devices with full
browsers” and Tablets with full browsers.” Just to the right of this, you’ll see “Decrease by” and that box should be set for 100%. My ads will now show up only on desktop computers. I do this because I want people to buy directly from these ads.
Technically, everything is now fine and good, but Google did not give us all the keywords I chose. So now we will do it my way.
My Way
The initial setup of the campaign is basically the same. The difference is that I use “Keyword Planner” to create my campaign.
When I created the campaign the way Google suggested I ended up with a lot more keywords but the majority of them were not targeted. I knew I had to find a different way. I remembered you could create campaigns using Google Keyword Planner so let’s do that now.
Start by going to the top of the page and clicking on “Tools.” Then, click on “Keyword Planner.” In Keyword Planner you’ll see a box that says, “Your product or service.”
For this example, I’ll type “Affiliate Programs” into this box. Then I click “Search” and it will do what’s called a “Broad search.” Broad Search gives variations of your keyword phrase.
It will come up with hundreds of results (637 for this example). I don’t want all of those keywords because many are not really related to what I want. I only want keywords with the term “Affiliate Programs” in it.
So, click “Keyword Options” (on the left-hand side) and select, “Only show ideas closely related to my search term,” and then save it. This narrows down all the keywords to only those that contain the exact phrase, Affiliate Programs.
So, in this example we’ve narrowed the keywords down from 637 in the broad search to 190 with the exact phrase “Affiliate Programs” in each one. This gives me an extremely targeted keyword list.
I then click the button that says, “Add All (190)” and it adds them to the campaign, but, there’s a minor issue because you actually have 191 keywords. The original keyword “Affiliate Programs” needs to be added which gives a total of 191.
To do that go to the right, on the line where you see “Affiliate Programs” listed and you hover over the check mark and it will turn blue. You click it and “Affiliate Programs” will be added to the keyword list which brings my total to 191.
Here’s a shortcut I learned…
Look to the right and you’ll see a tan box (located directly above the blue box) that says, “Review plan.” Right above that tan box you should see “Ad groups: followed by a numeral.”
So, in my example it says “Ad groups: 1.
Just to the right of that is a symbol. When I hover over that it says, “Set Match Type”. I click it and change it from “Broad Match” to “Phrase Match.”
It then asks you if the next time you save keywords you want also them to be saved as “Phrase Match.” Click “Yes.” That way every time you do a keyword search they will do it as a “Phrase Match” rather than a “Broad Match.” This automatically adds brackets around all your keywords and saves you a step.
Then, on the right, there is a button that says, “Review plan.” To the
very right of that button you will see four icons:
- Copy to clipboard
- Download
- Save to account
- Trash them
I choose, “Save to account.”
This brings up a popup where I create the new campaign and enter the campaign name. I’ll name it the same way I above, MU Trial–STD–Affiliate Programs. Like I did in the Google way, I put in my $2.00 default bid and $20.00 daily budget. Then I click “Save and Continue.” The keywords are then added to your campaign.
Your next step is to create ads for your campaign, so you click, “Create ads for your new campaign.” Once it’s loaded you click the “+AD” button. (left side, near middle of screen).
Choose your “Ad Group” from the dropdown box and fill out the form just like I did in the previous example.
Final URL: Put the URL where you want them to go when
they click on your ad. For this example, I used: https//
marketinguniversity.com
Headline 1: Like Affiliate Programs? Try
Headline 2: Marketing University For $1
Path: Affiliate Programs
Description: Try Armand Morin’s Marketing University For $1. Access 350 hrs of Video Training. (Note: to the right, in this box, you will see a countdown of how many characters you have left for your description)
If you are doing multiple ad groups with the same description, just copy it and you can then paste it into the description each time.
If you look to the right of your screen, you’ll see that it gives you a preview of the ad as you create it.
This was a very fast and a bit technical overview of the way I suggest you set up campaigns this way rather than the way Google tells you to do it.
