How to Set Up an AdWords Account

Think you’re ready to take the plunge and start a Google AdWords account? If the next three statements describe you, than you have my blessing!

You have a website that is relevant, easy to navigate, and fairly well built out.

Your AdWords account will help you to bring qualified searchers to your landing pages. Once they’ve made it to your site, it’s your job to convince them to convert. To achieve this, you must create landing pages that will compel visitors to take action. If your landing pages are cluttered, lack relevant information or do not facilitate a conversion, you’re throwing money into a black hole and your paid search efforts will be in vain. If you know that your landing pages need a little TLC, check out these tips. (Bonus points if you have mobile optimized landing pages, too!)

You’re willing to commit to this project for the long haul (financially and time-wise).

You won’t see the full potential of your account from the start. Cliché as it may be, it’s important to recognize that PPC is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time to establish a strong structure, expand keyword lists, identify negatives and test ads/landing pages. Plus, you are likely to start off with poor Quality Scores, which will hurt your average position and CPCs. You will see your Quality Scores start to shift once you’ve established your Google “street cred” and proven that you’ve built an account that offers a positive user experience (this typically takes 4-6 weeks).

You are willing to dedicate some extra manpower to PPC for the next few weeks.

Sure, once your account has been up and running for a while, you can sit back and relax. However, your first month will require a bit more heavy lifting. If you’ve never managed a PPC account before, I recommend taking a few weeks to do some studying (maybe even get certified, if you’re feeling like a true overachiever!). Once you know the ropes you can embark on the account build out, which may also be a fairly time consuming process and then, for the first few weeks, you will need to monitor your performance pretty heavily. Though it may be tough right off the bat, the hard work will be well worth your while!

If you fit the descriptions above, we recommend taking some time to develop your strategy and identify your paid search goals. One of the most important things to consider is how you will define a conversion. A “conversion” is the action that you want the searcher to take after they’ve clicked on your ad and visited your landing page. Different advertisers track different types of conversions. An e-commerce site might want to drive purchases, whereas a plumber may be looking for form fill-outs or phone calls. It is also important that you identify the value associated with a completed conversion.

3 Steps To Set Up A New AdWords Account

OK, for you brave souls who have done your research and are ready to get started, here’s how you can the ball rolling:

Step 1

Head to www.adwords.google.com to set up an account. When creating an account, you have the option to create it under your existing Gmail account or set up a new account. Personally, I like to set up a new Gmail account ahead of time, which I use specifically for AdWords management. This way, my personal email isn’t bombarded with emails from AdWords.

Step 2

Now that your account has been established, you must complete a few housekeeping items, such as setting your time zone and currency preferences:

Step 3

Finally, you are prompted to set up billing information. With AdWords, you have two payment options. Automatic payments allow you to pay after accruing clicks. You will be charged upon reaching your billing threshold or 30 days after your last payment, whichever comes first. If you opt for manual payments, you will prepay AdWords and charges will be deducted from the prepaid amount. When your prepaid balance is diminished, all advertising will be suspended until you make another payment.

You can elect to have payments drafted from either a credit card or a bank account. Keep in mind that Google must verify the bank account, which can take a little while. If you are eager to get your ads up and running, your credit card may be a better option.

Congratulations, you are now an official PPC advertiser and can start building out your account. We wish you the best of luck!

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): How to Optimize Conversion Rates for PPC

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your sponsored search ads, landing pages, and overall website design to raise your conversion rate. In other words, the goal is for the highest possible percentage of visitors to your site to convert, or complete your desired action. CRO is quickly gaining in popularity because it's seen as a way to increase profits from sales without raising your advertising spend.

Of course, just as SEO isn't really free, neither is a website redesign. It requires time and resources and, if you're doing it right, testing. Nonetheless, it's more than worth your while to familiarize yourself with the basic principles of website conversion optimization, so you can maximize the chances that a potential customer who arrives at your site from a search engine becomes a qualified lead or a paying customer.

There are a number of things you can do to increase your conversion rate, among them:

• Write compelling, clickable PPC ads that are highly relevant to the keyword/search query and your intended audience. All the better if you're targeting high-intent mid-tail and long-tail keywords that indicate a searcher who is late in the buying cycle, as those consumers are more likely to convert.
• Maintain a high degree of relevance between your ads and corresponding landing pages. Your landing page should deliver on the promise of your ad (the call to action) and make it easy for the searcher to complete that action, be it signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper or making a purchase.
• Test your landing page design. Conduct A/B testing to find the right layout, copy, and colors that push the highest percentage of site visitors to fill out your form, call in, or otherwise convert to a valuable lead or customer.

Optimizing PPC Conversions: Start with the Right Keywords 

When you start thinking about conversion rate optimization, it's tempting to fiddle around with buttons and forms and other low-in-the-funnel design elements that might make or break the sale. But remember that part of optimizing conversions is getting the right visitors to your site in the first place:

• High web traffic is useless if none of those people convert.
• With search marketing, increasing your qualified traffic is a matter of bidding on and optimizing for the right keywords.
• Better keyword traffic data means you can make better decisions about your website and ad copy and better target the right customers.

How Keyword Grouping Affects CRO

Effectively grouping and organizing your keywords can have powerful effects at every level of your search marketing results, from SEO to PPC to CRO.

Why? Because strong keyword groups make it much easier to:

• Write effective, targeted PPC ads
• Create specific, optimized landing pages
• Prioritize content creation
• Maintain an organized, well-structured website

All of these practices can work to increase both traffic and conversion rates. They also have a positive impact on yourQuality Score, which lowers your overall cost per action.

Landing Pages and Conversion Rate Optimization

The quality of your individual landing pages can also have a dramatic effect on conversion rates. Think about it – a prospective client stumbles across your page as the result of a specific search query. If the content and offering of that page aren’t relevant to what they were looking for or expecting to find, they will return to their search and you will lose that lead.  And the negative effects don’t stop there!  Poorly constructed landing pages can also cause your Quality Score to drop, which will in turn raise your cost per click, cost per action, and reduce your ad rank so that it’s harder to win spots in Google’s ad auction process. 

So, what makes a good landing page?  Common best practices for page design include few key elements:

• Compelling headline – Create a striking headline that is relevant to your PPC keyword and compels prospective clients to remain on the page to fulfill your desired action.
• Concise, targeted copy – The content of your page should clearly communicate your offering, and speak directly to the keywords associated with that ad group.  Use bulleted lists to prevent copy from becoming too lengthy or overwhelming.    
• Eye-catching, clickable call-to-action (CTA) – Make sure your CTA button stands out visually, appears clickable and uses short, gain-focused text.
• User-friendly lead capture form – A good form includes all the fields needed to fulfill your offer, but not so many that prospective clients are visually overwhelmed. Think carefully about what information is truly necessary to capture as you build your form.
• Attractive overall design – Landing pages should be clean and uncluttered, which conveys both trustworthiness and professionalism to prospective clients.  Design should also be consistent with your brand in order to prevent a disjointed browsing experience for visitors.

Adhering to these best practices will keep your landing pages relevant and high-quality, which will lead to a valuable boost in both CRO and Quality Score. Try out WordStream’s free Landing Page Grader to see if your AdWords landing pages are optimized for conversions.

Cost Per Action (CPA): How to Lower Your CPA in AdWords

Cost per action, or CPA – sometimes referred to as cost per acquisition – is a metric that measures how much your business pays in order to attain a conversion. Generally, your CPA will be higher than your cost per click, or CPC, because not everyone who clicks your ad will go on to complete your desired action, whether it’s making a purchase or filling out a form to become a lead. Cost per action takes into account the number of ad clicks you need before someone converts – in order words, improving your conversion rate will lower your CPA.

So, what determines your CPA? Like most things PPC, your CPA is directly affected by your Quality Score, Google’s all-important metric based on the quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.  In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs – in fact, for each point your score is above the average Quality Score of 5, your CPA will drop about 16%.

Keeping your Quality Score high and your CPA low can be a huge benefit to your PPC budget over time, giving you the opportunity to buy more exposure in the online advertising space and optimize the number of conversions that come from your ad spend.

How Quality Score Affects Cost Per Action

It’s well known that AdWords Quality Score affects your cost per click, but not everyone realizes that Quality Score is every bit as important in determining your cost per conversion

When you plot average CPA against impression-weighted Quality Score, you see a strong correlation: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the cost per action.

In other words, optimizing for Quality Score and optimizing for CPA are essentially the same thing.

The below table shows how much you’ll save on cost per action if your Quality Score is higher than 5:

Likewise, having a below average Quality Score will increase your CPA, relative to your competitors, which hurts your overall ROI.

What Is Cost Per Action Bidding?

CPA bidding is a method of paid advertising that allows you to tightly control your advertising spend. Rather than paying Google for every time someone clicks on one of your ads (as with CPC bidding), CPA bidding only requires you to pay for each conversion, a metric you define yourself when you set up each campaign. This action might be a sale, a lead, a download, or some other conversion you define. CPA advertising can help you avoid spending money on search terms that may not be directly driving business. If one of your ads displays in a SERP and does not match up with the searcher’s intent, you’ll only pay if the searcher engages with the ad and ultimately converts.

Google AdWords Puts Focus on Shopping Campaigns

As we move closer to the Holiday season, Google continues to come out with features to help eCommerce advertisers during their busiest time of the year. Two announcements were made by Google on Wednesday.

• The new Diagnostics tab in the Merchant Center will be replacing the Data Quality tab currently in the Merchant Center.

• Five new features around Shopping Campaigns have recently been launched to help advertisers rev up their campaigns heading into the holiday season.

Google explained that with the new Diagnostics tabs, troubleshooting in the Merchant Center will be much easier for companies. Errors and warnings on your products feeds and items are easier to find with the Diagnostics tab as seen below:

The Diagnostic tab also gives users:

• A historic report in order for the user to see when/what may have caused the disapproval of items or feeds.

• A downloadable report giving the reasons for the disapproval of each item or feed that has errors or warnings.

• Traffic and impact metrics in order to see what the issues have done to overall traffic and performance.

Google did not stop there. New ways to look into Shopping campaign statistics have also arrived. The following five features are now available to advertisers for Shopping Campaigns:

• Auction Insights Reports – Wonder if you have the same competition on the regular Search Network with your Shopping Campaigns? Find out what competitors are showing when your Shopping Ads show. This can even help your companies pricing for online products, as you can see where you can get the edge on your competition as holidays approach.

• Search Impression Share – The dimensions tab now allows advertisers to get granular with impression share metrics in order to find where you are missing out on impressions due to rank, and where you are missing out on impressions due to budgets.

• Device and Time Segmentation – This allows users to see which devices and at what times their shopping campaigns are performing.

• Bid Simulator Columns – This shows the projected metrics an advertiser would see had they been bidding differently.

• Flattened view of your product groups – Allows you to sort product groups within a single ad group by performance data in order to help with optimizations.

How Should I Organize My Adwords Account?

Now that you've mastered your first ad, you're on your way to creating many more, right? Before you do, it's important to know the three-layer design of AdWords. Understanding the relationship between these layers of your account will help you organize your ads, keywords, and ad groups into effective campaigns that target the right audience.

How AdWords is organized

AdWords is organized into three layers: account, campaigns, and ad groups.

1. Your account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information.
2. Your ad campaign has its own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.
3. Your ad group contains a set of similar ads and the words and phrases, known as keywords, that you want to trigger your ads to show.

Account Unique email and password Billing information

Campaign Campaign Budget Settings Budget Settings

Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ads Keywords Ads Keywords Ads Keywords Ads Keywords

Why you should organize your ads into ad groups and campaigns

When people are searching online and they type a word or phrase, they're looking for information that's closely tied to those words. For example, if Eric types digital cameras and he sees an ad for film reels, he probably won't click the ad.

To show ads that are relevant to the searches of people you're trying to reach, bundle related ads together with related keywords into an ad group. That way, all of your related ads can be shown to customers searching for similar things.

A collection of ad groups forms a campaign. Your campaign is the master control for your ad groups where you can choose:

• How much you're willing to spend on clicks or conversions from your ads
• Networks and geographical locations where you want your ads to show
• Other top-level settings that affect clusters of ad groups

Example

Let's say you own an online electronics store and you create an AdWords account so you can begin to advertise the products that you sell. At the account level you can choose who else you'd like to have access to your AdWords account and your preferred payment method. The top-most layer of your account might look as follows:

Account Online electronics store

You decided you want to advertise your inventory of televisions and cameras, so you create separate campaigns for each. Splitting your account into two campaigns ensures that you can devote at least half of your online advertising budget to each product area.

Campaign Campaign Televisions Cameras

Focusing on your camera campaign, you might create various ad groups for different types of cameras, like digital cameras and compact cameras.

For your television campaign, you might create an ad group for each type of television you sell, such as flat screen or plasma TVs.

Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Flat Screen TVs Plasma TVs Digital Cameras Compact Cameras

Within a particular ad group, you'll want to choose keywords that are closely linked to your ad text. For your digital cameras ad group, you might try keywords for different brands, models, and prices for the digital cameras you sell (make sure you follow our trademark guidelines).

Tying it all together, your overall account structure might look like this:

Account Online electronics store

Campaign Campaign Budget Televisions Budget Cameras

Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Flat Screen TVs Plasma TVs Digital Cameras Compact Cameras

Tip

A common method for organizing an AdWords account is to organize it the way your website is structured, with each ad group representing a different page or category on your site.

Seeing your account organization at a glance

Once you've created your first campaign, you'll see an "All online campaigns" panel appear on the left side in the Campaignstab of your AdWords account. From this panel, you can see at a glance how your campaigns are organized. Click on one of the campaigns and you'll see your ad groups as well. This folder structure also allows you to quickly move around your account.

Tips

• Start organizing your campaigns and ad groups as you create them. Reorganizing your account after you've created several campaigns and ad groups wipes out all the valuable data you've accumulated, possibly affecting how your ads perform.
• If you create a "Search Network only - Standard" campaign, you can add multiple ad groups on the "Create ad groups" page.
• Many accounts are best organized by creating one campaign with several ad groups, two or three ads, and 10-35 keywords within each ad group.

AdWords account limits

These are the limits for an AdWords account (although most advertisers don't reach them):

Campaign and ad group limits

• 10,000 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns)
• 20,000 ad groups per campaign
• 20,000 ad group targeting items per ad group (such as keywords, placements, and audience lists)

Ad limits

• 300 image/gallery ads
• 50 text and non-image/gallery ads per ad group
• 4 million active or paused ads per account

Targeting limits

• 5 million ad group targeting items per account (such as keywords, placements, and audience lists)
• 1 million campaign targeting items per account (such as geo target and campaign-level negative keywords)
• 10,000 location targets (targeted and excluded) per campaign, including up to 500 proximity targets per campaign
• 20 shared negative placement lists per account
• 65,000 placements per negative placement list
• 11,000 shared budgets per account
• 20 shared negative keyword lists per account*
• 5,000 keywords per negative keyword list*

Limits for business data and feeds

• 400K rows or feed items per account for dynamic ads, ad customizers, and extensions
• 100 user-generated feeds or business data sets per account

Ad extension limits

• 250,000 ad group-level extensions per account**
• 50,000 campaign-level extensions per account**
• 10,000 ad group-level extensions per campaign**

* If your ad groups are close to reaching their keyword limit, we'll place a notice in your account. Learn more aboutkeyword limits and how to create an effective keyword list. 

** For example, let's say you have 1 campaign with an extension containing 8 sitelinks. Then you add these same sitelinks to another campaign and also to 10 ad groups in a third campaign. Now, your account has 8 feed items, 2 campaign-level extensions, and 10 ad group-level extensions.