How to set up Pay Per Click

August 25, 2011 0 Comments

I am often asked by clients how to set up pay per click and what the best practices are when setting up a Google Adwords account; this post covers what I tell them.

The secret to a good performing Google Adwords pay per click campaign is to make sure you set up your acccount correctly from the start. By following a simple set of guidelines your account will be easier to manage and it will also be easier to control your click costs and clickthrough rates.

Make sure you take notes and learn how to set up pay per click to get your account set up as I describe here if you want your PPC campaigns to have a chance of performing better for you.

How to set up your pay per click campaigns

An Adwords account consists of the following structure:

Campaigns
Adgroups
Keywords
Ads

If you think in terms of a hierarchy, Campaigns come at the top and have several settings that determine things like where your ads that are part of the campaign will be displayed, the type of bidding you will be doing, geographic location, ad scheduling and so on.

In Adwords you have the option of displaying your ads as part of the search network and display network (sometimes referred to as the content network). The search network option will show your ads on Google search results (and search partners if selected) whilst the display network allows you to target relevant third party websites to display your ads on.

It is good practice to create separate campaigns for the search and display networks if you want to target both. The reason being that your bidding strategy will be different on each and separate campaigns give you that flexibility.

How to set up your adgroups

Adgroups are created within a campaign and contain the keywords you want your ads to be found for together with the ads themselves.

Best practices for adgroups are to create a separate adgroup for each product, service or theme you are targeting. Some products and services can be broken down into several related products and services, again I would create a separate adgroup for each of these. You want your adgroups to be tightly themed around one idea, product/product type or service/service type.

Within each adgroup have a tightly knit number of keywords that relate only to the product/service the adgroup represents. Use negative keywords to avoid your ads being shown for inappropriate searches such as “free”. This can reduce your potential click costs and improve the quality of the clicks you get.

Avoid duplicate keywords within the adgroup or across adgroups, use phrase match keywords to begin with, especially if your budget is small.

How to set up your ads

Within each adgroup you can have one or more ads created. At the campaign level you can determine how each ad gets displayed if you have more than one in your adgroup.

I always recommend creating 3 ads in each adgroup so that you can test them against each other to see which one gets you the most clicks or the best clickthrough rate. If you want to split test the ads I suggest you select the option to rotate all ads evenly this will give you a better idea as to which ad gets the most clicks.

You should check your ads daily for the first couple of weeks and modify the poor performing ones to try and beat the best performing one. Eventually one ad will be unbeatable, usually after 4 weeks of testing and tweaking. At that point you should check your ad once a week to make sure it continues to perform.

So there you have it. Those are my recommendations for how to set up pay per click campaigns that will be easier to manage and will perform better for you.