There’s no denial about the benefits AdWords can achieve for your business, such as: wider, instant exposure, targeted advertising, in-depth reporting and more. However, before you get started, you need to ask yourself 3 questions: are people looking for your product? Do you have the budget for it (Google’s Keyword Planner tool can help predict what it will take) and thirdly – do you have the time to learn and invest in it? Even if you consider hiring a professional, AdWords campaigns are time-consuming.
Bottom line is, you need to be willing to experiment and analyze on a daily basis to achieve optimal results.
What does your company do? What product or service does it provide? Put down everything that’s directly related to your product/company, and then expand on it to create a broader scope where searchers can reach you. Also, a good place to start building your keyword list will be your website, which should include the main terms that describe your business and products. In addition, use Google’s Keyword Tool to find additional keywords your potential customers may use.
Think like a customer. If you were looking for a product like yours, what keywords would you use?
Account: You only have one AdWords account. You can several ad groups, but only one account. Every aspect of the AdWords interface takes place within the account. The account level is where you select your billing, and payment options.
Campaign: You can have multiple campaigns within an account, but don’t confuse it with multiple ad groups. The campaign is where you select geographic, language, network, and device targeting options. This is also where you set your daily budget. If this is your first time campaign, you might want to start with one.
Ad Group: There can be multiple ad groups per campaign. The ad group is where you can set your default bids. Ad groups can include keywords for the search network, and placements (and/or keywords, topics, interest categories, audiences) for the display network. The ad group also includes ads that will be shown when your targeting options match a user’s search query, or placement view.
Keywords: Keywords are what users input in the search engine to search for what they’re looking for. Google uses keywords to determine whether or not to display your ad to a user. A user sees your ad when the keyword, bid, and targeting options all combine to determine whether or not your ad ranks high enough in the auction for that ad to be shown. You can set individual bids for keywords and placements within the ad group. You can also change keyword match types, add or delete keywords, and add or delete negative keywords.
Ads: Ads are what the user sees, and (hopefully) clicks on. It’s a snowball effect: The higher the CTR (Click-through Rate) of the ad, the higher the CTR of the keyword which triggered that ad to show, the higher the CTR of the ad group the ad and keyword are in, the higher the CTR of the campaign that ad group is in, the higher the CTR of the account that campaign is in. If there is a problem at any level of the account, ads diagnosis should help provide some insight as to what that problem is.