How to set up your first Adwords campaign

This is a short guide to the key steps - Google themselves provide quite a bit of help and it's not hard to work out what to do, but don't accept their 'default' settings automatically - it's in their best interest that you spend as much money as possible - and this isn't always in your best interests!

First Steps

1. If you haven't got one already, you will need to set up a Google Account
2. If you have got one, sign in
3. Sign up for an Adwords Account

Once you have an Adwords Account you can setup your first campaign but there is one thing you need to do before you start.

Brainstorm your keywords

1. Work out what keywords your audience uses – and which are going to be profitable for you! You might want to record these in a spreadsheet or similar.  There are a variety of keyword research tools for you to choose from.
2. Group keyword phrases together under a single 'head' keyword. For example your head keyword might be 'Chocolate recipies' and your keyword phrases grouped under this would include "Chocolate cake recipies"
3. Research how much volume each keyword gets and suggestions for more using Google's keyword Tool.

Once you know what keywords you want to target, it's time to...

Set up your Adwords campaign

1. Log into Adwords and click on "create a new campaign"
2. You will be asked to set general settings:

• Name the campaign – make it meaningful!
• Campaign Type - Select Search network only
• Select devices to target (this will depend on your audience – leave as default to being, you can always change it later)
• Locations – select "let me choose" and enter country into the field or you can select a number of areas via Advanced Search
• Set your budget (x dollars per day)

3. Click on Save and Continue

4. You will then have to setup a new Adgroup first - an Ad group is a group of one or more ads grouped together with a set of keywords that will trigger the Ads

• Enter Ad Group Name
• Create your first Ad
• Select Your keywords

5. Click on Save and Continue

6. You then need to setup your billing details (but can do it later if you wish).  Billing to your credit card is by far the easier- but watch your budget so you don't get a scare at the end of the month!

Google provide tips and links to detailed instructions and help along the way, so follow their guide. 

Once you are done

Once you have setup your first campaign you should go back and fine tune it:

• Group small numbers of similar keyword phrases together under ad groups, then target your ad text to those keywords.
• Change the default keyword match type to phrase or exact, unless you want to do a bit of 'fishing' first. Broad match types will get your ads displayed for all sorts of wild and wonderful search phrases and can result in wasted clicks.
• Have a least two ads per ad group and test which one does better
• Monitor your campaign, and focus on improving the quality of your ads to lower cost per click and increase click through rates.
• Add negative keywords to filter out searches you know you don't want – such as 'cheap' or 'free'.
• Set up conversion tracking if you are confident with Google Analytics (or your reporting tool) – you can't improve what you can't measure.
• Don't set it and forget it – monitor performance to test what ad text works best, what keywords get better click rates.