Setting up your first, or indeed any, AdWords account can be daunting. There are so many things to remember: location, keywords, networks, adgroups, ads, bids, budgets… the list goes on. But don’t worry, Team Hallam have put together a checklist of the things you need to remember when setting up your AdWords account. It’s surprising how many of these get overlooked, but they’re all pretty important points that can have a major impact on your account performance.
You can download our checklist here:
http://www.hallaminternet.com/assets/AdWords-Checklist.pdf
1. Creating your AdWords account
(If you already have an AdWords account, skip to step 3)
You should have Google Analytics set up on your site (if you don’t, do it NOW), so if you’re creating your account, use the same email address & password as you do for your Analytics. This keeps everything in one place and makes tracking account performance much easier. You can link your AdWords with your Analytics if they’re in different accounts, but it’s easier to have everything in the one account.
Go to Adwords and use your Analytics details to sign up. (Note: this will only work if the email address is not linked to any other AdWords account). You will then be asked to select your Time Zone & currency preferences. You can’t change this once it’s set, so make sure you pick the right ones!
2. Billing
This is where you input your payment details. Go to “Billing preferences”, and select the country where your billing address is located, enter your billing address, choose your payment method and enter the relevant details.
3. Network
The Settings tab is one of your new best friends, but it’s amazing how many accounts we see where the owner has just kept the default settings. Remember, settings are at campaign level, so anything you change here will affect your whole campaign.
Most advertisers will not want their ads to show on the Display Network. Don’t have your campaign showing on all networks at once. The Display Network will skew the data and give you a teeny tiny clickthrough rate. Make sure this is set to “Search Network only”. If you do want to use Display, set up a separate campaign for this.
4. Locations & languages
If you are a local business or you only want your ads to show in certain areas for any reason, then you need to look at this section. Location targeting lets you target your ads by country, city or radius (e.g. 20 miles around Nottingham). You can set as many location targets as you want/need.
Likewise, you can exclude certain areas from your targeting.
5. Daily budget
Enter the amount you want to spend per day here. If you’re working on a small budget, you’ll need to keep your keyword lists pared down to avoid spreading your budget too thin.
6. Bids
With AdWords, you can either set your bids manually, or allow AdWords to maximise the clicks you get for your budget. Managing bids manually allows you more control, but automatic bidding can work well too. Try both to see which gets you the best results.
7. Devices
Decide whether you want to target all devices, just computers or just mobile devices. If you want to target mobile devices, you should set up a separate campaign for this. But unless you have a mobile , or mobile-friendly site, it’s best to stick to just computers.
8. Delivery method
Set this to “Standard” to ensure your ads are delivered evenly throughout the day, and you don’t burn through your budget in the morning.
9. Ad rotation
If you’re split testing your ads (which you should be!), this means that your different ad variations will show at different times. Choose “Rotate evenly”, at least at first, to get an idea of which ad variations are working best.
10. Ad scheduling
This is a great feature of AdWords. It lets you switch your ads on and off at certain times of the day, or on certain days of the week, so you’re not wasting budget on clicks that happen when you’re not open, for example. You can also adjust your bids for different times of day.
11. Keyword match types
One mistake many new advertisers make is using only one match type for all the keywords in their account. This is usually broad, although I have seen all phrase match and all exact match accounts before. There are four match types in AdWords:
- broad
- phrase
- exact
- broad modified
12. Negative keywords
Negative keywords are your other new best friends. Without these, if you’re using broad or phrase match keywords, you may find your ads showing for completely unrelated queries (PPC Hero does a great regular feature on crazy search queries their PPC Managers find), which may be turning into clicks from people who are never going to convert. This can have an impact on your Quality Scores. Make sure you have comprehensive Negative Keyword lists on all your campaigns. You can set them at campaign level (great for general phrases, such as job searches or “what is…” type queries) or at the adgroup level (excellent for making sure there’s no competition between adgroups for similar queries). You can also create and add lists of negative keywords in your “Shared Library”. There are some really good ready-made general lists out there.
13. Display URLs
Your Display URL is the URL that shows in your advert. This does not have to be a real URL (see Destination URL) so it can be so much more than just www.yourwebsite.co.uk. Again, you’re limited with characters (35), so lose the www, add some capitalisation, and give that URL a nice, keywordy slug that people are going to look at and think “that page is where I need to go”. So, say you’re advertising your cake-making business, and you have an adgroup for cupcakes. Instead of: www.yummycakes.co.uk, you could have YummyCakes.co.uk/Cupcakes
14. Destination URLs
These are the actual pages you’re sending your visitors to, so you need to make sure they’re the right ones. Check, check and check again, to make sure that you’re not sending your visitors to your cupcakes page from an ad for wedding cakes.
15. Conversion Tracking
Last but not least, conversion tracking. Without this, you won’t have the foggiest idea how well your campaigns are performing. You can find this under the “Tools and Analysis” tab. Here you can set your conversions and generate the code to go on your website. Paste the code into the relevant page (e.g. the “Thank you” page after an email sign up or purchase), and you’re done!
Remember, just take your time, and check, check and check again that everything’s set up correctly. And once your campaign is live, don’t be tempted to make changes too quickly. Unless something is very obviously wrong or not working, wait until you’ve got a good enough set of data to make informed decisions about any changes you make. 7-10 days is a good amount of time, usually.
