Keyword Research
Which keywords are most relevant to your campaign and are used by people to find your product/service/company?These are also relevant for the keywords that you will be using on the target website itself.
Can also be adjusted in the long run by checking the log and see what search keywords visitors used to reach the website.
Adwords also provides a quality score for keywords, so that you don’t waste your time on underperforming keywords.
Consistency between the landing page content and Adwords keywords is important. Quality search results are awarded with a higher quality score by Google.
Competitive Research
Which keywords are used by other companies / products in the same field (http://www.ispionage.com/) ?
Audience Research
Who are you targeting, what do people say about your brand / product / company already ?
Once you have defined these key corners of your campaign, you can move forward and actually setup your campaign in Google Adwords.
More on this, in the next small article.