This is a series of articles summing up some of the key points when planning a Google Adwords campaign.

1. Building up a Google Adwords campaign (1) – Research
2. Building up a Google Adwords campaign (2) – Starting the campaign

With the keywords defined, we can start with the setup of the campaign.

I am not actually going over each of the options provided by the Adwords interface, but I provide you with  an initial and fast first start. The Google Adwords documentation is very detailed and it makes no senses replicating that here.

Keyword Matching

Adwords provides multiple options to target your keywords in searches. For a first campaign I would suggest starting with an “exact match” setup.

5-10  exact and focused keywords should be enough to get you started. Those should be keywords people are most likely to search for. These keywords will be used for exact searches, which means the ad will only show if the exact keyword is used.

Adwords allows you to group your keywords for better tracking later on.

Group different keywords by:

1. Brand vs. non-brand keywords
2. Head keywords (most relevant) & longtail keywords (keyword combinations)
3. Seasonal keywords (before / after Christmas, New Year / Easter)

Monitoring

Monitor your campaign and eliminate keywords that are not being used and expand on the rest of them.

It makes no sense to keep keywords that underperform and do not help your conversion rate.

Segmentation / grouping of ads

Think about who you plan to target with your ads. Is your campaign targeting  the whole world, countries, languages or are any other things relevant. Think about how you want to group your ads.

1. Search, Desktop / Laptops, Mobile
2. Country specifics
3. Language specifics
4. Time of day

All of these points help to better target your ads and organize your keywords.

Now that you have setup and defined your keywords, we will talk about the ad copy itself in our next article.