Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Creating an Outline for Your Account

The best way to set up your account is to think of AdWords as an outline for your business, or at least those parts you'll be promoting via AdWords. Start by identifying the different campaigns, based on the value of each lead or sale.

In other words, every keyword in a given campaign should have roughly the same cost per action. In other other words, every visitor who arrives at your website from a particular campaign should be worth roughly the same amount of money, should they become a lead or make a purchase. That makes managing and optimizing your campaign using AdWords Editor (see Chapter 10) as simple as possible.

Explore this strategy with a hypothetical store that sells golf equipment, www.joesgolfshack.com. First, here's the typical (and wrong) way to start advertising: An advertiser who gets a $100 credit from Google jumps in without any planning and sets up a campaign called Golf Equipment. The advertiser then creates a single ad group called golf equipment, writes an ad, and throws in a bunch of keywords that all have to do with golf equipment:

• [Golf clubs]
• [Golf shoes]
• [Golf bags]
• [Golf carts]
• [Golf balls]
• [Golf bags]
• [Golf clothes]

And brand-name variations of all the above.

Every visitor from that campaign is taken to the www.joesgolfshack.com home page, and must navigate to the particular item they're looking for. The initial results of this campaign? Based on our experience, that advertiser will quickly send $100 back to ...