Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Creating Your First Active Campaign

Google's campaign settings all default to getting you the maximum traffic to your website. We love traffic as much as the next PPC agency (we finally get to play in it), but too much of the wrong traffic is a recipe for not making money. Because you pay per click, showing your ads to millions of the wrong visitors is a costly proposition. We'd rather you throttled the fire hose down to a drinking-fountain level.

Or, to use another water metaphor, have you ever showered in a strange bathroom where you weren't used to the hot and cold controls? And you stood in the shower, directly under the shower head, and turned the water on full blast? Maybe you were prudent enough to turn on the water first, observe for steam, and then timidly stick a finger under the stream checking for a temperature that would cause neither burns nor shrinkage? If the latter, then you'll prefer our AdWords strategy to Google's defaults.

Adjust campaign settings

If you already set up campaigns to assess search volume, you can either repurpose those campaigns or set up new ones. To keep things simple, we take you through the creation of a brand new campaign so you can tweak Google's default settings just as you'll do every time you create a new campaign.

In Chapter 13, we share an advanced AdWords tactic that we call “campaign cloning,” in which you can quickly replicate campaign ...