How to Structure an AdWords Account -- A Practical Guide
A walk-through of some of the core components in setting up your Google AdWords account, plus tips on particular AdWords features that can help improve your program's performance.
A walk-through of some of the core components in setting up your Google AdWords account, plus tips on particular AdWords features that can help improve your program's performance.
The initial structure and setup of your Google AdWords account will go a long way in helping you achieve your paid search goals — whether it’s new customer acquisition, lead generation, efficient e-commerce sales, or branding and awareness.
We’ll start with a few assumptions:
Before jumping in to the nuts and bolts of setting up your Google AdWords account, it will be helpful to conceptualize how your account will be structured. Synching up your product categories and subcategories to paid search campaigns and ad groups will help prepare you as you begin the process of actually setting up your account.
We’ll use a fictitious shoe retailer, Rob’s Running Super Store, to illustrate.
Campaigns are often best used to house a product category. The ad groups that fall underneath the campaigns will give you the flexibility to describe different attributes of the product that the campaign represents. Ad groups are also where you will be assigning a related set of keywords and ad copy that reflect the product and its attributes.
As you think through this, keep in mind that breaking out your campaigns and ad groups in a granular manner from the start will help keep your ad copy very targeted to the user’s search. The more targeted the ad copy you write for each ad group is to the user’s search, the more efficient your program will be.
Let’s dig in to Google AdWords and begin setting up the account.
The Basic Setup
You will need to set up a Gmail account, which will serve as the primary login to access AdWords. Once you log in, you’ll be asked to name your first campaign and set the locations that you want your ads to appear. You will have the ability to go back and edit this information should you need to at a later date.
You’ll also set your daily budget here. You can (and surely will) change this as time goes on and you gain learnings from your campaign.
If you plan on being very hands-on with the management of your account (which you should), then select Rotate to show your ads evenly. If you have three ads in an ad group, Google should serve these ads evenly. This will allow you to quickly identify under-performing ads as they will all receive similar exposure in Google.
Creating Ad Groups, Ads, and Keywords
Now that you’ve got the basics set for your campaign, it’s time to create your first ad group, which will fall under the campaign that was created. As mentioned earlier, ad groups will house your ads and keywords, and will be related to attributes of the product you’re advertising.
First, name your ad group.
Next, create your first ad. Five mandatory fields need to be filled out when creating your ad. There are limits of 25 characters for your Headline and 35 characters for your Description lines 1 and 2. Here’s a great reference guide for ad copy best practices.
Adding keywords is the next step. With the help of a keyword tool, you can populate your keywords into the open field in the interface or upload a keyword spreadsheet.
The upload method is great when you’re working with hundreds of keywords. To add keywords to our Men’s Running Shoes_Lightweight campaign, the keyword list might look something like this:
Notice the brackets around the keywords in the above example? We’re defining not only the keywords, but also match types, specifically the Exact match type in this example.
Test out multiple keyword-match type combinations to see the type(s) that help you achieve your goals. Here’s more information on best practices for keywords and match types.
Almost Ready to Launch
You’ve got your basic setting in place, your first ad group is created, your ads written, and your keywords loaded up, but there’s still an important step that needs to be completed before you launch: billing. You’ll be taken here after you create your ads and keywords.
This is a fairly straightforward process. Enter your billing information, and you’re ready to go.
This is Just The Beginning…
Setting up an account’s first campaign and ad group is the beginning to a much more comprehensive process of building multiple campaigns and ad groups, and most importantly optimizing the account based on your performance goals. The ongoing optimization and management process will ultimately determine how successful your account is.
Creating a sound account structure from the beginning will help make the entire management process much smoother. Fortunately Google makes the setup process pretty straightforward.
Hopefully the tips shared here will help you on your way to a successful account creation.