Before you can start thinking about optimising an Adwords account, you need to understand how it all fits together.

An Adwords account is like a set of Russian dolls; open each element, and you find a smaller one.

An account comprises one of more campaigns, each made up of a number of Ad Groups, containing a set of keywords that in turn can have different match types.

One of the most common mistakes made in Adwords is to fail to utilise the functionality that this structure provides. An account comprising a single campaign, containing a single Ad group, with every keyword appearing with just one match type, is almost certainly not optimal. This is a structure that I’ve seen far too often when assessing accounts that advertisers have created themselves – they don’t understand the elements, so they tend to ignore them.

So how should it be done?

Accounts

Unless you have multiple websites, each with a significantly different offering (in terms of products, services, or general purpose), then you should only have a single account. If you run multiple accounts bidding on the same keywords, you will display multiple times for that search result. Unless your websites fit into the exceptions above, this is called double-serving, and will get you told off by Google.

Campaigns

Your account comprises a number of campaigns, each of which has its own budget.

There is a clear downside to using different campaigns if you have a tight budget. If one campaign runs out of money, and another has a surplus, then some of your adverts won’t appear even though you have money left over. Campaigns cannot take budget from other campaigns, so you should never split your account without a good reason.

There are times when it is absolutely essential to run separate campaigns, however. Suppose you are selling toasters, and advertise on both PC’s and mobile phones. It’s very likely that you’ll want to bid on ‘toasters’ on both, but the performance is likely to be different (users are more or less likely to buy), so you’ll want to make a different bids. In order to put different bids on the same keyword for different media, you’ll need separate campaigns.

Another example would be if you know that your campaign performs completely differently at different times of the day, or on different days of the week. Google provides you with basic tools to manipulate your budgets and bids at different times, but you are generally far better off running different campaigns.

Finally, most of your targeting settings are set at campaign level. As we’ll see in a later blog, the Display Network works completely differently to the Search Network, and so you need to manage it completely separately. The same is true if you are running more advanced options like Remarketing.

If budgets are unlikely to be an issue, you may want to use different campaigns to target different subsets of your products, or different types of searcher.

For example, one of our advertisers has a campaign for each product type (dresses, trousers etc). Another has separate campaigns to try to target males and females, based on the type of searches that they enter.

The first example allows them to have an additional level of grouping, so that they can have adverts targeting different clothes styles and sizes – but more about that later.

The second example allows the advertiser to try to manipulate the gender split visiting their site. As they are a dating agency, this is a very powerful tool to them.

Ad Groups

Every Ad Group has its own set of adverts. You can also set bids at Ad Group level (this is recommended – again, this is covered in detail in a later blog).

As I said in the first part of this series, Adwords has become seriously competitive. If your advert is competing with ten others for the users’ attention, it is absolutely critical to make it as relevant as possible.

I ran a search for Panasonic DVD Players, and these are the nine results that appear above the fold:

Of these nine adverts, eight mention Panasonic, four mention DVD players, and only three mention Panasonic DVD Players.

Two of the adverts aren’t even for DVD Players!

So which would you, as a user, be likely to click on? I’d suggest either M&S, Pixmania (though this is B2B only, so perhaps not) or Shopcompare.

It’s slightly ironic, then, that none of these sites actually sell Panasonic DVD players!

So what’s happened here? We’ll look at keyword selection and matching types in a later section, but it appears that companies like Superfi and Play have put all of their Panasonic keywords into one Ad Group, and Argos have done the same with their DVD Players keywords.

The lesson here is to make sure that your adverts relate to your keywords. The more similar your keywords are within an Ad Group, the more targeted your advert will be; the more disparate they are, the less targeted your advert will be.

So group your keywords carefully. You’ll get better click through rates, and you’ll also be able to manage your bids more effectively.

Keywords

Finally, select your keywords based on what you actually sell! I’ll look at matching types, which have probably caused the downfall of Panasonic and EBay above, in a later episode.

Whenever somebody searches for something, clicks on your advert, but doesn’t buy anything, you’ve wasted your money. If you bid on products or services that you don’t sell, you’re in danger of wasting your money. If your advert is accurate, you’ve got a fighting chance, but it’s still not a good idea in the majority of situations

Setting Up Your Campaign

Before you switch your computer on, you need a credit or debit card. Google will accept bank transfers as well, but if you do this, you’ll have to pre-pay, and every time there’s a problem, your adverts (and customers) will disappear.

You’ll also need to dig out your VAT details – the rules are probably different from country to country, but in the UK, you’ll need to declare your own VAT, as Google Europe is based in Ireland.

You also need to pick your daily budget - this is entirely up to you, but if this is your first campaign, it’ll probably take a little while to make it profitable, so don’t spend more than you can afford. Once your campaign’s making money, of course, things will change and you can spend as much as you like (subject to cashflow limitations).

Once you’ve got these things, you need to create your list of keywords, and group them into Adgroups. Then write some adverts for each Adgroup, pick appropriate landing pages and set your daily bids. I’ll go through each of these stages in the next part.

In case you missed my last post, on Google AdWords, here is the link: http://www.epiphanysearch.co.uk/blog/google-adwords-expert-agency-secrets-revealed-part-one/. Look out for next week’s post on Thursday!