Yesterday Rob explained the basics of GoogleAdwords. Today he looks at setting up your first campaign and some of the most common mistakes in setting up AdWords.

Today I’ll explain

How to set up an AdWords campaign

Let’s use a working example to make things clearer – let’s say you’re a financial adviser and you advise on mortgages, life insurance and investments among other things. Let’s also assume that you have set up your AdWords account and are ready to go.

First things first, you need to decide on some keywords – and by keywords I really mean key phrases, because searches on single words are rare and not very effective. Rather than just use the words you think are right, you need to do your research to find out what real people actually search on. A great free way to do this is to use the Google AdWords keyword tool. You simply key in some keywords and it shows you how many people used that term last month, and even suggests some alternatives.

You’ll probably come up with some phrases like ‘mortgage advice’, ‘life insurance advice’ and ‘investment advice’. You might also want to try some general phrases like ‘financial adviser leeds’ for example.

Where most new advertisers go wrong

Having got a keyword list together, most new advertisers now think the hard work is done. So they add all of their keywords in to one ad group, then they write one general ‘one size fits all’ advert, and send anyone who clicks on the ad straight through to the homepage. This is a quick way of doing it, but it’s the wrong approach.

What you should do

What you should do, is set up an ad group for mortgage advice and put all your mortgage advice keywords in there, and then write an ad that’s very specific to mortgage advice. People who click the ad should then go to a page about mortgage advice, not the homepage.  Repeat this same process for life insurance and investments and you’ll have a series of tightly focused ads, going straight to the information people are looking for.

Why you should do it this way

You may think that writing multiple variations of your ads is a lot of work for no gain. It is more work, but it’s well worth it and it will bring far better results. You may also think that sending people to your homepage is no big deal, but you would be surprised! Don’t forget that the reason people look online in the first place is probably because it’s quicker. If they don’t see what they want quickly they will hit the ‘back’ button and see ads from your competitors and click through to see if their site makes it any easier. Online consumers can be very impatient.

So, the easier you make it for customers to find what they need to know, the more successful you will be. As if that wasn’t reason enough to write relevant, focused ads and send people to the most relevant pages, there is another great reason to do it. Google likes you to advertise this way too, and will reward you with lower click costs if you do.

Google can also tell how useful people find your pages – if someone clicks your ad and then within seconds ends up back on the search results page, it will be clear to Google that your ad and website are not relevant enough. This can then affect the positions your ads appear in, and ultimately the cost you pay for every click.

In my next post I will explain briefly and in plain English, how Google’s bidding system works. You’ll then see how writing effective ads can make your campaigns a lot more effective.

By Rob Watson of www.clicktosale.co.uk

Come back tomorrow for the final part of this three-part-guide to Google Adwords