Campaign structuring is step one, which I covered in my last article Internet Marketing Campaign Structuring Tactics. Now that you have a properly preconceived structure in mind, the campaign settings menu has many attributes that you will want to take advantage of.
Campaign Name – The campaign name is used to identify the contents you are marketing. Name this something that is memorable and helpful to you. Google does not consider the name of your campaign when determining pricing or quality score. You can name it “My Google Campaign 1” or anything else, but it’s helpful to name it something that you will understand what’s inside that campaign.
Start and End Date – This setting allows you to choose when the marketing will start and end. If you decide you want to set up a campaign for next month’s advertising you can set it to day 1 of the next month and allow it to run forever. This is really helpful if you are building out a holiday campaign such as Christmas. You can choose the campaign start date the day after thanksgiving, build out the campaign months in advance and schedule it to end a few days before Christmas.
Budgeting – Budgeting is controlled at the campaign level and you set it according to how much you want to spend per day. Now that we have a highly controlled campaign structures we can also have highly controlled spending. Budgeting is very important, and must be used for each campaign to ensure you do not blow a year’s worth of marketing expenses in one day. Since some industries have a really high search volume it can become very easy to spend $1k - $5k by the end of a day, so ensure that you only put what you can truly pay for.
Delivery Method – This allows you to pick how your ads are displayed over the course of a day. Since some industries have a high search volume, and you may have a very limited budget that cannot allow it to remain on 24/7, you can set a standard or accelerated method of delivery. Standard will attempt to space out the ads throughout the day, and accelerated will show the ads as quickly as possible. If you choose accelerated and have a budget of $50 you could end up only being shown from 12am – 1am, which is only 1 hour of non prime time marketing. If you choose standard delivery you may get some spurts of traffic during the busy hours of search.
Keyword Bidding – This feature is automatically set to Maximum CPC bidding. If you plan on being an aggressive internet PPC marketer you will want to use this option, since it will allow you the greatest control over your campaign. However if you cannot dedicated much time to optimizing your campaigns you are given a couple other options as well.
Budget Optimizer – If you choose this option you basically tell Google how much you want to spend in 30 days and they will control CPC clicks for you. They will attempt to drive as much traffic to your site as possible for the given monthly budget. However, the main issue is that you no longer control any variables such as positioning or bidding, and you are not really sure if you are getting the best price as possible.
Preferred Cost Bidding – If you are unsure what to bid for each keyword but you have a target CPC you want across your entire campaign then choose this option. Assume you want to pay $1 per click, simply put that into this setting and Google will send you traffic that costs this much per click. Again there are many issues with this since you are leaving everything up to Google at this point, and you really have to put complete faith in them that they will give you the best traffic at the best costs.
Conversion Optimizer – This setting is not available for all Google Adwords users, especially since your campaign has to have a prerecorded conversion volume of 200 within 30 days before this option is available. If you do happen to have this option available then you have a really high producing campaign. This setting in theory allows you to choose a CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and Google will basically only charge you on this factor instead of per click. The idea behind it is great however, you should always be looking to lower your CPA over time and changes to your creative’s and landing pages could really affect your conversion ratio. If you successfully increase your CR you will end up paying more and more to your campaign monthly budget.
Since we want to take advantage of Google and not the other way around, I recommend sticking with Maximum CPC bidding and have complete control over the outcome of your campaign.
Ad Scheduling – This feature allows your ads to be limited to a certain time of day. Since it is possible for limited budgets to spend their entire day’s worth of advertising within 1 hour of starting a new day, you might want to limit the ad exposure to prime time hours. However, if your budget is too small, and bids are too low for competitive prime time advertising, you may end of with no traffic at all.
Position Preference – Many times an advertiser will discover that only a specific position will get conversions. Say over a period of testing you discover position 3 and 4 have the highest conversion ratios and greatest ROI. You may want to limit your exposure to only these specified positions so that you only spend on highly targeted and convertible traffic. This is especially great if you have limited budgets and are able to make this discovery.
Ad Serving – It is best practice to always be running 2 ads for each Adgroup at all times. You should be testing against a current creative and attempting to beat it with another. Google allows you to optimize your ads based on better performing ad giving you the options of Optimize and Rotate. Optimize will display the better performing ad more often and rotate will always split the ad delivery by 50% each. If you choose optimize you could run into the problem if a good ad trumping any news ads you try to test against. Since the longest running ad will always have more performance data than a new one, testing against a new ad could become challenging. Using the Rotate evenly option allows for quicker A/B testing, but will require that you are more responsive to turning off underperforming ads.
Networks – Google gives you the option to display your ads on 3 different networks, Google Search, Google Network and Content Network.
Google Search – If you choose this option your ad will only be displayed on google.com and no other websites.
Google Network – The network is made up of all the syndicated search engines that Google has partnered with. The network includes sites such as AOL, EarthLink, shopping.com, ask.com and many more.
Content Network – The Google content network are sites published by individuals like me and you, who use the Google adsense program. Many of these sites are blogs, forums, review sites, and articles.
If you are doing a PPC marketing campaign you should use both the Google Search and Google Network Options for maximum exposure. NEVER INCLUDE CONTENT with the Google search and network options. The content network works very much differently and should not be combined. Content should always be contained within its own campaign, but more on this later.
Languages – Google gives you the option to target only the languages of which your visitors will understand. Sending a Chinese visitor to your English only website is a waste of cash, so be sure to only specify the languages your site includes.
Locations – This is your geo targeting options. This will allow you to restrict your ads to the geographic areas that your website caters to. If you sell to all of the USA you can select USA, but if you sell only to Los Angeles, then you might want to restrict ads only to that area. Google even allows you the option to only target specific cities, so if you wanted to only market you site to 10 cities within Los Angeles, you can go in a check mark each city you want. However as a special note on this feature, not all the traffic will be accurate since some visitors might be using a proxy to surf the web, or the ISP might route all their customers out of one location. A good example is AOL. All AOL users in the USA are routed out of Virginia, and if you target Virginia you might get a lot more traffic than expected.
This basically covers everything there is to know about Campaign structuring and setup. I hope you have found this helpful. If you have any questions, please be sure to comment, and as always, I will be quick to respond and answer your questions.
