Before You Create Your Account

It is easy with AdWords to start choosing keywords and writing ad copy, but do not start by getting caught up in the details. The time you spend doing keyword research can be wasted if you do not first lay out a plan based on your AdWords goals.

Follow this list of items you need to accomplish before working within your AdWords account.

List Your Marketing Goals The first step in creating a successful AdWords account is to determine your marketing goals. Goals are the reasons why you are advertising. If you do not have goals, it is impossible to tell if you are reaching your goals or wasting money. For a full recap of setting goals, please see “Setting Your Marketing Goals” in Chapter 13.

Always be as specific as possible. To make more money or to get more leads is not a goal. To increase your ROI from 200 percent to 240 percent or to receive 17 new leads a day from Miami are examples of well thought-out goals.

Set a priority for each goal. Do not list them as high, medium, and low. Instead, list them in order of importance. By making the hard choices of putting them in order to begin with, it is easier to determine budgets and account organization.

Keep in mind your AdWords campaign settings as you create these goals, as you may want to tailor your goals based on your potential exposure. For example, if you are selling insurance in Florida, you might have one goal for the state of Florida and another goal for Miami.

Determine Your Budgets Set a budget for every goal you listed. AdWords budgets are kept at the campaign level. The minimum campaign budget is $1 per day. Therefore, ensure that all of your goals can support a $30 per month spend.

Refine Your Starting Goals Based on Your Budget If you find that your budget is not high enough to support all of your goals, then you have two choices. One is to combine some goals. For instance, instead of having one goal for Florida and another for Miami, combine them into a single goal when you start. However, you should still plan to separate out these goals in the future. Periodically review and refine your initial goals.

The second option is to set a budget for each goal in descending order of importance. Once you have hit your maximum allowed spend, each goal without a budget will not be used for now (Figure 17-1). Review these goals in the future to see if you can allocate them some portion of the budget.

Determine Account Organization Once you have a list of goals and budgets, it is time to determine how to organize the campaigns in your account. See “Structuring Campaigns to Achieve Business Goals” in Chapter 14 for the in-depth details of account structure.

Install Conversion Tracking For every goal you want to track, set up conversion tracking. As the conversion tracking script is tied to the entire AdWords account, when you change your account structure, add or remove ad groups, or make other changes, the conversion tracking script will continue to work. See “AdWords Conversion Tracking Code” in Chapter 13 for details on creating and installing conversion tracking.

Figure 17-1: Allocating budget by goal importance

By installing conversion tracking before creating the account’s details, you can determine if the site can support conversion tracking or if new pages need to be created. In addition, you will become more familiar with the content management system (CMS) of your website, which is necessary when choosing landing pages and keywords and determining testing methods. By determining if there are any issues before creating the account, you will save yourself from having to change all the landing pages if a new CMS is installed or new pages are created.

Please note: If you are using alternate conversions such as phone calls, create a method for tracking these conversions.

Install Analytics Finally, choose and install an analytics system. Google Analytics is a free analytics solution; however, based on your data needs you may require a more sophisticated system. The advantage of Google Analytics is that it is intimately tied to Google AdWords with a minimum amount of work.

After you have determined your goals, budgets, and installed tracking scripts, it is time to build the AdWords account.