How To Set Up An Effective Adwords Campaign

Paid traffic can be a great way to test an affiliate product before launching a full sales campaign. Being able to turn traffic on and off like a tap allows you to quickly test different keywords for leads and conversions. I have been using an adwords campaign to help drive traffic to my list building report, with some success.

I will quickly go through how I set up my campaign. I am not using the google content network at the moment as that needs to be set up in a different way.

At this point you should already have your keywords, I showed you how I found keywords to target in this post.

Each keyword should go in it’s own adgroup. And within that adgroup I will have all 3 match types, broad, phrase and exact, for that keyword phrase.

Each adgroup runs 2 different ads so that you can continually split test the ads in your campaign as it runs.

When writing your ads, it’s a good idea to include your keyword in the ad. It can help with your quality score and it also shows up in bold in the ad, which will naturally draw the eye of the person searching.

If your domain name is short enough you can also put the keyword in front of the display URL in this format: KeywordPhrase.YourDomain.com so your keyword will appear again and be bolded.

You should also capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad. There has been much testing on this topic and although some people disagree, most will tell you that it helps to draw the eye to the ad. Another way of drawing the eye is using symbols like ?, %, TM symbol, and numbers.

Emotional response words are good to use in your ads, like ‘free’, ‘tips’, ‘tricks’, ‘secret’, ‘facts’, ‘learn’ and many more.

During my keyword research I came up with an estimate of cost per click to get in the top 3 positions. I typically set my broad match keyword bid to 50-100% of this estimate, depending on how low the estimate was. This is because the broad match is typically less targeted so I want to pay less for my clicks. I will then set exact and phrase match to 2x my original estimate. I prefer to start higher and reduce the bids than the other way around.

Other settings I use are to show the ads as quickly as possible, and rotate the 2 ads evenly so you can split test them properly.

Finally I set up conversion tracking within adwords. I’m not going to go in to detail here how I set all that up, it’s pretty straight forward if you look at it in adwords. But it is very important to know which keywords are getting clicks, sign-ups and sales.