Ever fancied advertising on Google but then taken one look at their dashboard and thought putting the kettle on was a much better option! You can of course pay the experts to do it for you, but if you are like me, I always want to try things out first before deciding whether it is a fruitful marketing tool.

Now I am by no means an expert at this, but if I can set up an AdWords campaign, then so can you. Here are some things I have learnt along the way:

1) Set your budget – you can limit your daily spend. This one small thing can really take the fear out of experimenting. After all, the last thing you want in your inbox is a hefty bill from Google AdWords. Aside from your daily spend you can also chose to set the individual bid limit (this is how much you spend each time your advert appears).

Tip: to start with you can let Google set the bid for you, that way you can see the kind of price each keyword reaches.

2) Keywords – there really is no dark art to this, you just need to think like your client, what terminology do they use? Google AdWords has a keyword planner to help you research this. I found that the autofill in the Google search bar is a good way of finding out the variants people are searching for.

Tip: Double check that your chosen keywords appear on the webpage you are promoting (the landing page), Google rates relevance highly and will score you accordingly. You can see your rating by hovering the mouse over the speech bubble under ‘status’.

3) Negative keywords – you don’t want your valuable clicks wasted so add in those keywords for when you do not want your ad to appear. Take for example the keyword ‘job’. You would be amazed how much you can reduce wasting your ‘clicks’ by including this negative keyword (unless of course it’s a recruitment campaign!).

Tip: Google’s search bar autofill can help you here as well, start typing your keyword and see what Google comes up with.

4) Location based targeting – another frugal option, especially if you are targeting local businesses. You can set a radius from your office postcode, that way only people searching within your specified area will see your ad.

5) Scheduling – I’m guessing your target audience will not be Googling at 3am, and probably not on the weekend either, so set your ads to only appear within a set timeframe.
Tip: make sure you have the right time zone set though!

6) Ad Extensions – these are quick links that appear beneath your ad, you could add a link to a specific page, or your contact information.

And finally…

Check it regularly. As you go along patterns will emerge and you will learn which keywords are performing best so you can delete or add them as necessary. Don’t forget to do the same for the negative keywords as well. This fine tuning to target only those interested in your product/service is vital if you want to get as much value for money as you can.

Good luck!

Tags: UK200

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