How to Properly Setup an Adwords Campaign…Part I
April 25th, 2008 by 
Amit
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this lately and I wanted to clear up a lot of confusion that people have about setting up their Adwords campaigns.
Your first job is to build an effective keyword list, I’m not going to go into the details about that in this post. For starters, I highly recommend Google Keywords Tool, they just recently improved it, it will give you an amazing keyword list and best of all it’s free!
Also check out this post I did about keyword research.
FILTERING OUT LONG TAIL KEYWORD
If you do keyword research like I do, you’ll probably end up with anywhere from several thousand to ten of thousands of keywords for your niche.
Now I know a lot of you will go out and immediately try to upload ALL those keywords into your Adwords account.
That’s a BAD idea.
Here’s why it’s a bad idea :
- If you’re a newbie ppc marketer you’re going to hit your account (50k keywords) and/or campaign (10k keywords) limits REALLY fast. And you’d better have some substantial history and adspend on Google before you try to get those limits removed.
- The first 2 weeks of launching a new campaign is when Google pretty much determines your campaign quality score. If you have a TON of low search volume long tail keywords in your new campaign right off the bat then Google will penalize you with a lower campaign quality score (these low volume search terms put a load on their system, that’s why they penalize you).
When you first launch a campaign on Google you only want to bid on mid to high volume keywords FIRST. Once you’ve build your campaign history and quality score up over a period of 2 weeks then you can add in all the long tail keywords.
Here’s what also cool about this approach : it allows you to test & optimize your campaign on a small scale before you ramp it up with 1000s of keywords. In the next post I’ll show you exactly how to do this.
Now you may be thinking : “Amit, this sounds great, but how do I filter out all the high to med volume keywords from my huge freakin’ keywords list?”
Simple, use Ad Sage, it’s a nifty little toolbar addon to Excel that gives you the search volume of each keyword on your keyword list (on MSN search) in the past 6 month. For your initial campaign launch, bid on only the keywords that have had at least 1 search in the last 6 months.
In the next section we’re going to segment that keyword list…
SEGMENTING YOUR KEYWORDS
In most markets it makes sense to break up your keyword list into seperate categories.
Let me give you an example: let’s say your promoting a site about bedroom accessories, you probably want to break up the keyword list into these categories like these :
lamps
sheets
pillows
furniture
brand name (if you can bid on that)
competitor brands
etc
Once your done breaking up your keyword list into categories, put each category of keywords into a separate Excel worksheet. Make a miscellaneous category for whatever keywords don’t fit into any other category.
Here’s an important key to getting a good conversion rate and high quality score:
Build a separate landing page for EACH and EVERY category that specifically targets that category. Don’t just dynamically insert variables onto the page, make sure each page has unique and highly relevant content. Your landing page about pillows, better be about pillows and nothing else!
If you’re direct linking, see if you can deep link each category to a relevant page about that category. If you’re bidding on specific product names, deep link each product to its sales page.
Next Time I’ll show you how to setup your ads, choose appropriate domain names, setup conversion tracking, and build your campaign using Efficient PPC.
adwords campaign setup efficientppc keyword research segmenting keywords
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
Thanks Amit, This was a great post! I have been promoting most of my offers through facebook and have just recently really taken a dive into adwords. This post really has a few great tips that I was unaware of. Keep posts like this coming
Amit,
Good post man!
Great post. Look forward to the followup and that case study you mentioned before too.
I’m a newbie to the ppc game and it’s just been sinking in how to really get lots of effective keywords. It has more to do with “thinking” rather than using some keyword tool. Like thinking of lateral keywords to your main keyword.
However, I never knew about the campaign being judged for a quality score. I thought it was just the keywords. By the way, I knew there was some cap on the number of keywords, but I still don’t know where they bother to tell you the limits.
Anyway, my question is this. Wouldn’t it make sense to gather your keywords and group them into similar channels or segments and then take each group of keywords and dump them into Google’s keyword traffic estimator tool? This is assuming your using Adwords for your PPC campaign.
Google will show you a graphic to represent search volume, but when you export it to Excel they convert the graphic bar into numbers. Use Excel to sort the keywords by the search volume, then copy and past them into your campaign’s adgroup.
That just seems like a better option, then using MSN’s search volume data.
Just a newbie’s two cents.
Peace.
I had never heard of Ad Sage but I will check it out. Segmenting keywords into categories and making very targeted landing pages is what I always do too and it makes a world of a difference.
Great Post Amit. Could you advice which type of offers would convert well on Facebook.
Best post you’ve had in a while. Good info, keep it up.
Excellent post Amit. Keep this kind of posts comming.
Another killer NO-hype post Amit… your straight to the point and keep it real… we appreciate your contribution back to the community.
Great post Amit. I’ve been at this awhile and keywords and ppc still confuse me. Do you think you could do a post about using facebook. Thanks, keep up the good work.
Ooh, excellent lesson, Amit. The education resumes in earnest.
What about initially running ads only in English speaking countries but excluding USA and Canada. This keeps the CPC lower, while experimenting with ad copy to maximize CTR. Then when the ad copy is pulling well, switch on USA and Canada traffic.
Also, if the first few variations of ad copy don’t work well it may be better to delete that campaign and start a new one, so as not to inherit the poor quality score of the failed ad variations.
Amit, I’d really like to see more detail of how you write ad copy. I’ve seen much about KW research and management, but nothing on writing ads.
Yes I like to put each of my categories into a separate ‘ad group’ and at the very least have a landing page for each ad group. It takes time, but you’ll be rewarded in the end.
What do you primarily promote leads or do you market products??
great post! very helpful. i am still a little confused on landing pages, but i think ill get there.
im looking forward to your next post, because i never know the level of granularity to implement on my adwords groups, basically, i dont know how specific each adwords group should be in terms of keywords
Hey Amit-
I agree with the last post-more information on landing pages would be helpful.
Love these posts, keep them coming
Awesome post!! A lot of people can learn from this if they take the time to actually set up an adwords campaign up just right. The part that I really want to comment on more then anything is the last section where you talk about creating a separate landing page for each section and category. YES!!! Finally others see the light!! This is not only a way to bump up your quality score with google and get a friendly nudge from them, but look at the benefit to your business that it can bring on another level. More relevant ads for that precise target market, and lander suited just for them…and not only are you bumping your QS with google, but you’re also putting yourself in a position to increase your conversions. Great formula….come on guys…put in the extra effort…it’s well worth it!
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Is there a similar add-on for pre-Excel 2007?
I’m going to apply your tips. Thanks for sharing, appreciate it!
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Hi Amit
I’ve just been chatting with a Google representative as I wanted to get my account limits increased. I’ve already spend thousands on Adwords so I didn’t think this would be an issue. She refused, point blank, to increase the restriction of 100 adgroups per campaign. She said that no advertiser can have more than 100 adgroups per campaign. How can I apply your method if I am limited to only 100 adgroups? If I’m using 1 kw per adgroup this only gives me a total of 300 keywords (broad, phrase and match). This is very frustrating as I have developed a keyword list of over 25000 keywords.
Awesome information Amit! Learning lots from your website and looking forward to your future articles.
Thanks for this website.
Shiv
Thank you very much
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Although I have almost 10 years of experience in IT, I am new to Adwords and the Internet marketing world. Your blog is awesome, I have learnt heaps!
Thanks amit.
Really great post~! I appreciate it! going to subscribe your RSS. Thanks~!