Activating Your Account

Are you ready to spend some coin and take your campaign live? Click Activate Account and complete the form that comes up.

To activate your account, follow these steps:

1. Use the drop-down list to select your billing country. The most common choices are at the top, followed by long list of just about every country there is.

2. Select your country from the Time Zone Country or Territory dropdown list, and then select your time zone from the Time Zone dropdown list. Google won’t let you change your time zone once you’ve set it, so be careful here. No second chances!

3. Enter the promotional code at the back of this book to recoup the cost of this book in free clicks.

4. Click the Continue button.

5. Choose a payment method.

Google charges your credit card on a pay-as-they-click system. Chances are, your only real choice here is a credit card: JCB, American Express, MasterCard, or Visa. I spent about 10 minutes searching for a country that allowed other options, and gave up after pretending to be from the USA, Canada, UK, Norway, Netherlands, China, Azerbaijan, and Brunei Darussalam. (If you happen to live in a country from which Google accepts PayPal or silver or yak cheese, please let me know for the second edition.)

6. Accept Google’s Terms and Conditions. Google’s long and complex Terms and Conditions constitute a legal contract, so read it carefully before agreeing. I’m not a lawyer, so you’ll get no guidance from me on this one. I just signed up and hoped for the best.

7. Click OK. You’ll be taken to a screen where you can fill out billing information. If you’ve ever bought anything online, that process will be straightforward and simple.

Google’s preferred phone-number format includes dashes, but no parentheses or periods:

919-555-3167

not

(919) 555-3167

Once you complete the form, your account is live and your ad should start showing on the right side of the Google search results page for the keywords you’ve selected.

After you complete your account setup, wait 15 minutes, and then browse to www.google.com and do a search on your keyword. Look at the top and the right of the search results page. If you don’t see your ad, scroll down and click the More Sponsored Links link. Keep going through the pages until you see your ad or you get to the end of the listings. This exercise gives you an idea of the competitiveness of your market. If you see a lot of competitors, don’t get discouraged. It means a lot of people think they can make money here. The information in this book will put you way ahead of most of them. When you see no or few competitors for a keyword, that may indicate a market that’s too small or too unresponsive.

When nobody can see your ad

If your ad doesn’t appear in the right column within 30 minutes of account activation, you may have a problem. Usually, correcting it is simple once you’ve figured out what it is. If your ad isn’t receiving any impressions (indicated by a 0 in the last row of the Impressions column), you may be a victim of one of the following:

- Editorial disapproval: Have you violated Google’s editorial guidelines? If you throw exclamation points around like crazy, promise “the best” or “the cheapest” stuff, capitalize like you’re screaming in a chat room, use copyrighted terms, offer cheap drugs from Canada or $25 Rolexes or nuclear-weapon-making instructions, or commit any of a dozen other infractions, your ad won’t show.

Google lays out their rules here:

• Editorial Guidelines: https://adwords.google.com/select/ guidelines.html

• Content Guidelines: https://adwords.google.com/select/ contentpolicy.html

- Low ad rank: Based on your monthly budget, which you set when you created the account, and your optional choice of a maximum bid price, which you can edit at any time, your ad may be relegated to page 19 of search results, the equivalent of scribbling it onto the back of a gas station receipt in yellow crayon and tossing it into a dumpster. In the Standard Edition, you can see exactly in what positions your ads show. At this point, you can try raising your minimum bid and monthly budget and see if that gets you onto the first page of search results.

- Poor keyword performance: If your keyword is pink slippers big enough to fit an African elephant or some other phrase that few or no people would ever search for, you could wait a long time before seeing a single click.

When just you can’t see your ad

Sometimes your ad is receiving impressions, but try as you might, you can’t find it yourself. Before you start humming the Twilight Zone theme, consider the possibilities described in the following subsections. Google thinks you’re searching outside your geo-targeting Remember when you first set up your account and you had to choose a geographic location within which to advertise? Google may be interpreting the information it’s reading on your computer (specifically, its Internet Protocol [IP] address, to mean you yourself are outside of your targeted area). IP addresses are loosely connected to different parts of the world. To find out where the Internet thinks you are, go to ipligence.com and scroll down until you can see the map at the bottom right.

There are many reasons why Google could get confused about where in the world you are. First, IP addresses aren’t exact they’re not like Zip or postal codes. Second, if you are connecting to the Internet through a service that’s somewhere other than where you are, Google can be misled. Third, little green aliens from outer space sometimes take over my fingers when I’m typing stuff I really don’t know anything about so that the paragraphs look long enough to be authoritative.