Getting the Most Out of Your Campaigns

If you want to set up one AdWords campaign, put it on autopilot, and never look at it again, feel free to skip this section. The changes I suggest will usually mean more, not less, work for you more decisions, more overseeing, more risk, even, if you drop the ball. Google gives you a vehicle with an automatic transmission that does your thinking for you. On highways it works fine, although it will never be as efficient as a well-handled manual transmission.

When you take it out for a race, though, you’re going to need precision control based on experience - something no computer can do for you. Ready to strap on your Adwords seatbelt and hit the track?

Changing the default campaign settings

From within your AdWords account, choose a campaign and click Edit Campaign Settings. You’ll see a page where you can change various settings for that particular campaign. Some of these options are shown to you when the campaign is born, while others hide on this page, waiting for you to find them. Let’s explore the options that you haven’t yet seen.

Delivery method

If you exceed your daily budget on a regular basis, you have two choices: tell Google to pace your ads evenly through the day (standard), or show the ads as often as possible until you run out of money (accelerated). Both methods can make sense, depending on the viewing patterns of your market. If your market is global, you probably want to show your ads evenly so you can get your message to your prospect in Singapore as well as the one in Saskatoon. If you run a local campaign for office workers, you may want to accelerate the ad showing if more people buy in the morning than the afternoon.

However, the choice begs an important question: why are you limiting your advertising spend? The concept of a budget for advertising doesn’t make sense if each ad is making money. If I offered you a dollar bill in exchange for your half-dollar, how many times would you want to complete that transaction? Does infinity sound about right to you? It wouldn’t make sense for you to say, “Let’s only trade my 50 cents for your dollar 24 times, because my daily budget is 12 dollars.”

Limit your daily budget for testing purposes, when you’re not yet profitable and you’re adjusting your keywords, ads, and Web-site sales process to become profitable. Another case where limiting your budget makes sense is if demand exceeds supply and you can only service so many paying customers. Or if you work for a big company used to advertising that’s not directly tied to results, and you’re given an ad budget. Or if you haven’t read this book and don’t yet know what you’re doing. (In fact, as you’re assessing the competition, if you find that their ads disappear and reappear on the Google search results page as you refresh the page, you can be fairly confident that a) they aren’t profitable yet; or b) they don’t understand results-accountable marketing and won’t be much of a threat to you.)

Keyword bidding

Keep the default here (Default bidding – maximum CPC) if you’re going to pay attention to your keywords and monitor your account on a regular basis. Don’t let Google optimize your budget.

Ad scheduling

Click the Turn On Ad Scheduling link and gasp to discover that Google gives you the option to schedule your ads by 15-minute increments, any day of the week. You can run your ads from midnight to 2:45 a.m. Monday, 3:00–3:15 a.m. Tuesday, and so on. By clicking the Switch to Advanced Mode link near the top of the page, you can even adjust your maximum bids by time period. You may want to be in a higher position on weekends, or just after The Daily Show, or during Monday Night Football, and so on.

Position preference

If you select the Enable Position Preferences check box and save your changes, you are taken to a position preference introduction page. When position preference is activated, you can designate a position range for each keyword, accomplishing two goals: your ad will not show for a given keyword unless it falls within that position range, and Google will try to keep your ad within that range, given your budget limitations. Essentially, position preference is like setting your maximum CPC, except you focus on the outcome (position) instead of the input (how much you’re willing to pay for that position). I prefer to control the money rather than the position since the only metrics that matter at the end of the day are money in and money out.

To play with position preference, drill down into the Keyword tab of an ad group, and make sure the settings are showing for each keyword. (If the cell at the top of the column reads Show Settings, click it.) Then click the Edit link in that column for the keyword whose position you want to set.