You can use a Google AdWords account to purchase pay-per-click advertisements on the Google.com search engine and the Google Search Network. The Google Search Network consists of Google partner Web sites, including Web sites such as AOL.com, Netscape.com, and Ask.com. There are three levels within a Google AdWords PPC account: account, campaign, and ad group. An account is a unique e-mail address and password with unique billing information. Your account is targeted to the time zone and currency you select. An advertiser can have multiple accounts linked together into a Client Center.

The second level of a Google AdWords PPC account is the campaign level. Each of your accounts can contain various campaigns. Think of a campaign as a strategy. One campaign may be for keywords related to your trademark; another campaign may target a certain demographic or relate to a seasonal offer. You can have up to 25 campaigns in your Google AdWords account. Each of your PPC campaigns has start and end dates, daily budgets, Google Network Preferences, and language and location targeting. Google Network Preferences allow you to choose whether your ads are shown on Google syndicate partner Web sites such as AOL.com, and also allow you to designate your participation in the Google Content Network. Usually one campaign is sufficient for a smaller advertiser; two or more are appropriate for a larger site. Each of your campaigns contains your unique ad groups.

The third level of a Google AdWords PPC account is the ad group level. An account can have up to 100 ad groups. Ad groups can contain hundreds of keywords and complementary ads that show when those keywords are searched.

Finally, you have keywords and ad copy. The number of people who see your ads depends on how popular the keywords are that you choose. The amount of clicks those keywords generate depends on the ad copy you write to accompany the keywords.

Although this chapter focuses mainly on Google AdWords, this platform is not the only choice for PPC advertising.

Yahoo Search Marketing is Google’s closest competitor and offers many of the same features as AdWords. Many Web searchers became accustomed to using Yahoo years ago and have not switched over to Google yet. This group may not ever see your ads on Google.com or any of Google’s distribution partners and are therefore worth targeting with Yahoo’s PPC platform.

Microsoft’s MSN provides a PPC advertising platform called adCenter. Although MSN adCenter is a distant third compared to Google and Yahoo in terms of search-engine market share, the MSN search engine is becoming more widely used because the MSN Live search toolbar is installed on many home computers and Web browsers as part of the Microsoft Windows environment.

The latest search engine to aggressively move into PPC advertising is Ask.com. Although Ask.com remains one of Google’s syndication partners, the company recently launched a competing PPC advertising platform called Ask Sponsored Listings, located at http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com. Ask Sponsored Listings provides a valuable resource for advertisers with a smaller budget and for others looking to capture market share outside of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Create an AdWords Campaign

You should be prepared to create your first campaign, ad group, text ad, and keywords when you open an AdWords account for the first time. The system requires new advertisers to not only enter basic Web site information, but also complete the steps required to display an actual PPC advertisement before the account creation process can be completed. There is a one-time charge of $5, which you should be prepared to pay with a major credit card prior to account activation. When you first begin to create your account, you can create a Starter Edition or a Standard Edition AdWords account. The examples in this book use a Standard Edition account; choose a standard account to ensure that your screen matches those depicted in the step-by-step instructions.

The Google AdWords sign-up wizard takes you through the steps necessary to create your account. Once your account is created, you must create a campaign. AdWords campaigns allow you to configure numerous features such as the daily budget for the campaign, where your advertisements are displayed, and the language you are targeting.

On the campaign level, you may also decide whether to show your ads on the Google Content Network. You can also choose to display your advertisements at certain times of the day by using the dayparting feature. When creating your first campaign, you must also create your first ad group. To do this, you must create an ad variation, select a group of keywords associated with that ad, and configure your maximum cost-per-click values. Once your first ad group is created, you can always go back and generate more ad groups within that same campaign.

If you already have a Google account such as Gmail or iGoogle, you should use it as your AdWords login. Otherwise, choose a secure e-mail address that you use often and create a password with at least seven characters, both letters and numbers.

You can edit your information, with the exception of currency and time zone, at any time after you verify your account. According to Google, “AdWords is built for change” and it is okay to make mistakes. This is true not only for changing billing information, but also for any of your PPC advertising campaigns. For example, Google provides numerous tools that allow you to make quick edits or mass edits to any of your advertisements. Moreover, with Google you can easily locate ads that are not appearing and quickly determine what needs to be done in order for the ad to show live on the Google search engine.

Note that Google is the largest of all PPC advertising platforms. The other top-tier PPC platforms include Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com. Second-tier search engines include Miva.com, LookSmart, Kanoodle, and Enhance.com, among others.

There are many adjustments that you can make to your campaign settings to take advantage of the advanced functionality offered by Google AdWords. On the most basic level, you can set a campaign ending date if you are only interested in running your campaign up to a certain date. On a more advanced level, you can choose to set different maximum bids for clicks generated at different times of the day.

Be sure to accurately set a campaign daily budget and select whether you want your budget spent on a “standard” or “accelerated” basis. Choose the Standard setting to allow Google to spread your clicks throughout the day while hitting your daily budget. Choose the Accelerated setting to spend your daily budget as quickly as possible. If you spend your entire daily budget in the first hour of the day, your ads cannot run for the remaining 23 hours. Try starting with an accelerated ad display to determine how long it takes to spend your daily budget.

Other important options to consider are the opportunity to display your ads only at certain times of the day. Use the AdWords Ad Scheduling feature to adjust the display times of your ads. You can choose to turn your ads on and off throughout the day in 15 minute intervals. You may find that the overnight hours provide traffic but that the traffic does not convert as well as afternoon traffic. In this case, you should either shut your ads down overnight, or you can use a more advanced feature to decrease your maximum keyword bids by a certain percentage during certain hours of the day.

Another feature offered within the campaign settings is position preferencing. If you find that your ads convert best when showing in the second or third position, you can set a position preference for those positions, and the AdWords system will attempt to only show your ad when it ranks in the second or third position and not otherwise. If your ad ranks higher than the second or third position, AdWords will attempt to lower your maximum cost-per-click so that it falls into your specified range. This feature is similar to what many of the expensive bid management solutions offer.

Through constant monitoring of your account, you can determine the optimal position of your ads and use the position preferencing feature to ensure that your ads show in that position. Note that the position preferencing feature takes three to four days to accumulate enough data to make these changes to your ad positions, and that every time you change your position preference, the data accumulation process must be repeated.