How to properly set up your Adwords campaigns

That Configuring your campaigns in Adwords is a fundamental part of its correct functioning from the same. Correctly limit when and where your ads are publishedit will save you from wasting money unnecessarily and will make your campaigns much more efficient, giving you a much higher return on investment.

Whether we’re just starting a new campaign or have had it active for a long time, It’s worth taking a close look at your configuration to optimize it as much as possible. Sometimes we have to take some time to study the results, draw conclusions and return to the campaign configuration to make small changes that will increase its profitability.

Many initially think that the best thing to do is to advertise as much as possible on as many sites, in all media, throughout the day and even cap the campaign with a certain budget. That makes Your budget will be used up quickly You actually missed the chance to get your ad shown more often to who your potential customers really are. The best way to avoid this is to focus on the public that is most likely to become a customer and block the rest of the public, which mostly just makes us lose money.

For a better understanding, let’s look at a real case as an example. In this case, We’re going to run a “conservative” campaign on the Adwords search network for an online board game store.

Once we launch, we’ll name our campaign and We choose the locations where we publish our ads. Since the shipping costs to other countries are very high in relation to the prices of the products and many of the games can only be found in our country, in the example case we have decided to focus only on Spain, where we get a higher conversion because we offer cheaper shipping prices, shorter delivery times and sometimes free shipping.

As for the languages, I recommend Only use the languages ​​that are available on our website or in the online shop. There is no point in advertising to users who, when they visit us, do not understand what we are offering them.

The next step is the networks and devices where our ads appear. First we have to choose if we want to advertise only in Google search results or also appear on sites like AOL or Amazon. By default, the “All available websites” option is selected, but since conversions are usually much higher in Google search results, I recommend only selecting this option. We mark “I want to choose them myself” and “Google search“. The rest of the options are disabled. Later, when we have good results and want to expand our budget and perform in more places, we can expand the networks we are present on.

The next step is select devices. For example, the board games online store, although it can be visited from any mobile phone or tablet, is not 100% optimized for these devices, so its display will not be the most appropriate and of course the conversions they will be inferior. Therefore, in order to optimize our campaign, we choose the option “I want to choose it myself” and “laptops and desktops“. The rest of the options are disabled. We can also expand the devices later.

The third step to configure is the offers and budget. Although the system that Adwords uses to improve conversions uses a lot of data and doesn’t work badly at all, that’s what my experience tells me Running the campaigns “manually” is even better. So I recommend leaving this option as it appears by default. We need to select a standard offer and the daily budget. The default bid refers to the maximum CPC we will pay per keyword, but since each keyword has its own CPC and we change it manually when we finish configuring the campaign, we only enter an indicative CPC in this field and then adjust it word by word. In the daily budget we put the maximum that we can spend daily, although as little as possible, I recommend setting it very high because if the campaign is working properly, why are we going to limit it?

That Delivery method is activated only when our ads are limited by budget. In such a case, it is better to keep it that we do not spend the budget in the morning and nothing is released in the afternoon or at night. If we want to advertise at certain times of the day, we can configure this later in the ad scheduling option. Therefore, we will leave the Default option as the publishing method.

Next we meet them Ad Extensions. These are great for increasing clicks on our ads and giving information to the user, so We will use the maximum that we can. Adding our store location, phone number or direct links to our products can only bring us benefits.

Finally we come to Advanced configuration. From this point, we’ll only focus on the first two options as the rest are only used on the Display Network. The first is the programming of the ads. We can choose the start and end dates of the campaign, but what’s really interesting is that we can too we can choose the days and hours that our ads are published. Over time, we will be able to deduce which days or hours of the week our ads are more profitable, gradually eliminating the time slots that do not interest us.

Finally, if we have more than one ad per ad group, we can choose to rotate the ads in turn to prioritize the ad that gets the most clicks or conversions. I recommend Start alternating a few days to prioritize conversions later.

In this little tutorial I have chosen not to show the Display Network options because, following the “conservative” line, I have preferred to focus on the options that are generally more effective with a limited budget, and this is undoubtedly the one I should start with only appear in the search results, which are usually much more profitable. Next to the Configuring and using the Display Network is complex enough to warrant an article devoted solely to itwhat we’re going to do soon.

doHow do you configure your Adwords campaigns?? Did you find this type of configuration interesting? What is your opinion?