In this installment of Google Adwords, we're going to go over some main terms and suggest some strategies for making Adwords work as smoothly as possible. Hopefully, after reading this article, should you decide to pick up a book like Adwords Miracle or Google Cash, a lot of this will be familiar to you and you'll feel more comfortable with your Adwords promotions.
Let's start off with a few terms.
Campaign - A campaign is one or more ad groups. Let's say you have a website that promotes various health products. You might have a campaign set up called “Health Products.” Within that campaign you would then set up a number of different ad groups for the various products that you sell, such as acne cures, cold sore treatments, etc.
Ad Groups - An ad group is one or more ads that target a specific keyword. So let's say given the above example that you are selling a cold sore treatment. You may have 3 or 4 different ads that you want to have rotated for that cold sore treatment. The ad group would consist of those 3 or 4 ads.
CPC - This stands for cost per click. This is one of the most important terms in your Adwords campaign. This is what you will pay each time somebody clicks on one of your ads. The problem with this is that this isn't a fixed cost. You set the max CPC, but depending on a number of factors, this cost per click could actually be less than your max or not enough to cover it and your ads don't get shown. We'll discuss this more in detail in a later article.
There are a lot more terms that you're going to need to be familiar with. If you want to see the whole list, Google actually has a glossary of all their terms. It's quite some reading and can be found here…
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=29
Now that we've gotten the main terms out of the way, let's move on to some strategies.
Probably the most important part of your Adwords campaign is the ad itself. This is a bottom line business and the bottom line with ads is that if your ad isn't compelling enough, nobody is going to click on it. Considering that you only have 3 lines to work with, this doesn't give you a lot of words to work with. This is where you have to be very clever and come up with 3 lines that are going to work.
There are many theories on how to construct an Adwords ad. They are all valid and they all work, for certain segments of the population. The key here is that you are not going to appeal to everybody. So you have to choose your target market and construct your ads for that target.
In our next installment, we'll go over specific ad writing techniques designed specifically for Adwords. 3 Google Adword Tips