Campaign Management

If you ever need to go back and change some of the settings you�ve applied to your campaign, please read below.

Editing Your Campaign

You can always add or remove the countries you’re advertising in. If you ever do want to edit the countries you advertise in or any other campaign information, just do the following:

1. Click on your �Campaign Management� tab.
   

2. Click on the campaign you want to edit.
   

3. This will take you to a page where you can view your AdGroups. Near the top of this page you will see a link titled �Edit Campaign Settings�. Click on that link to edit these settings.
   

The edit campaign settings page will look something like this. Here you can re-name your campaign, change your daily budget, decide where you want your ads to be displayed, choose which language you want, and pick which countries/cities/etc. you want your ads to be displayed in.

Campaign Settings:

You will want the following settings to be applied to your account, so in the “Campaign Settings” page of your account do the following:

Delivery Method – Make sure your delivery method is set to “Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible.”

Ad Serving – Make sure “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” is checked.

Now click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of your Campaign Settings page to save these changes.

Don�t forget to always save your changes. Many people forget to Save their changes and lose their work and later wonder why their changes were not applied to their account.

Setting Your Keyword Costs

When you bid on Google, you will not always pay the price you enter. The price you enter is the MCPC (Max Cost Per Click) you are willing to pay for that keyword. Google is constantly updating the bids for keywords in their search engine. For example if your MCPC is $0.15 and the advertiser in front of you is bidding $0.16 and the Ad one-position behind you is bidding $0.05, you will only pay $0.06 per click, because there is no reason why you should have to pay $0.15 per click if you can get the same Ad position for $0.06 per click.

Don’t set the same bid for every keyword because every keyword performs differently. For example, let’s say you are selling wallets and you can only afford a Max $0.10 per click. Don’t you think if web surfer 1 searches for “Brown wallet for sale”, and web surfer 2 searches for “picture sizes for wallets” and they both click on your ad that web surfer 1 is most likely going to buy a wallet? The chances are that he will. So even if your max CPC is $0.10, don’t be hesitant to go to $0.20 per click on keywords which generate targeted traffic, because they will generate higher than average sales. The same concept applies to poorly performing keywords. If the keyword performs very poorly, then don’t bid the same amount you bid on your best performing keywords.

How Much Should You Bid?

Most online advertisers make the mistake of bidding too much for keywords. Their logic being that an increased bid amount will give you a higher ad position, which leads to more sales.

Unfortunately, spending more money doesn’t mean more profit. For example some people bid $0.10 to $0.20 more per click just to receive a ranking two positions above their previous ranking. These are usually the people who say they spend $500 per day in advertising, yet receive only $550 in sales.

I recommend bidding just enough to receive placement on the first search results page (ad positions 1.0-8.0). This will give you the impressions you need without having to pay large advertising fees. Remember, just because first, second, and third positions are the most sought after; it doesn’t mean they always generate the highest profit. There are other ways to get higher advertisement positions without having to raise your Max CPC. Look at the Quality Score section to see how.

Do not raise your max bid more than $0.20 just because your keyword is inactive for search. Doing this is a bad move that many internet marketers make. I personally probably only have 1 keyword out of 1,000 that has a max bid of more than $0.20 per click.

What Should My Initial Max Bid Be?

This depends on many things. Some products have more popular keywords which require a larger bid just to be within the first ten search results pages, while other keywords have no competition.

Here is what I do:

When ever I start a new AdGroup I set all of my Max CPC to $0.05, then depending if the keyword has a poor rank or if it is inactive, I raise the keyword’s Max CPC to $0.10 per click. I rarely have keywords more than $0.20 per click.

Should You Bid Differently for Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match Keywords?

Yes, you should have different bids for broad, phrase, and exact matched keywords. Phrase and Exact matched keywords are more specific and usually receive a higher sales rate, therefore you can afford to bid higher on them. Broad matched keywords usually receive the most traffic, but are not usually the best performing so I only bid high on the broad keywords that describe my product exactly.

Adjusting Max CPC & URL for Individual Keywords

A quick way to edit individual keyword’s bids is to go to your AdGroup and click on the “Keywords” tab. Then to the left of each keyword you will see a check box. Simply check each of the keywords you want to adjust the bid and click on the “Edit Keyword Settings” at the top of the keyword list. You will then be taken to a page which allows you to change the bids for your keywords.

Google also offers its advertisers another way to edit the Max CPC and destination URL for individual keywords.

This feature is extremely useful. It is perfect for editing your keywords without having to move them to a different AdGroup or campaign. Notice in the picture above I said that the bid price and custom URL settings were optional. This is because you can change the bid price for a keyword without changing the destination URL and vise versa. Here’s what to do if you want to use this feature:

Keyword **0.15 – Sets the keyword’s Max bid to $0.15
Keyword **http://www.google.com – Sets the keyword’s URL to google.com
Keyword **0.15**http://www.google.com – Sets the keyword’s Max bid to $0.15 and the URL to google.com

What to do with good performing Keywords:

If you have a good performing keyword, you don’t want it to stay just good. Instead you want to make it better than good. You want to make it perfect. You can do this by adjusting the bids of your keywords. If you have a keyword which is making a good profit, it has a high rank, and has a great CTR. Then you can take your MCPC down a little bit, because your quality score should be high enough that if you take your MCPC down one or two cents, then your keywords performance will remain the same, but you will pay less per click, thus giving you a greater profit for that keyword. Before you check to see if your keyword is performing well you will want to see its conversion rate. You can find the conversion rate (the % of clicks that result in a sale) by enabling the Conversion Tracking feature in Google AdWords. I talk more about this later.

What to do with keywords that are barely making a profit:

There are two ways in which you can fix this. The first is the easiest, and is that you simply lower your MCPC. This will keep you from spending more money than the keyword generates. The second way is that you create a new ad group with the poorly performing keywords and target the text in the ad towards the keywords. This way you will improve your CTR because people are more likely to click on your advertisement when they see the keywords they’ve searched for in the title or body of your text ad.

Campaign Settings

Google’s Budget Optimizer

Google also has a tool which will take all of the pain out of setting individual bids for your keywords. This tool is called “Budget Optimizer”. Basically, when you have this tool turned on, Google will ask you for you monthly maximum budget (the amount of money you are willing to spend that month) and then Google will automatically and continually adjust the bids for all of the keywords in that campaign. Doing this will “maximize the number of clicks for your ad”.

I have used this tool and I would not recommend it for people who like having control over their account. If you have certain keywords that have a high amount of traffic and even more advertisers, then don’t be surprised if Google sets those keywords MCPC very high so you can receive the most amounts of clicks off of that keyword. If you use this tool and your Maximum Monthly Budget is $1000, expect to receive less clicks than you would if you edited the bids yourself.

Incase you’re wondering where you can access this tool, go to “edit campaign settings” and look for the Bidding category.

Google’s Max Daily Budget

I recommend you watch the following video from Google which talks about your daily budget:

Google Video - Daily Budget

Earlier you were prompted to enter the max amount of money you were willing to pay each day for clicks. This is called your Max Daily Budget. Unfortunately, this is usually way off. According to Google you will not spend more than your daily budget over a month’s time. Let’s say that your daily budget is $10, and this month has 30 days in it. You will not spend more than $300 in advertising that month, and if you do, Google will credit your account.

You can set your daily budget anywhere from $1.00 to $250,000.00. If you have your daily budget set low, don’t expect to receive many clicks from Google. You used to be able to set a very low daily budget and receive 200 or so clicks from it, meaning that you could get about 90% of those clicks for free. But you can’t do that anymore. So if you read anything about people making money online by spending only $1.00 per day in advertising, don’t read that material because it is a few years outdated.

Sometimes Google’s Budget can get messed up. For example, your daily cost could be well below your daily budget, but Google stops running your Ads saying that “Your daily budget has been exceeded…” (you can see why your advertisements are not being displayed by going to and using the Ad Diagnostics tool). If this happens it means that your account is currently under review. This usually happens with newer accounts but can sometimes happen when you are creating a new advertising campaign. It should be fixed when a Google account reviewer looks over your account; this usually takes about three days.