If you have a famous brand and you want to bid on it, just create an ad group and bid on your brand name in exact, phase and broad match, as follows. – [your brand] – “your brand” – your brand – . Set the ad group level max. CPC to a reasonable price. After that create an ad copy with your brand name in the headline and in the description lines, too. And also create a somewhat different second ad copy, based on the above. At first, set the destination URLs to your home page that should contain your keywords a few times.
Your campaign is all set. You should pause your other ad groups and activate this one to run. Now you are supposed to track what is happening to your campaign. The most crucial question is which page or pages you wish your visitors to see. It might well be the usual “Thank You” page that they only see on ordering a product or service of yours or on signing up to your newsletter, etc. All in all you need to decide what your “goal page” is and you might want to copy/paste the appropriate script on this particular page.
The rest is fun. Check on your stats every day, to learn how many users saw your ad, clicked on it, and got as far as your goal page. Attach special importance to the average position where your ads show. You want them to display on the very first search results page. If they don’t they won’t be seen by many users and you may want to try upping your appropriate bids. Having spent a week or so in the number one ad position you may try lowering the bids to see what is happening.
After a certain period of time, try to determine which matching option works best for you. Pause the poorly performing ones. Similarly, try to determine which ad variation performs best. At the beginning your number one priority should be your CTR because you can’t go ahead unless users start clicking on your ad. Delete the less performing ad copy and create a new one to compete with the champ and so on. Later on, focus your attention on your conversion rate, to see which combination of keywords and ad copies performs best in terms of conversions and in terms of return-on-investment. However, the golden rule says, don’t take your decisions too soon. Just let your campaign stats play out. As a rule of thumb, allow your campaign to accrue approx. 50-60 clicks to decide what your CTR is. Likewise, allow your campaign to accrue approx. 50-60 conversions to decide what your cost per conversion is.
After a good deal of time you need to run a Search Query Report to learn what users are actually keying in. You may want to make use of the results by determining new effective keywords or by identifying negatives. After a certain period of time you will most probably want to avail yourself of Google’s Website Optimizer so that you can compare two different landing pages of yours for efficiency. Continuous optimization means going with the best working keywords, with the best performing ad copies and with the best converting landing pages. However, when you reach this stage you are not a newbie any more.
