Throughout this book, I speak so much about “the AdWords campaign” that you might think your AdWords account is necessarily dedicated to a single campaign. Not so. Here, I must distinguish between the generic campaign, which is your overall marketing initiative as it applies to advertising on Google, and the AdWords Campaign, which is a distinct organizational tier.
An AdWords account may contain multiple campaigns (see Figure 7-2).
Although I strongly recommend making organizational divisions within a cam-paign (as I describe in the following section), running multiple camcam-paigns is not essential in many cases.
worth trying a correction there before deleting the keyword. However, after Google brands a
keyword “Disabled,” that’s the end: You must pluck the word out of the Ad Group.
Two major considerations lead advertisers to set up a second (and third) campaign:
The advertiser is marketing different products, represented by ads, key-word groups, and landing pages that have nothing to do with each other.
Even in this dispersed circumstance, you can accomplish the boundaries you need by working with Ad Groups within your campaign. But establish-ing a new campaign structure makes the Control Center pages neater and enables simpler naming of Ad Groups. Think of campaigns as marketing books, and Ad Groups as chapters in those books. Whether you want one book or several depends on the diversity of your marketing initiatives.
The advertiser wants to launch ads with campaign settings that differ from an existing campaign. Google provides seven settings that affect all ads in a campaign. Campaign settings can be convenient and inconve-nient. On one hand, global settings are cumbersome because you can’t exempt specific ads from their effect. On the other hand, the ability to set variables across the entire campaign is a valuable shortcut.
Knowing how to organize your marketing effort into AdWords campaigns requires a clear understanding of the Campaign settings. Google divides the Edit Campaign Setting page (see Figure 7-3) into several sections.
Figure 7-2:
An AdWords account running three campaigns, each with multiple Ad Groups.
Some Ad Groups are paused.
Here are the settings of each campaign that you need to consider when orga-nizing your entire AdWords structure:
Name.From an organizational viewpoint, the campaign name is proba-bly the least important setting. Of course, you want to name your cam-paigns distinctly. If the name is the only difference among your planned campaigns, you might as well lump them together and distinguish them in Ad Groups.
Daily budget.This setting is where you choose your spending cap per day. (Later sections of this chapter cover AdWords budgeting in detail.) This important setting, by itself, could determine a dedicated campaign in your AdWords account, even if it advertises a product similar to one in a campaign with a higher or lower daily budget.
Suppose that you sell kayaks and kayak supplies. Normally, you would probably consider your entire business to be under one campaign roof.
But if you market a landing page filled with inexpensive accessories (water boots, paddling gloves, roof racks) separately from a landing page dedi-cated to the relatively expensive boats, you might decide to budget more money per day to a campaign driving traffic to the latter page. Such a Figure 7-3:
Campaign settings apply globally to all Ad Groups
in the Campaign.
decision would be based on a host of considerations such as relative profit margins, clickthrough rates, and your maximum CPC. Tinkering with this setting on a campaign-wide level is possible only if you make intelli-gent and thoughtful divisions of your marketing strategy in advance.
Adamant though I am that you plan your account organization, remem-ber that the whole shebang is reconfigurable. You may rearrange your campaigns and Ad Groups anytime. Doing so is not exactly a drag-and-drop process, though, so planning is advisable.
Campaign schedule. Here, you determine start and end dates for the cam-paign. Because all campaigns (and Ad Groups within campaigns) may be paused and resumed at will, this variable usually isn’t changed from its default end date, which is December 31, 2010 — effectively an indefinite campaign run. However, setting an end date is useful when you can’t mon-itor the campaign closely.
Optimization. Google optimizes the rotation of the various ads within your campaign — at the Campaign level, not the Ad Group level. Opti-mization involves determining which ads in the campaign enjoy higher clickthrough rates than other ads and skewing the distribution of your ads toward those that perform better. You may turn off this feature at the Campaign level, but not at the Ad Group level (where it would proba-bly be more productive).
Content site distribution.You may also distribute your ads across the Google content partner network. This network consists of content sites that have agreed to enable AdWords ads to appear on relevant pages.
This network does not include search sites that Google licenses to, such as AOL Search and Netscape. Your campaign can be distributed through-out the content network of non-Google sites at your discretion.
Languages.All advertising is language specific, determined by the lan-guage in which the ads are written. Google can isolate the lanlan-guage used by individuals based on their Preferences setting. When you set a lan-guage choice at the Campaign level, all your ads should be written in that language, and they are all directed at Google users in that language.
Countries.Related to the language setting, this variable allows you to target users by their geographical location. Google locates its users based on their IP address, which works in most (but not all) cases. Currently, you may target your campaign to any combination of dozens of coun-tries or fine-tune your targeting to a U.S. region or a combination of U.S.
regions.
Note:Chapter 10 contains more detail about language targeting and geo-targeting.
Those new to AdWords have no way to evaluate the relative importance of campaign settings or to forecast the optimal division of their marketing. So, with the voice of experience, let me recommend that you pay close attention to three campaign features in particular: the daily budget, language targeting, and location targeting. Those three settings are the most important and are the variables most worthy of earning a campaign dedicated to them. Being able to adjust these settings across a suite of Ad Groups is vitally convenient.
The targeting they represent is so crucial in some marketing plans that defin-ing campaigns by these settdefin-ings might be more important than dividdefin-ing the account by product line. Ideally, though, major organizational criteria coin-cide, so that product type, budgetary requirements, language targeting, and geo-targeting all suggest the same campaign divisions.