Campaign Management

The following campaign settings are important enough to discuss on their own.

Budget – if you’re profitable, it makes no sense to limit your budget!  What’s nice is that you pay for your ads after they’ve listed, so you’ll be able to pay for those ads with the sales revenue they generated.  Many businesses need a line of credit to pull something like this off — not when you’re doing it with Google’s AdWords.

Delivery Method – if you’re finding that certain times of day are better for conversions, CTR, or both, then by all means you should attempt to force as many ads into that more profitable time slot (discussed in more detail in a second).  If you don’t really notice a difference or if you’re marketing all over the world, then showing them evenly is fine.

Automatic Matching – this is a fairly new feature that allows you to show your ads on search queries where you didn’t have a keyword.  Google does it automatically by analyzing your campaigns ads and landing pages and determines if your ad would still do well under the matched query.  They shoot for at least matching your CPC/performance.  The key here is to determine if this is working for you and, if it’s not, turn it off.

Keyword Bidding – you have four choices here:

1. 1. Manual bidding – recommended for maximum control
   2. Conversion Optimizer – if you have a high enough number of conversions, you can have Google do the legwork for you and stay under a certain cost per conversion.  Not recommended.
   3. Budget Optimizer – You simply set a 30-day budget and Google tries to get you as many clicks as it can for your keywords within that 30-day budget. Not recommended.
   4. Preferred cost bidding – You simply set the average price you’d like to pay and Google will do the rest.  We don’t like this because you may be willing to pay more for a specific ad group, or even a specific keyword phrase.

Ad scheduling – if you’re selling an ebook on battling insomnia, you may find your conversions skyrocket between 12 and 5 a.m.  If you’re selling ringtones (school-aged kids) then running ads while most all of your audience is sleeping is probably not going to be too profitable.  If you’re running a business that has to answer phones, you may find it much more profitable to only run ads during your business hours.  Ad scheduling ads an element that certainly needs to be managed, but it can plug leaks in your budget and help you exploit very profitable opportunities.

Position preference – allows you to specify which ad position you’d like and Google then does the bidding for you.  I prefer the more-control route and leave this option unchecked.  However, if you’re finding your conversions are significantly higher in a certain range of ad positions, it may be profitable for you to work with this setting.

Ad Serving – do not choose to Optimize and show better-performing ads more often.  If you do this, you aren’t able to splittest effectively.  Make sure you’re showing your ads evenly over time by checking the Rotate option.