Google AdWords can either be your best friend, or your worst nightmare. Well, maybe not your worst nightmare, but it can spend a lot of your money without giving you anything in return. Google doesn’t make it easy to understand which settings do what exactly, so there’s a lot of trial and error involved when learning to tame the beast that is AdWords. Luckily for you, we’ve been through the ringer, and know exactly which settings work best for your industry.
In this article, we’re going to go over each individual setting and take a look at campaign creation from a top-down approach using the new version of AdWords.
When creating a campaign the first decision you have to make is, which network do you want to run your ads on?
Network Options:
(Best Option) Search Network – This option allows your ads to show up when people are searching for you, your services, or key phrases that pertain to your business
Display – This network allows your ads to run on websites across the web. This may seem like a great option, but you’ll end up spending a lot of money on useless clicks because there isn’t any intent on the part of the end user.
(There are other options but none apply to our industry)
After choosing a network, you’ll be asked to pick a goal.
Goal Options:
Sales – This goal recommends settings ready to make a purchase
Leads – Helps you attract people to your business
(Best Option) Website Traffic – Drive relevant customers to your website
After picking a goal you’ll be prompted to post the URL that you’d like to send the traffic to.
After completing these two steps the next screen that you’ll see will ask you to fill out the following information
We’ll start at the top
Naming Your campaigns
When naming a campaign try to be as consistent as possible, and be sure to separate each service by each campaign.
The majority of our clients are in the restoration industry so I’ll be using they’re verbiage and services for our examples.
Example #1: 1. SA. Water Damage Restoration – New Landing Page
Example #2: 2. SA. Carpet Cleaning
Campaign name breakdown:
- The number at the beginning is strictly for organizational purposes, once you have several campaigns click on the “campaigns” tab in AdWords to organize them numerically
- “SA” if you have several people creating campaigns, it’s nice to know who created what campaign. Add your initials to your campaigns
- “Water Damage Restoration”, add the service you’re providing in the campaign name
- “New Landing Page” this indicates that we’re testing a new landing page for that particular campaign
Networks
We already chose a network, but there are two things that you need to do at this point.
Uncheck “Include Google Search Partners”
Why?
- We only want to appear on Google, we don’t want to appear all across the web.
- Potential customers are only looking on Google, not their partner sites
Click “No” on add Display Network
Why?
- I may sound like a broken record, but we only want to appear on Google because that’s where your potential customers are looking
Locations
In the location settings add the areas you serve
You can add areas by:
- Zip Codes
- City Names
You can exclude areas as well
If you’re getting clicks, and calls from certain areas that aren’t turning into jobs; you can exclude those areas and run ads in areas that are profitable.
Languages
We recommend leaving this setting on “English”
Bidding
You’ll see the following questions, we recommend these settings
What do you want to focus on?
Conversions
How do you want to get conversions?
Manually Set Bids
Click on “Select a bid strategy directly”
Choose “Manual CPC”
Budget
Under the “budget” setting you’ll see these features
Enter the average you want to spend each day
-
- Enter a daily amount you’re comfortable with spending
- For Example $100/Day
Click on the “Delivery Method” drop-down
We recommend using “Accelerated” because we want to gather as much useful information as fast as possible so we can optimize, and make changes accordingly
Start and End Dates
Enter in the dates you would like your campaigns to run
Perhaps you have a deal on your carpet cleaning service and have a special running for the next 3 days, set that particular campaign to run for 3 days only
Sitelink Extensions
Sitelinks allow you to send users to other pages on your website
Sitelinks can lead to the following pages should you choose to use them
- About Us
- Services
- Location
Callout Extensions
Use callout extensions to list the benefits of doing business with you
- 24/7 Service
- Free Estimates
- 30 Minute Response
Call Extensions
- This one is straightforward, just add your phone number
Structured Snippet Extensions
Take this opportunity to highlight the aspects of your services, or talk about similar services
For this example we’re going to write structured snippet extensions for restoration owners
- Service catalog: Water Damage Restoration, Flood Damage Restoration, Basement Water Removal, Sewage Backup Cleanup
Extensions to Ignore
These extensions don’t apply to our industry, and can be ignored
- Message Extensions
- Promotion Extensions
- Price Extensions
- Campaign URL options
- Dynamic Search Ads
Ad Rotation
We recommend the “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads” setting because it’s given our clients the best results
And
Why wouldn’t you want to show your best performing ads to as many people as possible?
Ad schedule
This setting lets you schedule your ads to run at certain times in the day
Say you stop all carpet cleaning services at 5, do you want your ads to continue to run after that allotted time?
No.
This is a great tool for ad optimization as well.
Say you get the majority of your clicks between 10 AM – 3 PM
With that information, you can schedule your ads to run only during those times and spend your budget efficiently
Location Options
With the location option setting you’ll be given several different options
This is the ONLY setting we recommend
Target:
“People in your targeted locations”
Exclude:
“People in, or who show interest in, your excluded locations (recommended)”
With the following settings, you have much more than a solid foundation; you have the everything you need to know about setting up your account properly. You can now start creating amazing ads and generating leads immediately. These settings are intended to give you a head start on your competition, and get the ball rolling so you can succeed on AdWords.
