What Are the Key Points for Beginners to Launch a Successful Adwords Campaign?

Quora can really be a great source of info--and we have to give credit where credit is due to this answer to the question, "What Are the Key Points for Beginners to Launch a Successful Advertising Campaign?" I'll reiterate the points here, because I really do agree with them:

  1. Select accurate location targeting
  2. Make sure you are do a proper keyword research and find the keywords with good volume
  3. Always use BMM and phrase match for best targeting
  4. Add all possible negative keywords for your business
  5. Create AdGroup with good ads (2 ads per adgroup) and proper landing page
  6. Once your ad start running, keep track of CTR, CPC, QS and Avg. Position for improving it
  7. Make sure you have proper conversion tracking enabled
  8. Device bid optimisation would be good technique based on conversion rate

Don't Forget to Check on Keyword Costs

Being such a good list we wanted to add one note to point #2--Keyword research is imperative, not just for volume but for costs as well.

When the user mentioned $20/day budget I thought they might be in trouble. CPC’s in Adwords can often be prohibitive for smaller budgets. A good rule of thumb is that you need your daily budget to be at least 2x more than your average CPC. We usually shoot for 3x at a minimum.

We use a few tools to estimate CPC’s before running ads. The first tool is keywordtool.io. From their estimates it looks like this particular potential Adwords advertiser in good shape:

That’s not huge volume, but they will have plenty of room on $20/day with CPC’s less than $1.

We also usually drop the keyword into an actual Adwords campaign and ratchet the bid down until we get the alert that we’re below the first page estimate:

Use Adwords 1st page bid estimates to your advantage in the keyword research phase

Keep in mind those estimates are connected to the location targeting. And in this case we were searching for all US.

The CPC can vary widely by location. Adwords location targeting is only available at the campaign level, so it can get a little busy in there to set up these kind of experiments. But we’ve seen some nice optimizations by breaking out campaigns by state for example—and using the targeting to leverage lower CPC’s for the account.