Chapter 3: Campaign and Ad Group Management

Chapter 3: Campaign and Ad Group Management

Campaign Strategies

Within an AdWords account there's a certain hierarchy. The hierarchy consists of the account, campaigns, and ad groups. 

The top level is your account.  Within your account you control your username, contact information, billing information, and password. 

Campaigns are the next level. Campaigns have their own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.

The third and final layer are your ad groups.  Ad groups have a set of similar ads and the words and phrases, known as keywords, that you want your ads to show for.

You'll want to take the time to create several ad groups so your ads show then they're most relevant.  Choose related keywords relevant for the ads you create within each ad group. 

Campaigns are the master control for your ad groups. At the campaign level, you can choose how much you spend on clicks and choose settings affecting clusters of ad groups.

For every campaign you may choose a budget, location, and where the ads will appear online (i.e. the Search, Display Network, or both).

Each campaign should have a goal. That goal could be to create branding awareness, increase traffic to your website, increase sales or even increase sign ups to a newsletter. It's suggested you give the campaign a name based on the goal you're trying to achieve.

Your First Ad Campaign

AdWords has an online wizard to help walk you through your first campaign. Creating a campaign is easy. Just sign into your account and click on 'create your first campaign'. From there you'll be taken to the campaign settings page.

On this settings page you'll choose how much you want to pay, the locations you want to target, and optional ad extensions you want to use.

After you save your campaign settings, you'll be able to create your ad and list your keywords. If you don't already have your billing information filled out you'll need to do this before your ads can run.

When creating a campaign think about the settings that will help your ads reach the right people. Think about your customers. Who are they.  And think about the results you hope to achieve with your campaign.

You can choose (or change) your location and language settings from within your campaign settings tab.

You will also be able to choose (or change) the bid and budget for your campaign. In order to figure out your monthly ad spend take your maximum spend per day and multiply that by 30.4 (the average days in a month). That's your monthly campaign budget.

Your AdWords monthly campaign spend will not go over this number. Keep in mind this is your budget for a single campaign.  You'll have to add each of them up to get your total monthly budget.  You can edit your daily budget by returning to your campaign's settings tab.

In addition to your daily budget you need to figure out your ad group bids. This is where you decide the most you're willing to spend per click (which is called your maximum CPC).  Keep in mind that your actual CPC is lower than your maximum CPC (in most cases).

You have two bidding options; manual and automatic bidding. Manual bidding is where you set bids for individual keywords in your ad groups yourself. Automatic bidding does it for you based on your daily budget. The goal of automatic CPC bidding is to generate as many clicks as possible within an advertisers target budget.

Enhanced campaigns allow you to set bid adjustments that go up or down based on criteria including when ads are shown on mobile phones, in locations, and at certain times of the day.

Ad Rotation

Ad rotation is another option. If you have more than one ad for an ad group, the ads will rotate.

No more than one ad can show at a time. 

You can choose to deliver your ads evenly or optimize them for clicks or conversions. By choosing to optimize them AdWords will select the ads that perform the best.

You can choose from one of the following rotation options:

1. Optimize for clicks (default).  In this case AdWords figures it out for you based on your performance.
2. Optimize for conversions. As long as you have conversion tracking setting, AdWords can look at your conversion rate and figure out which ad is converting best, then show that ad more often.
3. Rotate evenly. Your ads will be shown evenly, but AdWords will eventually begin to optimize and select the ad that converts best for clicks or conversions after 90 days of no changes.
4. Rotate indefinitely. AdWords will always rotate the ads evenly and never optimize them.

Ad Delivery

You also have control over how often your ads show throughout the day with the ad delivery method.

• Standard delivery distributes your ads evenly throughout the day. If you choose standard distribution you may not see your ad each and every time you search for it. Standard delivery is the default delivery method.
• Accelerated delivery shows ads until your daily budget is depleted. This means your budget may run out early in the day and your ad may not be shown again until the next day.

You control this within the bidding and budget section of your campaign settings.

Display Network Considerations - Frequency Caps

The frequency cap limits the number of times your ads will appear to the same unique user on the Google Display Network. Frequency capping does not apply to the Search Network.

Frequency capping prevents your ad from showing too many times to the same people who don't want to see it and aren't doing business with you (which is indicated by them not clicking on your ad).

You can find the frequency cap options within your campaign in the advanced settings section under ad delivery. The option to change your frequency cap will only show if you have ads in the Display Network. 

Campaign Status

The campaign status column tells you if a campaign is active or not and whether it's limited by budget.  

There are a number of different statuses including:

• Eligible; active and can show ads
• Paused; inactive until resumed
• Deleted; won't show until you re-enable it
• Pending; a pending campaign is one that is currently inactive, but is scheduled to begin at a future date
• Ended; inactive because it's past the scheduled date
• Suspended; prepaid account balance ran out
• Limited by budget; only showing sometimes because of budget, when this shows up they'll usually have a 'recommended budget' for you

To help clear out older campaigns that are not currently running, you can filter your campaigns to show only those that are enabled.

You can copy the settings from one campaign to another campaign and make new ads from old ads. You also have the ability to sort your campaigns and ads by clicking the heading of the column you want to sort by.

Ad Group Basics

Ad groups in the Search Network target keywords. It's best if your ads are organized by a common theme. That way a single ad makes sense to run any time someone searches for a keyword within your a group of related keywords. You'll see the best results if you set up your ad groups this way.

You'll need to set a maximum CPC. When someone searches for a keyword in your ad group, your ad will appear. If a viewer clicks on your ad you'll pay no more than your maximum CPC.

You can set individual prices for the keywords within an ad group or use the automatic bidding option where AdWords optimizes the prices for you based on your ads performance and your daily budget.

A text ad, keywords, and a default bid are the required elements for ad groups running on the search network. Grouping a theme of keywords together within your ad group will allow you to create ads relevant to those keywords.

Ad groups in the Display Network can be set to target keywords along with many more options. These include topics, placements (which are websites you would like your ad to show on) and other options. All of these options can be controlled at the ad group level of an AdWords account.

Create New Ad Group

To create a new ad group simply find the name of campaign you'd like to add an ad group to. From there click on the ad groups tabs and click the + New ad group button.

You can always edit your ad group later by clicking on its name. You can add in ads or keywords at any time.

You can edit a single ad group by clicking on its status icon or change an ad's bid in the 'default max CPC' column.

Ad Status

The status column let's you know if an ad is active or not. If it's not active the status column will show the reason why it's inactive. 

There are 12 different ad statuses:

1. Paused - Inactive due to manual pausing of the ad. You can always resume a paused ad.
2. Pending - Inactive, but scheduled to begin at a future date.
3. Ended - Inactive due to being past its scheduled end date.
4. Deleted - Inactive because you deleted it. You can re-enable a deleted ad.
5. Under review - Inactive while under review. As long as the ad is approved it will become active.
6. Eligible - Ads that are still being reviewed, but may be run on Google search pages.  Eligible ads will not run on all networks until they're reviewed.
7. Approved - Ads that have safe content for all users and can run on any network.
8. Approved (non-family) - Ads that have content thought to be inappropriate for some users. If a user has turned on SafeSearch filtering ads with a non-family status will not show.
9. Approved (adult) - Ads that have 'adult' content. They won't be shown for users who have SafeSearch filtering turned on and for sites in the Google Display Network that don't allow adult ads.
10. Approved (limited) - Ads that may only be shown under limitations including certain countries or search terms.
    
11. Disapproved - Ads that will not run due to a violation of one of the AdWords advertising policies.
12. Site suspended - Ads that will not run due to issues with your website. You will have to fix the issues and go through the approval process again.

Most of the statuses are related to an ad's approval or disapproval.  Paused, pending, ended, or deleted are statuses that you have control over.

Policy Details

You can find out more about why an ad has a certain status by enabling the policy details column.  This column will not show by default. Once you've enabled it, your ads tab will show the policy details column. This will allow you to see more information about your ad's approval status.

Approval Process

Even though an ad is paused, it will be reviewed. That means you can create all your ads, pause them, and unpause them when they've been reviewed and are approved. This works great if you're running a dated promotion.  You can check the policy details column to find out whether or not your paused ads were approved.

Resubmitting a Disapproved Ad

If your ad was disapproved, you'll need to make adjustments to it. Once you edit your ad and save the changes, it will be submitted for review automatically.

If your site was suspended and your ad was disapproved due to problems with your website or a specific landing page, then you'll need to make the proper changes to your website. Once you're sure it no longer violates any of the AdWords policies you can resubmit your ad. 

In order to resubmit your ad, you'll need to find the status column in your ads tab. If you hover over the white speech bubble next to the 'disapproved text' then you can click on 'resubmit my campaign for review' and your ad will be reviewed.