Today we are starting a series called, Beginner AdWords Optimization. Now, what does that mean?

This is specifically meant for people who have started an AdWords account, and maybe they have not done any optimization up to this point. Maybe it’s something that they turned on, or they’re not really that experienced with it. They set up an account. It didn’t work really well. They shut it off immediately.

This is the optimization that you should probably work with right when you turn an account on, or optimization rules for AdWords accounts that have never really been touched, meaning they were set up, they were turned on, and they really haven’t been touched since.

So, today, in day number one, we are going to take a look at our Adwords settings.

So here we are inside a Campaign, and here we are in our Ad groups.

Let’s Check Our Settings

Go down to the left-hand side and click on Settings.

Here we see the Campaign. We see the status is enabled. What we can do now is, the first thing I want you to take a look at is Networks.

What networks are you on?

Are you on the Search Network, or are you on the Google Display Network? If you are doing true PPC, you probably want to be on the Search Network. The Display Network is basically those display ads that you might see if you’re on a news site, and you see an image ad over to your right-hand side.

The Search Network is when people go to Google and actually type it in.

Make sure that you just have the Search Network included here.

Where Are Your Locations?

Next, I want you to take a look at Locations.

In this particular campaign, you can see that we are targeting the Las Vegas area. However, if I’m a service provider, and my business only targets Las Vegas, but if we look on here and we see United States is checked, or the United States and Canada, or All countries and territories, obviously you have a big problem.

So what I would do now is specifically and Enter a specific location. You can scroll down and click on Advanced search.

Now you can target a specific area like Las Vegas, Nevada. But watch out… as you can also target Las Vegas, New Mexico. Obviously that would not be one area that you’d want to target.

You can target specifically the Las Vegas Strip. You can target Henderson, NV which is a suburb of Las Vegas. You get the point.

All’s you have to do is click on the TARGET button next to the choices.

Now, if you are in a specific area where maybe you have a franchise, and you are only allowed to target specific zip codes, you can enter in the zip codes there as well.  You can also enter in zip codes to exclude, so if you butt up against somebody else’s territory then all you would need to do is type in the zip code that they have, and you can click on the exclude option.

Make sure you’re targeting is accurate here.

What language are you speaking?

While, I know that this may seem obvious, but make sure you’re not targeting a language that your ads are not in. Or that your customers do not speak.

What’s Your DAILY Budget?

This is not a monthly budget here. This is not $19.75 a month. This is a DAILY budget, meaning that if you’re ads are shown, and they are clicked on, and you use up your entire daily budget, your ads will stop showing for that day.

I’ve spoken to new clients and they will sometimes say, “We have a $400 a month budget, and we burned through that in a single day”.

What they didn’t understand is that the input area in Google Adwords is for a “daily budget”, so they went in and entered $400 (in the daily budget setting), and the next day it was gone.

So you need to take your entire budget. Let’s say it’s $300 a month, divide it by 30.4 which is the average number of days per month, and you will get a number to come up with. So if it’s $300 divided by 30.4, that’s actually $9.87 a day. Enter that number in the “daily budget” field.

Make sure that your budget here is accurate.

What are you going to bid?

Now Google will give you a lot of suggestions. However, Google’s suggestions are not always great suggestions to follow.

When it comes to bidding, when it comes to PPC bidding, we usually will always start with Manual CPC (Cost Per Click).

You can see there’s obviously a number of different bid strategies.

Target CPA which is Target Cost-Per-Acquisition.

Target ROAS which is Return on Ad Spend.

Maximize Clicks, a lot of people will check this because they want to get the most clicks to their website. The problem is if your website is not converting, that’s not the best strategy to use.

And so on.

We always suggest starting with Manual CPC. Now, you can get help increasing conversions with Enhanced CPC. However, if you’re just starting, I would suggest keeping it at Manual CPC and not clicking the Enhanced CPC option. This is something that we will look into later.

Next, go down and click on Additional settings.

How Often Are Your Ads Rotating?

Under Ad rotation, make sure you check the setting to rotate ads indefinitely.

Chances are, that you’ve left the optimize best performing ads setting checked. Now, if you were running one ad, that really doesn’t matter as it’s always going to show that ad.

But if you are running multiple ads, what you’re telling Google is you want to show each ad as often as the other one, so that you can always determine which ad is performing best. This is called ad testing.

But, when Google optimizes that for you, they will sometimes choose an ad that maybe only has five conversions, but the losing ad has 10 conversions.

Maybe the first ad has a better click-through rate, meaning more people have clicked it. But I’m obviously going to go with the ad with more conversions (in this particular example).

When it comes to this, I would always just check the option “rotate ads indefinitely”.

Another Location Setting

And then lastly, under Location options. Scroll down and make sure it’s checked on “People in your targeted locations”. Let me give you an example of this.

If we’re targeting the Las Vegas area (we’ll stick with that example), we want only people in that Las Vegas area that we have targeted on our map to be able to see our ads when they’re searching for it.

If we’re targeting Las Vegas, and somebody lives in New York, we don’t want our ads to show up if they’re looking under specific key words in New York.

You want to make sure they are in your targeted location when they’re searching for you.

Adwords Settings Conclusion

Now, while this is just a very stripped down version of how to basically adjust your very basic Google AdWords settings, this is by no means the be all end all guide to do that.

However, it should give you a quick idea of some fast changes that you can make to make sure that your AdWords Campaign is getting off on the right start.

A lot of people will start an AdWords Campaign and end up going into their account the next day, and something is way off, and they have no idea what it is, and they just throw their hands up.

Their budgets gone. They’re yelling things like “This doesn’t work”, “This sucks!”

We want to make sure that’s not happening for you.

So what this quick video series is designed to do is give you some ideas of what you can work on to help improve your Google Adwords account.

Later this week, we’ll be releasing our Google AdWords Optimization, Day #2 video.

That’s going to talk about some of the keyword settings that we would have you take a look at if your campaign’s not running the way it should be.

See Adwords Optimization Day #2 Here (Keyword Eligibility)