New to Adwords

Any pointers before I dive in?

[overdrive]

New to Google adwords. Any pointers before I dive in? Any tutorials on making the best out of the ads? Like what keywords to target and what not. Do's and Don'ts? Would appreciate all the help.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

overdrive, welcome to this forum, and to AdWords as well! I wish you every success.

You'll get a great deal of excellent advice here, and I am pleased to be among the first to offer it.

IMO, you would do well to put the following mantra in the back of your mind, and let it inform everything that you do in your AdWords account.

AWA's Mantra: "Always seek to be targeted, rather than general."

Everyone who has been around for awhile is now saying "Oh well, there goes AWA with that 'Be Targeted' thing again!"

But really, it is good advice. What it really comes down to is this:

* Use keywords that are very specific to what you have to offer. Avoid single-word keywords for the most part. Use 2 or 3 word keyword phrases to start.

* Show an ad that is about exactly what your keywords are about. (Use multiple Ad Groups to achieve this.) Pay special attention to the headline: it is all many people ever look at.

* When they click on your ad, send Google's user to the page on your site which is most highly related to the keyword they've searched on, and the ad they've clicked on.

This is a short (and I'll admit, an over-simplified) recipe for good results, IMO.

May you have fun, & be successful!

AWA

[beren]

My main suggestion is to apply tracking URLs to your keywords so you can see how each one is doing when it comes to delivering results.

And be aware that for each campaign, you stipulate whether the ads show up on "search" site, "content" sites, or both. I like to keep each campaign either "search" only or "content" only, so I can distiguish them. The number of sites in Google
's network (the content sites) has expanded greatly in recent months, and the quality of traffic from those new sites has been very poor for me and for many other advertisers.

The search site ads produce quality traffic, better than Overture's or any other PPC in my experience. The content ads produce clearly inferior traffic, though. That's been my experience. You might find something different for your ads, but you can't know unless you apply tracking URLs and distinguish between search and content ads.

[lukasz]

Use negative keywords.
Make sure you are targeting right countries and languages.
Monitor your adwords very closely in the first hours.
In my first campaign I had two-word keyword which happened to be included in title of very popular song. 1000 impressions and 0 clicks.

[Corey]

I would recommend keeping a fairly close eye on your campaign at first. You may be surprised at how much (or how little) you may spend your first few days.

Another recommendation would be to use several keyword phrases and monitor which ones are successful.

And remember that success is not clicks (those cost money). Success is conversion. True success is getting the most conversions (signups, orders, etc) for the least clicks. Try using a program such as Conversion Ruler to monitor your conversion, or the built-in Google program.