Newbie.

Tons of questions

[Luke12321]

I am going to try to keep all my questions within this one thread rather than creating new threads with each problem that I run into. I am in charge of setting up a campaign for a family members website.

Here is my first question...

With the good adwords tool, I used this page to generate some ideas for keyword phrases I might want to set up a campaign for.

Ex. I found the keyword "commercial lawn care"

Estimate CPC is .36

Position 6-8

Match Type: Broad

Does this mean I should expect a CPC of 36 cents if I started a campaign for "commercial lawn care"?

More questions to come...

[jcmoon]

Yes, this means Google expects you to pay roughly .36 cents per click if you added the keyword 'commercial lawn care,' to an active campaign.

[Luke12321]

My next question is, if I was marketing a campaign geared towards commercial lawn care, would I be better off to have:

"California commercial lawn care"
"CA commercial lawn care"
"Nevada commercial lawn care"
"NV commercial lawn care"

or would I be better off to just bid on "commercial lawn care" and select them two states as states I want my ad to be displayed for.

Thanks again!

[Luke12321]

My next question is, if I was marketing a campaign geared towards commercial lawn care, would I be better off to have:

"California commercial lawn care"
"CA commercial lawn care"
"Nevada commercial lawn care"
"NV commercial lawn care"

or would I be better off to just bid on "commercial lawn care" and select them two states as states I want my ad to be displayed for.

Thanks again!

[BDuns]

it doesn't sound like you'll be working with a very large budget...here's a couple suggestions:

geo-target very tightly...if your business is local only.

be careful of using broad match...you will show for queries about commercial everything (real estate, ad space, industrial supply etc.)

find as many exact and phrase match keywords. this will bring down your cost per click as well.

If you DO decide to go with broad match for your keywords, I would run daily search query reports (In the 'Reports' tab), at least at the beginning. You'll likely see all sorts of search queries where you don't want to be showing, so find some of these words and add them as negative keywords. ex: if you're going for customers in california only, but you see Nevada lawn care search queries, those clicks are obviously a waste, so you'll add "nevada" as a negative...shoot, maybe the other 48 states too knowing expanded broad match....

[fordo23]

I would definitely recommend starting with exact or phrase match. That way you have complete control over your terms, and you know they are highly targeted for your products & services. There are lots of free/cheap keyword tools out there. Not sure how good your site is for SEO, but you could always check your logs/analytics tool for the ‘natural search terms’ to give you more ideas too.
After your campaign has been running for a few days, run an ‘impression share’ report at a Campaign level to see if your budget is enough to cover your core product. If you are on broad match you will have less control for understanding the size of your core market terms and how much of the pie you might be missing. (There’s also been controversy in recent times over Google taking liberties on Broad match and showing ads on ‘relevant’ match basis).

I’d also like to offer advice on items to watch in campaign settings.
Delivery method - Choose: “Standard, show ads evenly over time”, the accelerated option will just spend all your money asap

Networks – You’ll automatically be set to Google Search & Search Network (my advice is to un-tick Search Network). The wording in my option is very ambigous. The Search Network is their partner sites, such as AOL & Ask.com. I think if you just starting out, and your budget is limited, turn this setting off so you have more control. If you want to read more about the ‘search network’ here’s the link.

[adwords.google.com...]

Hope this is of benefit.