10 AdWords setup tips
Here is a quick checklist of commonly missed tasks that should be undertaken when setting up an AdWords account and new AdWords campaigns.
- Determine if you’ll use pre-pay or post-pay. We only recommend pre-pay for those cases where you need precise control over the total budget consumed over the life of a campaign. Note that as of writing this post, this is a permanent decision for the account.
- Turn on Auto-Tagging under My Account >> Account Preferences so that Google Analytics and other tracking software provide more detail about your AdWords traffic.
- Set the regional targeting for each campaign, including exclusions of regions if applicable.
- Set the right regions and devices for each campaign so that you aren’t showing ads where they would simply waste budget.
- Turn on or off position preferences for each campaign.
- Select the preferred delivery method for each campaign. We favor Standard delivery for most campaigns unless we need to know at which hour the budget is typically being depleted. (For some geo-targeted campaigns, we’ve seen erroneous data in the Impression Share report.)
- Set the campaigns’ start and end dates.
- Turn on ad scheduling if you intend to only show ads part of the time.
- Set Ad Rotation to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly” so that you will be able to see the differences in performance from different ads and can improve them. Note that this setting is not available until your ads have started showing.
- Add campaign negative keywords if you are certain of words that you will never want your ads to show for. Doing this early can save a lot of money, but be careful or you could inadvertently omit good prospects.
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October 8th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
It might also be worthwhile to turn off delivery to certain types of pages, such as parked pages and adult content sites. This can be done at the campaign level by clicking on the Networks tab, the Exclusions area (under the listing of networks), clicking on Add Exclusions, and selecting Exclude Category.