Before you begin creating your campaign, it’s important to learn how AdWords is structured. A well-organized account can help you create effective campaigns that target the right audience and, ultimately, help you reach more of your advertising goals.
AdWords is organized into three layers: account, campaigns, ad groups.
- Account: Your account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information.
- Campaigns: Each campaign in your account has its own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.
- Ad groups: Each ad group within a campaign contains a set of similar ads and keywords that you want to trigger your ads to show.
Structuring your campaign
With AdWords, you’ll organize your account into separate campaigns, with each campaign focusing on a single business goal, such as driving traffic to your website, or offering, like a particular product or service. If your business serves several geographic areas, you might want to create a separate campaign for each location.
One effective approach is to organize your campaigns to reflect the structure of your website. This allows you to create campaigns around specific themes or products. For example, an electronics retailer might create campaigns for specific product categories, such as televisions and cameras.
You control the following at the campaign level:
- How much you’re willing to spend on clicks, impressions, or conversions from your ads
- Networks and geographical locations where you want your ads to show
- Other top-level settings that affect your ad groups
Tip
- A common method for organizing an e-commerce website AdWords campaign is to organize it the way your website is structured. However, when using AdWords for lead generation, you should organize your campaign structure according to your keyword research and utilize different landing pages for each ad group.
- Campaign organization is extremely important. You should consider and plan your campaign at the beginning, rather than try to reorganize later. Reorganizing your account after you’ve created several campaigns and ad groups will wipe out all the valuable data you’ve accumulated and possibly affect how your ads perform.
Organizing your ad groups
Each campaign contains one or more ad groups. An ad group allows you to organize your campaign into sets of ads and keywords that directly relate to each other, which can improve your Quality Score and help boost your return on investment. For Search Network campaigns, this helps you show ads that are relevant to the searches of people you’re trying to reach. For campaigns targeting the Display Network, you can create relevant ads to show to customers browsing websites about similar topics.
Similar to your campaign structure, you’ll want to create separate ad groups for each theme or product that you’re advertising. Again, consider creating ad groups that are based on the sections or categories that appear on your website. For example, the same electronics retailer might create ad groups for sub-categories, like compact cameras and SLR cameras.
Example
Antoine creates a Search Network campaign to drive sales of Fiona’s products, and starts researching how the campaign should be organized. He considers building out several ad groups that are based on how Fiona’s website is organized — Acme’s web designer has improved it — and the different products she offers, such as bunk beds, chairs, and tables. Next, Antoine starts thinking about how to reach Fiona’s target audience — mothers.
Developing a Plan
Campaign Settings
Campaign settings can include your budget, network, bidding options and adjustments, location targeting, campaign end date, and other settings that affect an entire campaign. Keep in mind that not all campaign settings are available with every campaign type. Learn more about campaign types and their available features.
General Settings
Campaign name: Edit the name of a particular campaign.
Campaign type: Determines which of the settings and options below you’ll see as you customize your campaign. Tailors the set-up process to just what’s relevant for your goals.
Locations: Target your ads to almost any geographic area. Specify countries, territories, regions, cities, or custom areas where you want your ads to show.
Languages: Target your ads by your customers’ language preference. For example, only customers whose Google interface language is Spanish will see ads in a campaign targeted to Spanish.
Networks: Determine where on the Internet your ads will show. Ads can appear on Google’s Search Network or Display Network, or both.
Devices: Campaigns target all types of devices by default. Note that if you have a “Display Network only” campaign, you can target specific operating systems, device models, as well as carriers and wireless networks. To see these options, go to the “Devices” section on your Settings tab, and click advanced mobile and tablet options. If you have a different campaign type and would like to use these targeting options, you might consider creating a “Display Network only” campaign.
Bidding option: Choose automatic or manual bidding for ad clicks (Max. CPC). Advanced options let you choose to pay per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM bidding) or set a cost-per-acquisition bid (Conversion Optimizer, CPA bidding).
Tip
You can increase or decrease your bids to gain more control over when and where your ad are shown by setting bid adjustments.
Budget: Adjust your campaign’s daily budget at any time.
Delivery method: Choose either standard or accelerated delivery for your daily budget to determine how quickly your ads are shown each day if your campaign is limited by budget.
Advanced settings
Ad extensions: Show relevant business information (such as a phone number) with your text ads. Create and manage your ad extensions from the “Ad extensions” tab.
Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling: Specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your AdWords ads to appear. You can also adjust bids for your ads during certain time periods.
Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping: Your ad rotation selection determines how often we deliver your active ads in relation to one another within an ad group. Frequency capping limits the number of times your ads appear on the Google Display Network to a unique user.
Automatic campaign optimization (Display Network only): By default, your campaign is optimized based on the targeting elements you’ve selected, such as keywords, audiences, or placements. Select “Auto-optimized” if you’d like Display Campaign Optimizer to find additional conversions for your campaign automatically.
Experiment (BETA): Make experimental changes to your bids, keywords, and ad groups in your campaign. As traffic accumulates on your experiment, statistical differences may emerge. Evaluate and apply changes based on your tests.
Editing your campaign settings
If you don’t have any campaigns yet, click the +Campaign button to create a new campaign and follow the instructions on the page to complete your ad group. Once you have a campaign, you can edit its settings as often as you like.
Here’s how to do it:
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the Campaigns tab. Under All campaigns,click the name of the campaign that you’d like to edit.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click Edit next to the settings you’d like to change.
- Click Save after each change.
Additional study materials
- Read more about structuring your AdWords account.
- Find out more about organizing your campaigns and ad groups.