How to set up PPC Campaign on Google Adwords’ new interface

‘Good marketing makes the company looks smart, great marketing makes the customer feel smart,’ Joe Chernov.

In the competitive business environment, the best way to achieve your business objectives is by leveraging the time and tested Google AdWords. Yes, the AdWords based search campaign is your best shot to let your website speak about the products and services to the target customers, which is arguably way better and effective than any other marketing approach. The successful implementation of the Google AdWords campaign shall see your website feature in the top section of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This way, your website has a better chance of being noticed and visited by prospective customers thereby giving your business and brand the much needed boost.

If you look at any of the SERPs you will find the top and bottom places to be occupied by advertisements. And it is only after the ads that Google displays the relevant and organic search results. So, should you want your visitors to notice your website, you should ideally set up a Google Adwords campaign in the new interface and aim at becoming a part of the top 4 ads. In doing so, you can be a step ahead of your competitors and closer to your customers. Google AdWords can offer you an ROI that is well nigh impossible through other traditional marketing streams. However, before getting into the nitty-gritty of setting up an AdWord campaign, let us first understand how Google charges for the ads.

How does Google charge for the ads?

Google charges on a PPC (Pay Per Click) or CPC (Cost Per Click) basis. In other words, your ad will be charged only when someone clicks on it. Importantly, Google is aware of the fact that rich advertisers can skew the market by buying the top slots of a SERP with irrelevant and bad ads. The bad ads can create a bad user experience and drive the relevance of the platform southwards. To prevent such a scenario, Google awards a ‘quality score’ to your ad, which denotes the relevance of your ad to a person’s search.

How to set up a PPC campaign on Google AdWords’s new interface?

After logging into Google AdWords, click on the blue ‘+’ button on the ‘Campaigns’ dashboard.

This is followed by selecting the ‘Search’ campaign type from among the other ones such as the display, shopping, videos and universal app.

Campaign goal: Select the goal of your ad campaign from a series of options such as sales, leads, website traffic, product and brand consideration, brand awareness and reach or app promotion. In fact, you can even create an ad campaign without setting a specific goal.

Choose the website: In this section, the name of the website needs to be mentioned along with the search network. The search network will ensure your ad appears on Google and its partner sites like CNN.

Target country & language: Select the country name where you want your campaign to reach. In this section, you can even exclude a city, region, country, or post code. This is to be followed by selecting the language of your ad campaign. Even though selecting the universal language ‘English’ works in most cases, it is better to target your customers in the language they understand the most.

Campaign time limit: You can fix a time limit to your ad campaign by giving a start and end date. However, should you want your campaign to continue till an end date, the option ‘None’ needs to be chosen.

Campaign name: Set up the name of your campaign. It can be related to your product or service (web development, digital marketing etc.,) or even the name of a country (Germany, France etc.)

Keyword selection: In this section, you need to select the list of keywords upon which the campaigning is to be carried out. The keywords should be appropriate and reflect the ones that are likely to be used by your target customers.

Add extension: Now, select the extension from the list of options. This feature allows you to display more business information on the SERP such as phone numbers, store rating, offer price or more web links. The extra bit of information can be handy for the users and do not require them to visit the website.

Price extension: The price extension option allows you to display a price for a specific product/service. This helps your target customers to know the price upfront and decide for themselves whether to avail the same or not. In the absence of this info, customers have to contact you in order to know the price, which in many cases, might not appear to be a good user experience. The price info can turn a prospective lead to an actual customer. It can be set up by clicking the ‘Create New’ button.

Site extension: Selecting this option would display the URLs to your individual web pages rather than only the home page. This helps a user to directly visit the interior pages to search for the relevant information rather than follow the relevant links on the home page. This would save time for the user and lead to a better user experience.

Call out extension: In the SERP, it is better to provide the USP of your brand in order to attract the attention of users. You can do so through the call out extension route and add unique services like free shipping, 24 x 7 customer service etc.

Structural snippet: This option allows you to display the range of products or services offered by your business. For example, a website development company can display websites such as eCommerce websites, small business websites, corporate websites etc.

Budget & Bidding: This option allows you to put up a specific amount for Google to advertise the keywords that are used in your website. The amount can be set up as ‘standard’ (spread evenly over a period of time) or ‘accelerated’ (spend more to get the top position on a SERP.) For example, if you have a breakfast shop, the relevant keyword should ideally show in the morning rather than appearing in the afternoon or evening as decided by Google. In such a case, accelerated bidding would make sense.

Cost per acquisition (CPA): This particular strategy allows you to pay for a certain action by the target customer. This is a supposedly low risk venture as you have to pay only when a particular action (read clicking on multi channel funnels or submitting a form) is performed by the user. It is calculated as cost divided by the number of conversions.

Maximise conversions bidding: This feature allows you to set up bids to enable maximum conversions in your ad campaign. This process throws up a CPC bid that is optimal for your advertisement each time it is shown on the SERP. This is done by Google AdWords to give you the maximum conversions while spending your budget.

Conclusion

Google AdWords is arguably the best platform to launch your ad campaign. The features and options that appear on this platform can help you reach your target customers in the most effective manner. However, care must be taken to optimize your campaign constantly to derive the maximum ROI given the fierce competition that exists. The above mentioned steps are a ready reckoner for you to set up a PPC campaign in the new interface of Google AdWords. Remember, Google AdWords is not a cakewalk and requires a thorough understanding of the various options before you can hit the success button. We assume the blog would be helpful to set up a campaign on the new interface of Google AdWords. It can even come in handy should you engage professional yet cost effective PPC management services to promote your products and services.