Lessons Catalog

Lesson 6c: Your Account

When organizing your account, strive for the following:

• Organize your campaigns by topic. Create separate campaigns for each of your product lines, resources, or brands. This helps you monitor your advertising more easily and make the necessary adjustments to improve your campaign performance.


• Target the right languages and locations. Target your audience appropriately by choosing languages and locations that relate to your business. If you target multiple countries, try splitting them into separate campaigns by country. To learn more, visit the Language and Location Targeting lesson.


• Create highly specific ad groups. Just like with your campaigns, build your ad groups around a single product or service. Then, group your keywords and placements into related themes. By doing this, you can create ads that most accurately promote what you're selling.


• Avoid duplicate keywords across ad groups. Google shows only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword, so there's no need to include duplicate keywords in different ad groups or campaigns. Identical keywords compete against each other, and the better-performing keyword triggers your ad.

Keyword targeting

• Choose specific keywords that relate to your business, ad group, and landing page. Two- or three-word keywords usually work best. For optimal ad visibility, include relevant keyword variations, along with singular and plural versions. If applicable, consider using colloquial terms, alternate spellings, synonyms, and product or serial numbers. The Keyword Tool can help generate lists of possible keywords.


• Take advantage of keyword matching options. With some keywords, you'll get more ad impressions; with others, you'll get fewer impressions but potentially more clicks. To learn more, visit the Keyword Targeting lesson.


• Use unique keyword URLs. Keyword destination URLs send users to a specific landing page, ensuring your customer arrives immediately at the most relevant page for the keyword that triggered your ad. Edit individual keyword URLs by clicking 'Edit Keyword Settings' above your keyword table.


• Try Google Sitemaps: If you're a webmaster or have access to your webpage code, you can use Google Sitemaps as a tool to generate more relevant keywords for your AdWords campaign. Sitemaps enable you to automatically submit all your webpages to Google and receive detailed reports on those pages' top Google search queries. You can then use the reported top search queries as keywords for your AdWords account.
  
  For more information, visit Google Sitemaps.

• Choose sites or related placements that are relevant to your business. The more relevant the sites you target, the better the chances that your ad will show. To create an effective list, we strongly suggest using all methods available in your account when choosing placements. To learn more, visit the placement targeting lesson.
  
  When using the Placement Tool to find and select websites and related placements, pay attention to the Ad Formats column in the list of available placements. If you run only certain kinds of formats — for instance, image ads only, or text and video ads only — make sure the placements you select accept your format.


• If necessary, target site sections. If an entire website isn't relevant to your ads, you have the option to target only the relevant parts of the site. This option may be appropriate if the site covers a variety of topics, of which only some relate to your ads. For example, if you sell kitchen appliances, you might choose to advertise only on the food section of a news site rather than placing ads across the entire site.

  (Note that site sections are slightly different from publisher-defined placements. In a publisher-defined placement, the publisher decides what pages or portions of his site you may target. With a site section, you yourself use URLs to pick which parts of the site you want to advertise on.)

When you choose both keywords and placements, you'll be targeting your content network ads twice: once by keywords and once by placements. Use the Networks and bidding section of your Edit Campaign Settings page to determine how your keywords and placements work together.

Here's an example: Suppose in one ad group you target the keyword roses and the placement www.example.com.

• With the content network enabled and the setting 'Relevant pages across the entire network,' you can let the keyword roses display your ad across the content network, but raise your bid whenever roses triggers your ad on www.example.com.
• With the content network enabled and the setting 'Relevant pages only on the placements I target,' you can choose to have your ad appear only on content pages of www.example.com, and only when one of those pages matches roses.