Starting a quick AdWords campaign can often provide decent results but if you plan your campaign thoroughly  beforehand, chances are that your results are going to be even better.

In this post we are going to discuss the important considerations that an advertiser must take prior to starting an AdWords campaign.

Understanding your campaign goals

Before anything else you need to know exactly what you want to achieve from your advertising campaign. Are you looking for more sales, sign-ups, downloads or maybe you just want to popularize your brand and the products that you sell. Only then you can decide upon:

• What mix of advertising tools you should go for (keyword campaign, content campaign, site targeted campaign or a mix)
• What bidding mechanism you should apply to your campaign (CPC, CPA or CPM)
• What keywords and ads would provide the best results for your aims and objectives.

What is your advertising budget

How much do you have to spend for your campaign? This is an important question that you need to ask yourself. Because it will affect the bidding approach, daily spend, keyword and advert selection. For example if you have limited budget you might want to only target certain areas within your country and go for long tail keywords in order to decrease your cost per click as much as possible. Then you would be able to get more traffic at lower cost.

Targeted audience

Ask yourself who are my target audience? Questions that might help are:

What gender are they?
Where are they based?
What income do they have?
Whats their age group?
Do they know the product that you offer or are they looking for a solution to a problem?

Once you have an answer to all of those questions you would be able to chose the right campaign setting, decide upon the keyword type and write adverts that will appeal to this group.

What keywords to use

There are a few thing that you need to consider here. First of all take into account what your campaign objectives are you looking for branding or sales. Whats your advertising budget if its large than maybe you can afford using broader keywords if the budget is limited maybe a better option would be going for long tail and branded keywords.Last but not least who are your targeted audience – do they know the products that you offer or are they looking for a solution to some specific problem. Asking yourself all those questions prior will make defining your keyword list a lot easier.

How much to bid?

A lot of people find it hard to decide how much to bid for their keywords. So here are a few tips that might help:

Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool – even though in most cases the estimated bids are not 100% accurate you could still get a rough estimate. Usually the bids are 20%-40% lower that the ones that Google provides.

Look at how much competition there is in the search results – even though it is a very simple procedure it can tell you a lot about how much you will have to pay per click. If there is only a couple of ads out there its likely that bids will be low. If there are hundreds of pages of sponsored links your advertising campaign isn’t going to come cheap.

How much do you earn from your clicks – this is absolutely vital to do before planing your campaign. Find out how much your products/services cost and how much you can afford to spend per click in order to be profitable. Its pointless spending $5.00 per click if you only make $3.00 per sale.

Tracking performance

This is the thing that will make the difference between earning and loosing money. I can’t stress how important it is to measure your campaign performance as not doing so is going to keep you in the dark about whats working and whats not. In Google AdWords there is no secret strategy that works every time every successful campaign has an individual custom tailored strategy. In order to define your strategy you will need to experimenting and measure results. As a rule of thumb conversion tracking and Google Analytics are a must.

Well i hope this help. If you want to find out how your campaign can perform even better why not try our FREE AdWords Audit or just give us a call on 0203 137 1048.