AdWords Essentials

If you’re new to AdWords, this is a nice friendly introduction. It talks a bit about AdWords advantages vs. traditional advertising, and about some of the challenges AdWords presents.

A overview of reasons people find AdWords a good investment. It’s probably the world’s most powerful and effective advertising platform, useful for product and lead gen marketing alike.

The Google network extends outside the Google search results page. This post describes opportunities AdWords provides within search and beyond.

Quality Score is Google’s way of measuring how relevant your ad and landing page are relative to search keywords. A high Quality Score improves ad position and decreases cost. A low Quality Score can prevent your ads from running at all.

A nice overview of all the major elements that go into an AdWords campaign. The posts in this series assume familiarity with these concepts, so if you are rusty you might give this article a look.

AdWords campaigns can be organized any way that you wish, but there are some best practices you should be aware of. A thoughtfully organized campaign can reduce a lot of headaches later on.

Keywords are the connection between your ad and the search query a person types into their browser.

Match types define how broadly or narrowly your keyword needs to match a search term before an ad is triggered. You get more traffic with a broad match type, but more quality with a narrow match type.

Negative keywords are often overlooked, but important. If you are an insurance agent, you don’t want to advertise when people search for “insurance scams.”

This article highlights some things to keep in mind when composing your ads.

If you wish, you can make sure your ads appear only to people searching from a certain physical location and/or at a certain time.

Extensions are helpful (and free) additional bits of information that can be included with your ads. It’s always a good idea to add them, because they can increase ad performance.

A list of all manual extensions available in AdWords, with examples and some suggestions about which to use and when.

A list of all automatic extensions available in AdWords, with examples and suggestions about use.

The landing page is the web site your ad points to. The success of an ad campaign depends on the success of the landing page — if the page doesn’t convert, your investment is wasted.

Every time someone performs a Google search, an auction is performed to determine which ads will be shown. This article describes how that works.

Along with Quality Score, how much you bid determines where your ad appears relative to other ads competing for the same keywords. This article describes how Google determines how cost is calculated for various ads.

A suggested routine you should follow every week to monitor performance. A monthly routine is also suggested.

Conversion tracking lets you measure how well your landing page is performing. This article goes over the basics.

A nice checklist to guide you when you set up a campaign in AdWords.