Friday: Building Out the Campaign


This week, we have been concentrating on the strategic and structural concepts behind building out a campaign. Now comes the time to pull the levers and push the buttons.

As we’ve mentioned, we always create separate content and search campaigns, but beyond that, how should you subdivide campaigns? As we have mentioned several times, you should start by creating just a few campaigns to achieve the minimum number of conversions (15 per month), and use Google Conversion Optimizer to automate bid management more quickly.

It is, of course, our recommendation that you use AdWords Editor for campaign build-out. AdWords Editor enables you to “walk away” from your work and come back to it without losing work or data. In addition, AdWords Editor makes it easier to modify your campaigns and ad groups on the fly. For example, we often create campaigns with a certain level of granularity, but then consolidate ad groups based on ads as we write them. What seems like a separate ad group at first blush might make sense with its keywords consolidated with another ad group that has similar (especially fewer) words.

We know that you’ve already learned a lot at this point, but resist the urge to go activate your freshly minted campaigns. The rest of this chapter will help you hone and refine your campaign logistically—setting bids and budgets, tracking sales efforts directly, and so on. Don’t worry; you’ll be in the marketplace and on the SERPs soon enough!