The AdWords Campaign

Luckily, I had already done the first stage of the process, which is researching proper keywords for your product or business. I'm marketing my Employee Evaluation Module with the AdWords, something I've had for sale for almost 4 years with minimal success.

Because my website and the page I'm marketing this item from are optimized properly, with a Google page rank of 4, with the search term "employee evaluation program" I come in on Google at #17, Yahoo at #3, Ask at #4 and MSN at #6. Those terms average around 18,000 searches a month; it's a nice term to be ranked highly with.

I went to the Google Ads page and created an account. Because I already had an AdSense account, it allowed me to use the same passwords for AdWords. It then gave me two choices of types of account to set up; Standard or Starter. I went with Starter, because I want to see how all of this works out. With that, you put in your website and Google will run its own test to give you choices of keywords it thinks you might want to use for your ads to come up on.

Next, you get to select the terms you want to use, and you don't have to only use their terms. They recommend a maximum of 20 terms, but also recommend to go lower if you can, which I did, choosing only 6 of their terms and adding two of my own. Some of the phrases they come up with seem to look the same, but one never knows how people are going to put in terms when they're looking for what you have to offer.

Next comes the details part; your name, business name, address, etc. Then you get to select how much you want your monthly budget to be. There's a $5.00 set up fee, but after that, it asked if I wanted $30, $50, $100, or I could put in my own dollar amount. I chose $30 because I'm new and a little bit skittish.

You also get to select where you want the ad to show, within reason. It asked me if I wanted my hometown, the area I live in, the state, the country, or the world. I chose my state, New York, which should give me access to around 18 million people, especially those 9 million in New York City. I thought about going throughout the country, but I wanted a chance to maximize my investment by staying relatively local.

The one thing I didn't initially see was where I could set how much I wanted to pay per click. I went looking for it in my account information and learned that, for the Starter setting, the default is them "maximizing" the ads for the most effectiveness, based on your budget. I decided to leave it alone, as I'm pretty much expecting that, at best, I might get 20 clicks a day. But that's okay, because the purpose is to get some targeted traffic for just that item, not people who might be coming to my main site and just looking around.

There is one minor disappointment already, though. It would seem that, with the starter package, I can't link to my Analytics setup, so I'll have to review my stats through AdWords until I decide whether to upgrade to Standard or not; oh well, minor issue I suppose.

What are my hopes? Well, if I can make even one sale, I'll have made my money back and then some. If I sell one a day, that's $200 a week. Not a bunch of money, but it buys pizza.