… or any PPC Campaign.

Many advertisers today either 1) jump into Google Adwords without having a clue what they don’t know or 2) they are too afraid of losing money to start in the first place. Both approaches don’t get you anywhere.

If you don’t have a lot of Adwords experience and already managed to get successful Adwords campaigns running (that means campaigns that make money back), the best advice is to prepare and then start small and learn along the way, while you expand your campaign. Being prepared means to have a basic knowledge of what is going on. This article will help you to understand Adwords better and get a successful campaign up and running.

Before you even start you should know clearly what you are after. In affiliate marketing the goal is to make a conversion (user takes the desired action), so that gets easy. There may be other goals though, for this article I assume we are going for some kind of measurable conversion, most likely a direct sale or lead.

1. Understand Your Niche, Your Offer and Your Audience

The first thing to do is to understand your product and the people that buy it. In affiliate marketing that is not a no-brainer, since there are a lot of products looking promising and that you can choose from. If you own your product then this should be easier :) So get informed on the product, if possible test it yourself and understand it’s benefits clearly.

Then understand what problem it solves for the customer. Robert Collier always said the secret is to “Entering the conversation inside the customer’s head.” (and Perry Marshall also likes to quote im often). If you understand the need and problem of the customer and why he may be looking for this product, you can create a much better targeted campaign. For instance look in some blogs and forums of that niche to understand the mindsets of the customers. Also study the ads of your competition.

Also check if the product you want to advertise has a commercial demand. That means if there are people spending money. You can get an idea in affiliate networks by networks earnings or EPC (average earnings pay per click) or on Clickbank on the gravity-rating. More importantly look on Google itself if you search for the product name. Are there a lot of advertisers? If not, that may be a sign that there is no one spending money to buy it.

2. Finding the Right Keywords to Start With

You don’t want to start new with very broad keywords, like “internet marketing” or “weight loss”. While they have a lot of traffic, they also have a lot of competition and are usually not targeted enough to get a good idea if your campaign has the potential to be a winner. Use the Google keyword tool to get very targeted keywords that still have a volume where you don’t have to wait to see results for months.

For instance if you have an offer towards one gender use this in your keyword, like “weight loss for men” or be more specific like “german shepherd training” instead of “dog training”. You can go even deeper. By choosing a more targeted keyword you raise your probability of getting conversions and getting your campaign faster to a profitable level from which you can expand naturally.

You can see the monthly search volume of a keyword on the Google keyword tool. Of course you can use other keyword tools like for instance the free Wordtracker tool.

3. Know Your Competition

Before you start your campaign you should have a look at the current level of competition and what they are saying in their ads and how their offers and landing pages look like. There are two basic things to achieve: 1. to stand out of the crowd and 2. to just have an attractive ad.

The way especially popular affiliate products are promoted changes over time. In some niches you see ads ranking in the top positions that talk about “Warning” or even “Scams” in their headlines. You might have a hard time competing here without a special reason that the user should prefer your ad over the ad that tries to warn him. So the idea is to get an impression what the ads of your competitors for a given keywords look like. Then you can adjust your strategy better.

4. Writing your Ads

The art of copywriting would fill not even one post but a whole blog, but here are some basic tips to get you started:

• Insert your keyword: put the keyword in the headline and possibly into Ad Text and Display-URL
• Great headline: the most important part is the headline. So make it attention grabbing and to stand out.
• Be relevant: Don’t try to get visitors to click that don’t convert. You want converting (targeted) traffic in the first place, so only put on the ad what your landing page / offer delivers
• Put your benefits into the ad text: for instance “20% Discount Code”, “Free Trial” or “Get Slim and Fit” etc. – try to speak to the emotions
• Be specific: use numbers, not: make more money – but: make $10k in 4 weeks
• Insert a Call to Action into the ad: Write what you want the user to do, for instance “Order Today and Safe!” or “Sign Up For a Free Newsletter!”
• Use the whole ad: Headline, use most of the text and don’t forget the Display-URL, the URL tells a story too

Write your ad directly related to your keyword. Remember? You want to be “Entering the conversation inside the customer’s head.” Your adcopy and your keyword and finally your landing page have to be in total harmony to maximize conversion rates, your ultimate goal.

Start with at least two slightly different ads so you can run them “against” each other and split test them.

5. Settings and Launching

First turn off the content network for this campaign, since we are targeting only search. (You can target content also of course, but don’t mix them up, they work completely different).

Then add your country-targeting (or even region/city …) and check the options: accelerated vs. evenly delivery (might want to set it to accelerated to see faster results) and turn of ad optimization (you will optimize your ads yourself).

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is to throw too many unrelated keywords into one adgroup. You cannot do this if you want to get a successful campaign – you will fail if you do it. Create one adgroup and add your keyword or very related keywords along with your ads. To give you an idea, the keywords “google adwords tool” and “google adwords software” are still related, “google adwords help” and “google adwords software” are not.

Also activate conversion tracking right from the start. This is extremely important! Use Pixel or Javascript tracking (in the tools menu on AdWords) and implement it on the final conversion page of your landing page. Usually that’s the offer page, in affiliate marketing place your conversion pixel on the network for that offer (Ask your Affiliate-Manager if you have problems here).

6. Quality Score and Bid Management

The moment you submit your campaign your keywords will get an initial Quality Score assigned. This Quality Score is determined by your account Quality Score history, especially on this keyword and on the Quality Score history of that keyword in general (by other advertisers). Landing Page and Relevance of your ad to keyword is also important here. Once your campaign runs, AdWords will possibly adjust the Quality Score for your keywords according to your performance, which basically means CTR – compared to your competition. Please read my article about How to Get a Great Quality Score on Google AdWords – it is very important to understand the Google AdWords Quaity Score.

You want to have a bid that shows your campaign on the first page of search results, so raise the bid at least to the “first page bid” that Google is showing. If it is way too high for you, then you either have a bad history on that keyword or your landing page / adcopy is not relevant enough for it. It may also be that it is just extremely competitive – check with the Google keyword tool again to see the normal CPC for rank 1-3 on search for this keyword.

7. Tracking and Optimizing

When your Quality Score improves due to good relevance and ad copy your bid price will go down and your ad rank can go up. You just adjust your own bid according to your ROI (return on investment) and conversions.

You also want to continuously split test your best ad against an improved version. Don’t overdo it, just one new ad at the time. You can copy your existing best ad and then add one new ad. Otherwise, if you have a really bad new ad, your Quality Score may go down due to bad CTR. If you use multiple winning ads and one new ad you can test the new ad saver if that is a concern.

Track your conversions and optimize your campaigns along. You want to pause all underperforming keywords and ads and keep the good ones running. Underperforming means bad CTR AND bad conversion rate. For you the conversion rate is the most important one, for Google the CTR is most important – you have to optimize both.

Final Words

So there you have it, a complete guide to start your first campaign. I hope this helped and if you have questions or remarks, please write them into the comments or the forums!

Related posts:

1. How to Get a Great Quality Score on Google AdWords
2. Low Impressions on the Content Network ?
3. Tips for Success on the Google Content Network