Navigating AdWords
If you're new to AdWords, all the stuff inside your account can be intimidating. Never fear! It really isn't all that complicated to understand.
When you log into your account, you'll see a tabbed interface at the top. Clicking on a tab gives you different sets of information about your account. Here are the tabs:
- Campaign Management
- Reports
- Analytics
- My Account
We can't cover each of these in great detail here (each one could be a short book), but here's a brief overview to help you get your bearings…
The Campaign Management tab has four pages:
- Campaign Summary. Lets you mange your campaigns (a campaign contains one or more ad groups, which each contain one or more ads). If you don't have any campaigns yet, you'll start at the first step of an ad creation wizard here. If you already have campaigns, you'll see a list of them here. Buttons let you Pause, Resume, Delete and Edit each campaign. Columns show you the campaign name, status, total daily budget, total clicks on ads for that campaign, total impressions (each impression is a showing of an ad for this campaign), click-through rate (CTR, or clicks divided by impressions), your average cost per click (CPC) and your total cost so far.
- Tools. This page has a set of links to various Google tools. Of particular importance are the Keyword Tool (to research keywords) and the Traffic Estimator Tool (to estimate likely clicks and costs).
- Conversion Tracking. This page lets you configure conversion tracking for your campaigns. Conversion tracking lets you put a small bit of HTML code on a website which is "linked" to an ad. When someone clicks your ad and then takes the action you want (such as buying your product and landing on your thank you page), Google will track your conversion rate for that ad. Obviously, if you can't edit a website (which often is the case when you're promoting an affiliate product), conversion tracking from Google doesn't help you much. But if you own your own site, this is a must.
- Website Optimizer. This is new. This tool lets you do split testing and multi-variate testing on your sites, all for free! Considering that testing tools can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, this is a huge benefit. There are tutorials here to walk you through how to set up your tests and how to use the tool.
The Reports tab…drum roll please…lets you create reports. Here's a sample of what you can do:
- You can do statistical reporting to see your CPC and CTR.
- You can create financial reports to document your campaign costs.
- If you use conversion tracking, you can generate conversion tracking reports here.
You can download your reports in comma-separated value (csv) format, XML, HTML, and others. You can even name your reports and format them with templates.
The Analytics tab gives you access to Google Analytics, one of the most powerful tools Google offers. It lets you put tracking code on your site (and manage what Google calls Website Profiles) so you can track how visitors got there, how well your keywords are performing, or even the effectiveness of your email campaigns. It has amazing power for entirely free tool (and it's required if you want to use Website Optimizer).
The My Account tab shows you billing information for your account, and lets you set billing preferences. It probably seems like it would be your least favorite tab, unless you follow the rest of the advice on this site. If you do, the amount you owe will be chicken feed compared to what you're making.
Now you have a birds-eye view of what your Google AdWords account has to offer.