Written by Honcho | Oct 25, 2010 10:25:46 AM
So this week i will be taking it right back to basics and introducing you to Google Adwords and general account structure. This blog will give a basic guide to navigating Adwords, from understanding what is what to viewing your campaigns. Once logged into Adwords you are greeted by the home screen. This is filled with confusing numbers and information that may well baffle you at first. Don’t worry we will dissect it piece by piece. The fastest and easiest way to navigate the adwords system is to use tabs.
Tabs
Tabs are the main form of navigation around the Adwords client. Love them or hate them these tabs are always going to be there and will provide you with quick and easy access around the account.
Home
‘Home’ is the first tab we will focus on, this tab will bring you back to the ‘Account Snapshot’ page containing an easy-to-read summary of key information. Information such as:
- Account Status: Financial information about payments due & Remaining Balance etc;
- Announcements: Important news & updates direct from Google.
- Active Campaigns: Number of campaigns currently active.
- Campaign Performance: Two graphs and a summary of overall performance with the option of many different metrics. This can be a very fast and effective method of checking your performance in many different areas.
Campaigns
The Campaigns tab opens a page containing links to all online campaigns that are active, paused and even deleted. This page is vital in providing you with the information you will need when making decisions & changes within each campaign. The Campaigns tab is also where you can create and edit campaigns, ads, keywords, settings and Ad Groups. Ad Groups are where you can view, edit, create and delete all of your adverts and keywords. Also you can create performance summary graphs that can help you to analyse the data you have.
Opportunities
This is the clever bit. Adwords uses the opportunities tab to highlight any areas within your campaign that could be potentially improved by more investment or different keywords etc; These ideas for improvement are only quick fixes that Adwords suggests, it’s not going to provide you with information that will take your campaign straight to success. This tab is split into three main sections, as follows
- Campaign budget ideas: These are suggestions to invest more money in certain campaigns to achieve ‘Potential impressions’ & ‘Potential Clicks’. These potential figures can be very tempting and could well be effective but it’s not definitive and at the end of the day Adwords want you to spend as much money as possible, just food for thought when looking at these.
- Bid ideas: The same idea as campaign budget ideas, this time Adwords digs deeper into your keywords and suggests raising your bids with some more tempting potential figures that you could achieve.
- Keyword ideas: These are all suggestions for new keywords that could possibly bring more traffic, clicks and impressions.
Reporting
The reporting tab will open the Adwords Report Centre. This is used for more advanced and detailed reporting including Google Analytics and other analytical tools. I will be writing a PPC guide dedicated to the Adwords Report Centre so stay tuned to learn more.
billing
Does exactly what it says on the tin. The painful part of any PPC or SEO… paying for it. Billing contains the following four sub categories, billing summary, billing preferences, make payments & budget.
My Account
The ‘My Account’ tab allows you to access and control all your personal information such as login details and user preferences. This is also where you can add colleagues to access or manage your Adwords accounts. That sums up my guide to the Adwords account structure. Stay tuned for more
PPC basics guides where I will go more in-depth into various other PPC basics including
average position and
keyword targeting. If you have an opinion on any of the topics I have covered? Leave a comment and I will get back to you.