I recently launched an AdWords campaign and got some great help from our friends at Google AdWords HQ right here in Ann Arbor.  Our campaign is challenging because our key words are rarely searched.  Since not everyone is lucky enough to live next door to Google’s AdWords gurus, I thought I’d pass on a few good tips.

First a few basics.  There are two types of campaigns.  Search and Contextual.  We are all familiar with the search campaign, but the contextual campaign is not as popular.  A contextual campaign places text or image ads next to relevant content.  This is important for Janeeva because ORM software is not an often searched category.  In fact, none of the terms that we optimize on are highly searched.  This means that if we want to reach people who aren’t looking for us, contextual gives us that opportunity.  If you set up both as search and contextual campaign (as we have), keep them separate.  This makes them much easier to track and evaluate.

Setting up a contextual campaign give you the opportunity to use image ads, take advantage of it.  Build image ads of all sizes.  This takes longer/costs more but it maximizes placement.  Once you start the campaign, plan on monitoring it every day for a least two weeks.  It takes a couple hours a day to run the placement report and exclude the sites and categories that don’t make sense for your campaign.  Remember to exclude “parked domains” when you set up.  Expect a CTR of greater than 0.5%.  Less is just noise and probably a waste of marketing dollars.

Use the “Goals” feature in Analytics to track conversion.  You should have a web page that is presented when a goal is met such as the confirmation of a completed form.  Better yet, creating a “funnel” enables you to track traffic at each step of the conversion; info page, signup page, confirmation page.

Enjoy and good luck with your own AdWords Adventures.