There are 6 main activities in Google AdWords that require your attention after you get up and running with a Google AdWords campaign.   The following six activities will help to improve your ad performance over time:

• Setting Goals
• Selecting Keywords
• Developing Ads that Work
• Creating Destination Pages and Sites
• Tracking Your Results
• Optimising Once Again

In this article, I will look at Goal Setting in Google AdWords (future articles will go into the detail of each of the other 5 activities that you need to address in your AdWords campaign) Setting Goals Every company is unique. And therefore evey company will have a different set of business and marketing goals that they will set for themselves.  These will then be translated into advertising and marketing campaigns.  Here are some of the questions that you and your staff will have to consider in order to correctly set campaign goals:

1. What is you PPC Budget? While this might appear to be a relatively straightforward question, there may be different answers, depending on a range of things that are going on in the company.  You may want to simply continue to spend what you have been spending for the past few months.  However, using Conversion tracking, you might decide to increase the spend (as each click is bringing in a profit).
2. What kind of results would be best for your campaign? Lead Generation? Your campaign might be targeted on simply finding Qualified Leads, which are prospects who fit the profile of your best customers and have even asked for a follow-up. Increasing Conversion? Conversion is a measure of the number of visitors  to your web site who have taken some furtehr action or step that you want them to take (download a product, signing up for a newsletter, etc)
3. What is an Achievable Return on Investment? The Return on Investment for your campaign is a measure of it's success or otherwise.  It is the revenue generated as a result of the investment on the advertising campaign and is therefore very measurable.  You therefore have to decide what your require RoI is for a given campaign budget.  For example, you might decide that you are going to spend 1,00 EUROs per month for a period of 6 months and that, as a result of this financial outlay, you want to make sales of at least 20,000 EUR.

By placing real numbers against each key objective, you can clinically measure your success and then tweak your campaigns to optimise your return. The next step is to choose the correct keywords for your Google AdWords campaign so that you are correctly targeting your prospects for optimal results.  Keyword Selection is the topic of my next blog entry. In the meantime, you might have a look at the followin video from the Googel Channel on YouTube

Ian Dodson