Creating a new campaign is exciting work. You have the opportunity to start out fresh, with brand new keywords, brand new ad copy, and new targeting that will allow you to reach a new audience in a new way. However, there are a few settings that won’t come up in the natural flow of campaign creation that can sabotage your efforts.
New Campaigns In The Interface
You hard-core PPC people are probably aghast, but yes, lots of people still create new campaigns in the actual web interface. So here is the first half of what you’ll be dealing with:
As you can see, there are the obvious things like naming the campaign, selecting the campaign type (like Standard, Product Listing Ads, Dynamic Search Ads, Remarketing, etc.), selecting the network, geography, etc. This is pretty straight forward. Then we get to the second half of the process.
Here you have language, bid settings, budget settings, and ad extensions. All pretty simple. I’m done right?
Settings You Need To Fix Elsewhere
The first place you need to go is to the Settings tab for your new campaign. Looks like this:
There you will see all of the settings we saw in the account creation process, but we also see some additional settings that you need to take care of before letting your campaign run free.
- Delivery Method – Your choices are “Standard” and “Accelerated”. Standard delivery will take your budget and try to make it last all day. However, if Google feels you don’t have enough budget, how does it know which searches to show your ad and which searches to skip in order to make the budget last? I don’t know and I wouldn’t leave this decision up to Google. Choose Accelerated and then run time of day reports to see when your campaign is running out. Then figure out the budgeting yourself so you are in full control.
- Ad Rotation – This only works if you have 2 or more ads in an ad group, and you’ll notice that 3 of the 4 options end up giving Google control over which of your ads they will show on any given search. It feels a little like the fox guarding the hen house to me, but I digress. If you don’t plan on spending much time in the account, then perhaps one of the top 3 options will work for you. However, I like having full control, so I recommend the 4th option, “Rotate indefinitely”. This tells Google to evenly show your ad versions so that you can optimize based on YOUR definition of success.
- Close variants – This is a nefarious option in my mind. You’ll notice it only works for phrase and exact match keywords. You know, the ones you’ve specifically loaded to cover a very specific phrase. Then they sneak in these “close variants” along with plurals and misspellings (which sounds so innocent). If you choose to include close variants you’ve basically turned your phrase and exact match keywords into broad keywords. I do not recommend this.
By taking care of these settings you’ll ensure that your ads are being served when you want them to, on the search terms you specifically chose, and with an even rotation of the ad copy that you created. This will give you additional control over your account and allow you to make better optimization decisions.
