So we are now here in our Google Adwords account. I just want to go through some of the areas of this so you have an understanding of what the respective areas do. When we enter the site here there are four tabs: we can see "Campaign Management", "Reports", "Analytics" and "My Account".

The area I want to look at first is the "Account Snapshot". So we can see this section here, this just tells us if got any alerts, are account spaces, announcement, watch lists, tells me I've four campaigns running at the moment and that if we scroll down a little bit further it tells us a brief snapshot of the amount of clicks we had yesterday: we had 24 clicks, 1,100 impressions, click-through rate of 1.25%… I'm going to explain all
these in greater detail later on, average cost per click of 0.56¢, 6.99 nearly 7 per thousand views and total cost of €13.46.

So let’s go to the section now which says "Campaign Summary". This is a very, very important part. So in here we have the campaign summary and this is for September 3rd, 2008. So we scroll down we can see here that I have these various campaigns running: we have Montenegro, Croatia, Adriatic and Adriatic Ireland.

Basically what this campaign's been set up to do is, this is a client who owns a house, owns an apartment in Montenegro in Europe and they're looking to let that out and they're using Google Adwords to actually go to their website and to get people to pick up the phone and call them or to email them about the availability of the apartment and it's worked phenomenally well.

Google Adwords has made this client a small fortune, they've managed to cover all their costs for the mortgage of their apartment and it has worked phenomenally well and that if they were to go through an agent in the country or to advertise in papers it will cost so much more so their return on investments has been really, really good.

They're spending between €13 and €18 a day so you can convert that in dollars and then they're getting the bookings. They've got thousands of dollars worth of bookings just by using Google Adwords and running the ads just in Ireland and in the UK. They haven't had to run the ad anywhere else because there are only so many people that they can actually booked at any one time.

"Campaign Summary" - All I want to do now is I want to show you how to create campaigns later but the first thing I want to do is let's click on a campaign and I want to draw the settings behind the campaign. This is very, very important. This is where a lot of people make massive mistakes.

So we're going into the campaign now for Montenegro and the area which is absolutely crucial here is the "Edit campaign settings" link. So I want to click on that and go to that particular page. So we can see here that it tells us the name of the campaign, it’s been running since May, there's no end date, it got a budget of €15 a day, now you can increase that.

I highly recommend you put in a very high number. Some people say to me, "Well I don’t want to put in a high number because all my budget will be blown." That doesn't happen because you going to work out how much you will be potentially be spending. If you recommend a budget, if your budget's okay, Google will tell you this. I mean you could put in €100 here and obviously I recommend them high but there's no way you’re
going to spend that amount. Okay? Sometimes it's always better to put a little bit too much rather than too little.

"Delivery Matter" - This is very important. You always want to have it set up so that it says "Standard". Scroll down a little bit further, "All network types", select "Maximum CPC bidding" that I recommend you select as well. So if we just click on the "Change bidding strategy", I'll just show you what it says here. Well click "OK", just wait for that page to open up here and it gives you various ways of setting this up: "Manual Bidding", "Conversion Optimizer", "Budget Optimizer" or "Preferred Cost Bidding". I will always recommend you do "Manual Bidding" at the outset.

So let's go back to "Edit campaign settings". Now this is very important as well and a huge amount of people make this mistake to try and set up Adwords themselves for the first time. You want your ads to be shown on Google and on Google's search partners' network. The Google search partners can be someone like AOL, Google Groups and various other sites.

If you're basically have these worked, if you’re ad is showing on the top three positions on Google Adwords then it is likely to be syndicated at these other sites so I would recommend you have "Google search" and "Search partners" selected. Now by default when you set up your account, the "Content network" is actually selected. You should always deselect the "Content network" the reason being is that when you set up a campaign at a later stage you want to set up a separate campaign for the content network.

So we go over to the right-hand side. I wouldn't bother selecting "Position preference". Don’t do that at all. We scroll down to "Scheduling and serving". Now "ad scheduling" - this is quite interesting. You can go on to turn on "Ad scheduling" and basically you can have your ads showing at particular time of the day. So let’s say you don’t want to run an ad between 12:00 midnight and 7:00 AM, you can set this up so that you can go in here and just have your ads running at certain times.

As it's done at the moment I have mine running at all hours but you can turn off some of this blocks so your ad isn't running. And that's great because sometimes you don’t want your ad to be displayed at a certain time.

Let's say you’re trying to get traffic to your site and the action you want people to take when they land on your site is to pick up the phone and call you, then you don’t want to be getting calls in the middle of the night if that's the action because you'll be woken up and have to get out of bed. So you have to work out how often you want your ad to run.

At some times of the day you will get more traffic than others and you may want to pay more for your keywords at that time of the day. We'll talk about that at a later stage. It's quite an advanced technique and we don’t really need to be getting into great detail of it for now.

The other thing you absolutely need to do and this is so, so important and most people don’t do this - is ticking "Ad serving" by default. When you set up an account it says "Optimize". You always want to select "Rotate" and the reason for this is you always want to be controlling and testing one ad against another because the reality is when you start Adwords, you don’t know which ads are going to pull the best. What I mean by that you could have one ad that will get far more clicks than another and the only way you’re going to know that is by testing.

So always select "Rotate" and you'll always want to be testing at a minimum two ads at the same time. Basically what Google will do is they will show one ad 50% at a time, another ad 50% at a time and when you get to certain amount of data and visitors you can turn off one ad and then test a new one against the best out that's getting the most clicks. Hope that makes sense but it’s really, really important and I will be showing you how to do this later on in another video.

"Languages" - Obviously if you're in the English market you just want to have an English ad so you're just going to select English. The other area here to remember is, let's assume you're just going to be in the Irish market then you're just going to want to select Ireland as a location. Okay now in this example here we're also advertising in the UK market. Even though I'm living in Ireland we advertise to the UK market so we got Ireland and the UK set up as instance where our ads are permanently being shown.

If you want that your ad is shown in the States or in Europe just select those countries by clicking on the "Edit" button here and then Google will give you maps. So you can see by this map now it’s showing you Ireland and the UK. It is showing you where your ads can potentially run.

You can actually break this down and this is very interesting. If you click on the "Browse" tab, if you don’t want your ad to show over say all of Ireland you can select the "+" mark here and you can just select, deselect this then you can just select where your ad is to run in certain counties.

Let's say and I'm using Ireland as an example because that's where I am, capital of Ireland is Dublin… If you just want your ads to be shown in and around Dublin if you’re a local business that's just Dublin-based then you just want to select Dublin. But if you have a business that is all over Ireland where you can provide services then you want to select all of Ireland. So you can break this down by counties as well.

That's a great way of getting really targeted traffic so you’re not getting people say, from the west of Ireland who are never be going to be doing business if you’re out over in Dublin on the east of Ireland. So it's a great way of targeting your actual traffic. You're just going to work out if your business is local, if it's national or if it's international. If it's international then you potentially want to be advertising in a bunch of different countries.

So far here we just looked at the "Edit campaign" settings. In the next video we're going to look at the tools within Google Adwords.