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This article is going to cover the very basic steps we took to prepare our sites for creating and running Adwords campaigns. It will cover creating all the required Google accounts necessary for your first promotion and to ensure you’re set up to take advantage of all Google’s integrated services. I will also show you how to set up your first remarketing and conversion pixel.
If what I cover here is too basic, then you might prefer to read the more advanced articles that focus on the priorities of more experienced users. For extensive information on what you can achieve with Google AdWords you can follow the comprehensive guides compiled by Google here: AdWords Basics and Create Ads and Campaigns.
What this part of the guide will not cover is how to create an ad itself; that is something I’ll cover in the near future.
STEP BY STEP GUIDE
Step 1: Start by considering what your goals are. Google AdWords is fantastically powerful with a huge amount of settings and options at your disposal. This is great if you know what you are doing, however, it can be confusing for newbies when presented with too much choice.
But you don’t need to give this part too much thought right now; everything we are doing will be working towards you earning profit and ROI.
Step 2: Create a Google Account if you do not already have one.
Step 3: Set up and install Tag Manager.
Step 4: Create a Google AdWords Account if you do not already have one.
Step 5: Create Google Analytics Account (with Tag Manager) if you do not already have one.
Step 6: Create a Search Console and verify your website. This is easier if you have already completed Step 5 and already have the code for Google Analytics on your website.
Step 7: Okay, that’s the hard work out the way. The next step is to focus on linking all your Google accounts so that you can share the data between them all and create the most effective campaigns.
The best way to think about this is that Google Analytics is going to be the centre of the universe as far as Google properties are concerned. So what you need to do is link all the accounts into Google Analytics so the data is centralised. In this way each of the tools can take advantage of data sharing, and this is one of the core reasons why Google’s suite is so powerful.
LINKING ANALYTICS AND SEARCH CONSOLE
Make sure you are already logged into your Google account and that you have created all the accounts by following the steps in each article I have linked.
Then follow this link to link the verified website from Search Console to the Google Analytics account you set up earlier. Link Associated Search Console and Analytics Account.
LINKING ADWORDS TO GOOGLE ANALYTICS
This is done from within Google Analytics and is really easy to do. Just follow the step-by-step instructions within this link here: Associate AdWords and Analytics.
CHECKING YOU’VE SUCCESSFULLY LINKED YOUR ACCOUNTS
SETTING UP AND INSTALLING THE REMARKETING PIXEL
Okay so now all your accounts are linked, the next step is to set up the pixels we call ‘remarketing’ pixels. Now since many of our sites are health related, it is likely that without a deeper understanding many of your accounts could get banned automatically, especially if you are promoting a weight loss or bulking type product.
The quickest way to create a new audience for the purposes of remarketing is through Google Analytics. Now that all your accounts are linked and you are already logged in, you can easily follow this guide to achieve this.
Create and edit Audiences in Analytics for AdWords
Now you are tracking people who have visited your website, it is time to set up the goal conversions for your website.
We do this again in Google Analytics and afterwards import it into AdWords.
As an affiliate, your main goal is to send traffic to the site that converts for you; that means any affiliate link you have placed on your website. The best way you can do this is by creating a ‘Custom Goal’ using ‘Destination’ as the goal type.
Give the Goal a name such as MN Referral so you know it clearly is a referral for a MoreNiche link on your website, and then on the next screen place your referral link provided by MoreNiche.
The additional Value and Funnel boxes can be left blank for now if you don’t yet have an idea of the value of your referrals, but we do recommend you at least put a minimum of £1 in the Value box.
Once that is created in Google Analytics you can import the goal into AdWords here:
On the left, click the Google Analytics link and if you linked the accounts properly as per the earlier part of this blog, then you will see the goal you just set up.
All you have to do is import this goal and Analytics will share all the conversion data associated with paid traffic with AdWords going forward.
And that’s it for today! You now have all the tools in place to automatically start building audiences that you will be able to advertise to in the future and have all the right conversion tracking in place so you can work out what content works best for optimal click-through rates.
Now this is set up, it will require some decent volumes of traffic before the audience is large enough (minimum of 1000) to produce any sensible data from it in order to start targeting. The best thing you can do from here is start working on generating great content. After all there is no point having paid ads bringing traffic to your site if you don’t have great content!