Forecasting Your Pay-Per-Click Budget in Google - Step Three: Setting up the campaign
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Google provides advertisers with lots of flexibility when it is time to set up the actual campaign. Each campaign can contain one or more ad groups. An ad group consists of a list of keywords with one or more ads associated with it. You might set up one campaign with three ad groups if you had several websites or product lines to promote. For example, a clothing store could set up three different ad groups for shirts, pants and accessories. The ads in each group would be specific to each product type and the keywords within them would relate specifically to the product. You can only set your budget at the campaign level, not at the ad group level. Thus, I highly recommend creating separate campaigns for each ad group so you can easily set your campaign budget on words that would otherwise max out your budget.
The details of creating a campaign on Google would fill up another article. Thus, I will just instruct you on how to set your campaign budget in the Google Adwords console. For new campaigns, simply follow the step by step instructions until you get to the screen that lets you enter your daily budget for that campaign. For existing campaigns, you can change your daily budget by selecting the campaign and clicking "edit campaign settings" from the campaign statistics screen. While this article is specific to budget forecasting in Google, I highly recommend you perform forecasting for all paid search engines included in your campaign (e.g., Overture, Looksmart, and so forth). Each engine provides different tools to advertisers for forecasting, but the end goal is the same - to plan out your bidding so that ad exposure is maximized and you stay well within the confines of your monthly budget.
It is important to remember that Google displays your ad based on your maximum bid and your budget restrictions. What this means is that if your budget is lower than Google's recommendations for maximum exposure of your ads, then your ad will not show up every time someone searches for one of your terms. Google tries to disperse the frequency of your ad evenly throughout the time frame of your campaign, so that the campaign does not prematurely tap itself out.
Google offers two billing options - Post-pay and Prepay. If you Prepay and you run out of funds, then your ads will go down until the balance in your account is manually replenished by you. If you Post-pay…beware. Google charges for clicks received in the previous month, so it is very easy to go over budget if you are not careful to set limitations at the campaign level and keep a close eye on your campaign activity. This is why budget forecasting is so important. Remember to select your payment option carefully when you set up your Google account, because you cannot switch from Post-pay to Prepay and vice versa once your account is set up.
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