Once you’ve headed to the Google Adwords homepage you need to click the ‘Click to Begin’ button to get started.

Then you’ll be given the option of whether you want to start with the Starter or Standard Edition.

If you want to just get your feet wet then it’s perfectly fine to start with the Starter Edition. This gets you up and running with your first ad very quickly. However the drawback is that you are limited in the number of ads and campaigns that you can run. You are also limited to setting bid prices and budgets for your ads as Google will optimise and choose the best bid prices for you.

You can always upgrade to the Standard Edition at any time if you decide to start with the easier one first.

If you choose the Standard Edition the first thing you will need to set up is the languages that you wish to target. Obviously it is wise to choose the language of the customer that you are targeting (if you’re target audience is Chinese then you would choose this option), however the default language is set to English.

Then you need to decide if you are going to show your ad globally or only within certain countries or cities. If you have a physical product then it is wise to only show your ad in area’s that you ship to.

After that the fun begins and you get to start writing your ad and adding keywords for it and choosing a budget to spend. After your ad is finished it’s just a click away by pressing ‘start’ to make your ad live and to begin seeing traffic to your website.

Most of the process is fairly easy to follow and even the novice Adwords advertiser should have no problem setting up an account.

Broad match
The default option that you will get when you start entering your keywords is the broad match. Basically it means that as long as the searcher has your keywords somewhere in their search query then your ad will be shown.

If your keyword was for ‘celebrity perfume’ then your ad will be shown for any search that included those two words such as ‘perfume that celebrity’s wear’ or ‘latest celebrity perfume’.

Phrase match
The Phrase match means that they keywords that you are bidding on must be in the exact same order. In the above example you would not get ‘perfume that celebrity’s wear’ because the words are not in the correct order. However you would get a match for ‘latest celebrity perfume’ because the keywords are in the correct order.

Exact match
This match will show your ad if the user searches for the exact keywords that you bid on. This way your ad will not get shown for any of the above search terms because even though the second search term contains the right keywords it also contains the word ‘latest’. Only those searches that exactly match your keywords will be shown.

Negative match
You can also improve your ad matching by including keywords that you don’t want your ad shown for. For example you might add -free so that your ad will not be shown if anyone is searching for free items or products. Using negative matches can help improve your CTR due to not wasting your ad on searchers not interested in your ad.

A huge mistake that most new ad writers make is to target very broad keywords. This might mean that your ad is shown unnecessarily to searchers not interested in your product or service.

For an example, let’s say you are advertising for the weight loss/diet industry. This market is extremely huge with many different niches. If you were to add a keyword for word ‘diet’ then not only will you be facing tough competition and high bid prices, it is highly likely that the searcher wasn’t even looking for your product or service.

Maybe they were looking for diet cola, or even pet diet’s. If you product was for a diet pill then your ad has just been wasted since the person would not be interested and never click on your ad.

If however you had chosen the keyword ‘diet pills’ or even ‘[brand name] diet pills’ you will have a much higher click through ratio and you will also be targeting customers that are specifically looking for your product. So try and think about using highly targeted keywords as you will get a much better response and possibly more conversions.

The next step is choosing your budget or Max CPC. If you have chosen your keywords wisely then you will probably be able to get a lower cost per click than if you have highly competitive keywords.

It’s always a good idea after you have entered your keywords to take advantage of Google’s Traffic Estimator to give you an idea of how many searches, clicks and the approximate position of your ad based on the budget that you set will be. Just click the ‘Estimate Search Traffic’ to see how many clicks/traffic you are likely to get. This way you can play around with different budget and maximum cost per clicks before submitting your ad.

As you can see, choosing keywords for your Google Adwords ad is all about trying to understand what your customer would be searching for so that you can create a successful ad that gets clicks and hopefully sales.

Once you have set up your account with Adwords, one of the first things they will ask you to do is to write your first advertisment. You are given an example ad at the top of the page and five lines to fill out.

Headline
The first line you have to write is the headline. When someone does a search for your keyword, this is the line in your ad that will be the most prominent and also be underlined. You only have 25 characters to work with in the headline so much sure it grabs attention. It is often beneficial to to use your main keyword in the headline if you can.

Description
The next two lines is where you get to write the bulk of your ad. You have 35 characters for each line. The most successful ads usually put a benefit in the first line and a feature in the second line. So you might have your benefit as “Make money with [product]” and your feature might be “Get your Free Report on [Product] here”.

URL
The last two lines are where you put your URL for the page you want your visitors to go to.

The first line (Display URL) will be the one that is displayed to your audience;
and the second (Destination URL) will be the actual url that they are sent to if they click on your ad.

Often if you are using your affiliate link, you would put the display url as the merchant page, and the destination url as your affiliate link. That way the audience will only see the display url.

So now your ad is done! It’s now just a matter of clicking on SAVE AD and next choosing your keywords and budget and saving the ad. Google usually starts displaying your ad within 10 minutes of submitting it, so you could start seeing traffic almost immediately.