This is a continuation of our series about basic account optimization. In the previous article we made sure our account was properly structured and that it contained effective ads and keyword list. In this article, we will cover two basic campaign settings - targeting and budgeting.

Targeting

There are two interconnected types of targeting - language and location targeting. Naturally, you know best where your potential clients may be found. However, as a general rule, rather than spreading your advertising all around the world, it makes sense to concentrate your efforts on countries with the greatest potential. Are your services more localized in nature? If so, pick a specific city or region, not the entire country.

Here are a few tips regarding language and location targeting:
  • Are you interested in the Arabic market? Create a separate campaign which targets the Arabic language, write appropriate ads and keywords. To keep your ads as relevant as possible, do not use them all in the a single campaign.
  • Check the effectiveness of your campaign by country ("Dimensions" tab - sometimes to view this you need to click the arrow to the right of "Audiences" - then "Geographic report") and delete countries with the lowest CTR, or, even better, conversion rate.
  • If you choose the United Kingdom as country in the settings for geo-targeting, then visitors located in France, for example, will see your ads when searching on Google.co.uk. Are visitors from outside UK of no interest to you? Instead of choosing UK as the country, manually add each region ("Setting"Geo-targeting), and the problem is solved.
  • One campaign = one language. There is no point in showing Arabic language ads to Russian speakers. 
Budget

How do you choose your budget? How much money will be spent on advertising? Only you can answer the first question, however the answer to the second is provided by statistics. For example, you have three campaigns, but you cannot spend more than $600 per month on advertising. That means $200 per month will be needed for each campaign. Therefore, by default, the daily budget of each campaign will be about $6.66 per day. Some tips for setting a daily budget:
  • Check how may impressions were lost due to insufficient budgeting. To do so, on the page showing an overview of all your campaigns, click the button "Columns" above the graph and tick the box "Performance". For each campaign you can see the percentage of lost impressions due to your budget.
  • Are there lots of lost impressions due to your budget, or have the ads stopped showing because the budget for the next day has run out? Try to redistribute your budget among campaigns. Is there still not enough? It might be a good idea to think about increasing the overall budget for the whole account and spread your resources around various campaigns.
  • In campaign settings ("Position preference, Delivery method) you can choose either accelerated delivery or standard. In the first option the system will show your ads as often as possible no matter what the budget, while the second option will try to spread your budget evenly throughout the day.
  • On some days the system may allow an overrun of an account's budget. Don't worry, this amount will be compensated for by an under-run on another day or by a credit correction. In any case, on average for each day of the accounting period you will not pay more than your daily budget.
By following the recommendations in this and the previous article, we have learned how to set up a properly structured account with an appropriate budget and targeting. There are only a few things left to cover: properly setting placements and bids, and tracking the performance of your account. These topics will be addressed in future articles. Stay tuned for updates!


Author: Aleksei Petrov, AdWords Team
Posted by Omar Selman - Google AdWords MENA