Making AdWords Ads

Text Ads

Google AdWords text ads look like the example you see here. Crafting them is kind of like writing haiku--you have to work creatively within tight constraints:

• Headline: Max 25 characters
• Description line 1: Max 35 characters
• Description line 2: Max 35 characters
• Display URL: Max 35 characters
• Destination URL: Max 1024 characters

Surely members of the FSP community can come up with better ads than the example above! Contributors will be rewarded appropriately with fame and...more fame.

Image Ads

Google AdWords also has an image variation, and permits four image formats: .JPEG, .GIF, .PNG , and .SWF (Flash). The standard sizes are:

• Banner: 468 x 60 (49)
• Leaderboard: 728 x 90 (79)
• Inline Rectangle: 300 x 250 (239)
• Skyscraper: 120 x 600 (578)
• Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600 (578)

Deploying AdWords Ads

Choosing an Account

After you have selected an ad (either your own or one from the FSP pool), you will need to decide whose Google account is going to handle it. You can either set up your own account, work through the FSP's account(s), or use someone else's. If you want the FSP to handle it, we'd like to have you or someone else make a donation to cover the costs. If you or someone else handles it, below is an overview of how it works.

Campaigns

You begin by creating a Campaign. Campaigns have daily budgets, say $20/day. There are two very different types of AdWords campaigns: site-targeted and keyword-targeted.

Site-Targeted Campaigns will display your ad only on those sites that you specify (which by the way must be participants of the Google Network), regardless of page content. Keyword-Targeted Campaigns will display your ad only on pages that have the keywords that you specify, regardless of the site. It doesn't appear that there is any way to combine the two campaign types and display an ad only on pages with certain keywords and on certain sites. Selecting keywords is a black art; some resources include Wordtracker and even a book, The AdSense Code.

Ad Groups

A Campaign has one or more Ad Groups. For each Ad Group, you specify:
1. the targeted sites or keywords
2. the maximum CPM or CPC to bid
CPM is the "cost per thousand impressions", i.e. the cost every time the page appears 1000 times. This is used for site-targeted campaigns. CPC is the "cost per click", which is used for keyword-targeted campaigns. In this case you are specifying the Max CPM/CPC, because you are bidding against advertisers. The Max CPM should probably be something under $5. A keyword-targeted campaign has an advantage in the bidding war when a page strongly matches many of the campaign's keywords. The Ad Rank depends on both the bid CPC and the ad relevance.

It is nice to have at least two Ad Groups per Campaign, just so that you can compare how they are performing.

Ad Variations

An Ad Group can have multiple Ad Variations. These are just different (maybe completely different) versions of your ad that get rotated. Depending on your settings, Google can either show them randomly or lean more towards the variation that proves to be more popular (i.e. generates more click-thrus). It is difficult to know in advance what people will respond to, so you can keep trying different variations and go with what ends up working best.