Category Archives: Search Advertising

There’s a general notion that many things, good, bad, or otherwise, come in threes. This is the same basic idea behind the idea of your AdWords campaigns. For every AdWords account, you have: Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Ads.

Being an author, I thought about it and this made brilliant sense especially if you have series. The name of your campaign can be the name of your series. Perfect!

First, Campaign

Here you have your choices of what type of campaign this is going to be. You can choose the combination of Search with Display (Standard or All Features, which I’ll go into in a minute), Search Network only, Display Network Only, Shopping, Video or Universal App. Choose wisely because after you save this, you can’t go back and change it. You’re going to either have to live with it or create another campaign.

I mostly choose Search Network with Display Select – All Features and here’s why:

When I first started out, I didn’t know what I was doing and that seemed like the best option. You get a bit of both but more of Search, which I’m used to.

As far as whether you need Standard or All-features, the default is Standard but you will only be able to do text ads. With All Features, I get text and image ads (this is great if you are a teaser junkie like me) which can go on the Display select network. Now remember from my previous post, this option to be on display network allows you to be on partner sites based on relevance, which is key to target advertising. Not to mention all of the other features, like remarketing, which I’ll go into at a later stage.

Again, being on the DN is a different game but the fact that I can test he waters was a big selling point.

As far as territories, the default is your location. Unless you have serious reasons to not have your books in all countries and territories, I suggest that option. Limiting your territories only hurts your chances of visibility because you never know who and where will be interested in your work.

Language choice defaults to your language but, and this is with a slight caveat, you will get recommendations to add languages. Google does not employ translation so if you want to target people who speak only French or Spanish, then your ads and landing pages must be in that language. This option allows your ad to show up on sites in those languages and, quite frankly, English is a language spoken around the world so why not?

Below that you get to choose your bid strategy. If you find that you have time and know how to manually adjust your bids effectively, then go for it. Personally, I’ve learned that Google’s auction system is pretty intense and in all honesty, I don’t have the time or desire to do manual bidding. I go automated with Maximize Clicks so that the system can help me get to the maximum number of people in a day within my budget and I can focus on other parts of my search engine marketing strategy.

Once you’ve set up your campaign, it’s time to…

Set up Ad Groups!

If the name of your campaign is your book series, then your ad group(s) would be the names of the books within that series. This way you can focus on specific aspects of each book that you want to advertise.

After you name your Ad Group, you can enter an ad. One thing to note is that when you’re doing your URLs, within an ad group, you can only have one type of top level domain. What does that mean? If you have one book on Amazon, i.e. www.amazon.com/B123456789

then all ads within that group MUST all point to www.amazon.com. You can have different ASINs or different subpages within the site BUT you can’t have one ad pointing to amazon.com and another pointing to www.nook.com  or www.apple.com within the same as group. So ifYou wantong target your books on Apple and Amazon, you need to do so in separate ad groups.

Another problem is shortlinks. Using bitly links when doing bookmarketing is very convenient except when it comes to AdWords. Why? It goes back to that top level domain issue. Even though your shortened url is pointing to your landing page, the fact that the link you have as your final url is different from where people end up will cause your ad to be disapproved for site mismatch. You need to use the full link when you create these ads, not shortened ones.

So when you have your books being sold on different platforms, what’s the best way to overcome this hurdle? If you have a blog, create your landing pages for your series/books with all of the buy links.

That simple.

After you do the ad, next you’ll be asked to add keywords. Keyword Planner is a great tool that you can use to research your keywords ahead of time. You can find the ones you want to use, copy them to the clipboard and past them here. You’ll want to get about 10-20 unique terms to start. I’ll definitely discuss the basics of how to use keyword planner in another post.

Now, after I’ve told you all of that, I’m now going to say: You don’t have to create your ad right after you have created your campaign. You can just create the campaign, name the ad group and just leave the rest for later.

Got any questions? Feel free to comment!

NOTES

* For those who have local businesses, then location targeting is a must and I’ll get into that in another post