This is part 2 in our Getting Started with adCenter series, following my Creating Campaigns post from last month. Today's topic: ad groups.
Ad groups are your friends. It’s their job to help keep you organized as you manage your online PPC campaigns. When you are setting up your campaigns in adCenter, you can use ad groups to structure your campaigns to more effectively target your ads and keywords to your audience depending on what your ad groups are about.
You can create new ad groups right within the adCenter user interface. Once you are under the appropriate campaign, you can simply click on Create ad group.
From there, you’ll be taken through the 5 easy steps to create ad groups. Make sure to give your ad group a name that is meaningful to what you are advertising. This makes it easier to manage.
One option you have is to copy an existing ad group within your campaign, and elect to copy all keywords and/or all ads. Then, click Continue.
Note: if you do choose to copy an existing ad group, please be advised that it will be an exact copy. In this example here, that means that if I make a change to an ad in my North Shore ad group, the same ad in the South Shore ad group will also be changed. To work around this, you can still copy existing ad groups as outlined above, however, follow these steps:
1. Click on the ad you’ve just copied so that it previews. In this case, I clicked on the ad Surfing Pipe.
2. Change something about the ad (whether that is something as simple as a space or punctuation mark, or the entire text). In this example, I’ve changed the title and text.
3. Down below, click on CREATE NEW.
4. This will assign a unique Ad ID, so that you can make changes to the ad in one ad group.
5. Then, delete the former ad.
Another option is to import all new ads from an Excel or csv file. To do so, click on the Import ads link and use the available templates to import your ads into adCenter.
Once you've created all the ads necessary for your ad group, click CONTINUE to go on to add the keywords to your new ad group. If you've copied an existing ad group, you’ll find those keywords listed here. You can still add more keywords by typing them directly into the white box, delete certain keywords that don’t relate, etc. Just like we saw with the ads, you can also import keywords in bulk by clicking on Import Keywords and using the available templates.
Clicking Continue will let you set the pricing for the keywords in this ad group. Save & Continue allows you to review the ad group you've just set up. If you have applied targeting of any kind to your ad group, this will be outlined here, along with an overview of your ad group. If you need to make any changes, you can do so by clicking on the Edit link on the right-hand side.
Because targeting is done at the ad group level, if you click on the Edit link under the Targeting option, you’ll be able to target the ads in your ad group to specific regions, countries, cities and/or certain days of the week, as well as time of day.
Once you have everything set up properly, click on Submit, and your new ad group will be ready to roll!
If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum.