Advertising online is more powerful then ever before. If your website is not #1 in the areas you want yet organically, that’s something you want to work on, but in the mean time, a quick and easy solution is Google Adwords and this blog shows you how to login and monitor it. If you set it up yourself initially, you probably know how to navigate around if you already set it up. But this article is for those who had someone else setup their Google AdWords and now you want to monitor it yourself.
Go to http://adwords.google.ca and login with your email address and password when you signed up for your account.
Once you login, you have a summary page. It has the date range in the top right corner. Click that date range and choose one of the options for a specific range or choose “customer date range” and pick your specific dates.
The line chart changes as well as the numbers under it. To get more detail as to what campaigns and/or keywords cost more than others, click on the link to the campaign. You will then see the groups. Click each group, if you have more than one, and you will see the keywords for each group.
Each keyword lists how many clicks it got as well as how many impressions (searches made where you showed up), CTR is the Click Through Ratio which shows the percentage of how many people clicked on your link versus how many where shown(impressions). You will see your average cost per click (Avg CPC), the total cost for that keyword during the time range you specified earlier, and your average position on the searches for that keyword during that time frame.
If you take time to look at the menus you will see you can easily add more keywords, delete existing ones, change your minimum cost per click, and more. There are many options and although changing the information can be easy, understand the effects of it is more complicated.
Increasing your maximum cost per click can give you more exposure, but when someone clicks you will be really paying for it. But you will want to possibly remove keywords that are not performing well, as they can slow down your good performing ads, negatively affecting your entire campaign. Also, add more quality keywords and get more traffic.
You need to monitor your keywords and traffic regularly, at least at the beginning to be sure you have it working just as you want. Later you can slow down how often you check it.
On the left side is where you will see all your campaigns and groups. Click on the one you want to look at or edit. Click the link near the top left that says “All online campaigns” to get to the beginning again and edit settings on a more global level such as pausing and resuming a group or campaign.
Google has an online help menu via the help button in the top right corner when you are logged in, or click here to jump to it