You need an AdWords account.
In Adwords, login and click on Create a Campaign: Keyword Targeted.
This brings us to a page where we can enter more info about our campaign.
I named this campaign “Video Game Rentals”. My first ad group will be called “Video Game Exact Direct”. I added “Exact” and “Direct” to the name. “Direct” was added because this group will go directly to the offer with no intermediary landing page. “Exact” was added exact because I will only be using exact keywords. Find out more about “Exact” later.
We will only target English speakers for this campaign so we will leave the “Target language” as English.
Next we choose where this ad will be shown. For this answer we need to look back at our Azoogle Offer.
This offer only wants traffic from the United States so we won’t add to that. Always check this though, especially for software related offers. Canada usually goes hand and hand with the US. Also the UK, Australia and New Zealand pops up quite often.
Now we need the link from Azoogle. This is on the Azoogle offer page. For this I typed in the word SUBID in the “Sub ID” box. You can see that it adds “?sub=SUBID” to the query. The sub id can be changed dynamically. The idea behind Sub IDs is that you add information to them that tracks the ad, ad group, campaign, date/time, keywords, etc… so that you know what works. A lot of people mask these so that NOBODY including the affiliate company knows the keywords and demographics that they use. We will keep it simple in our experiment because we don’t expect to make money either way.
We copy that link and we will ad it to our ad back in AdWords. We are going to replace “SUBID” with this long string.
kw_e_ta1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}
“kw” tells us that this is a Keyword Sub ID.
“e” tells us that this will be only exact keywords.
“ta1″ tells us that this is Text Ad #1.
{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S} : This gets replaced with a “C” if the visitor comes from Google’s content network It is an “S” if the visit is from Google’s Search Network.
{creative} : This is the internal ad number that Google uses. It is almost useless because you have to view AdWords source page to view the ad number. Maybe Google will add in a way to see this easily at a future date so we just leave it in there.
{placement} : This is the base URL that the add was shown on. It is very useful to track the placement so you know which sites work better than others. If a site performs super well for you you can create a new campaign just for that site.
{keyword} : For search this is what the user was searching for. For content this was the term on the page that triggered the ad to be shown. They are slightly different but related.
So the Destination URL we put into Google is x.azjmp.com/02JGH?sub=kw_t1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}.
The page that visitor will end up on is www.gamefly.com. So we set the Display URL to www.gamefly.com. If you have a different URL than your end URL, your ad will be rejected.
For the ad text, we are keeping it simple.
Headline: Video Games by Mail $8.95
Line 1: Rent video games for $8.95
Line 2: 10 day free trial. No obligations.
I like to get the price in the headline. You get less clicks but each visitor is more likely to signup if they know the price.
For line 1 I started out with the word “Rent”. This is because I wanted the visitor to realize we are renting games for $8.95, not selling them.
For line 2 I want the user to realize they can signup for a free trial. They still need to enter their credit card info but aren’t obligated, they can cancel within the 10 days and not be charged anything.
The next step is to pick your keywords. I will start off with a very simple list.
[games rental video]
[ps2 game rentals]
[ps2 games rental]
[ps3 game rentals]
[ps3 games rental]
[psp game rentals]
[psp games rental]
[video game rental]
[video game rentals]
[video games rental]
[wii game rentals]
[wii games rental]
[xbox game rentals]
[xbox games rental]
We went put all of our keywords in square brackets. We did this so our ad would show only when the exact words were typed in. If we didn’t have them then our ads would show for things like XBOX GAME RENTALS SUCK or HOW TO GET FREE PS3 GAME RENTALS. We only want the exact for now. We’ll expand our keywords later and will branch out into Broad Keywords and another type called Phrase Keywords.
Next we set the budget. I am going to do $100.00 per day and pay $0.25 per click.
We then can see how much each click is estimated to cost us.
Then we just go to the next page and save our campaign.
Here it is.
There is still a lot more that can be done. This will be detailed in more posts.
My estimates right now is that this campaign wouldn’t earn any money and get VERY few clicks.
You can expect posts about “Finding More Keywords”, “Tweaking Campaigns”, “Tracking Performance”, “Writing more Ads”, “Creating Landing Pages” and “How to Deal with Losing Campaigns”.
