Nora Brown Design

AdWords Day 5: Creating an AdWords Ad

The next step in our AdWords campaign process is to actually create some ads. This is kind of fun — pretend you are Don Draper or Peggie Olson.

Components of an Ad

A simple text-based AdWords ad consists of:

• A headline
• Two lines of text
• Display url (the url people see in the ad)
• Destination url (the full url of your landing page)

The top-level domain of the display url must match that of the actual destination url. In other words, I could not enter my display url as “websites-for-freelance-writers.com” and then have my destination url be “www.norabrowndesign.com/writers”.

For more information on linking policies, read Google’s help article.

Screencast

I’ve created a screencast showing how to create and Ad. You can view the screencast here, on youtube, or embedded below.

Campaigns > Ad Groups > Ads

You can have multiple Campaigns in your AdWords account, each advertising a specific product or service. Within each campaign, you can have multiple Ad Groups. Different Ad Groups might target different sets of keywords and take a different approach in it ads. For example, I might have one Ad Group that targets freelance writers, and another that targets non-fiction writers. Then, within each Ad Group, you can have multiple Ads! It can get a little overwhelming. Just start simple, with a single Campaign, a single Ad Group, and 2 to 3 Ads in that group.