The Set Pricing page is where you start bidding on the keywords

The Set Pricing page is where I start bidding on the keywords in my ad group, setting my campaign’s budget, and using Google’s traffic estimator tool for the first time. Choose a Currency. This is an accountwide setting, not part of the individual campaign we have been working on. This is whereChoose Keywords

Here you will select your keywords. Don’t bother using the ones I listed previously. I picked a few barely relevant keywords and phrases, as well as some negative keywords, just as examples. I do not use actual keywords that have worked well for me as examples. A few thousand readers all bidding on the same keywords you designate which currency you will use to bid on, budget for, and pay for these ads.

What Is the Most You Would Like to Spend, on Average, per Day?

This is your daily budget, but remember, Google will guarantee only that this budget will not be exceeded on average by the end of the month. I have entered $100, but when setting your initial budgets, this amount is dependent entirely on your working capital and comfort level.

What Is the Maximum You Are Willing to Pay Each Time Someone Clicks on Your Ad?

This is the amount you are bidding per click for all the keywords in your ad group. I have set my initial bid at 5 cents, based on the three-month EPC (earnings per hundred clicks) of $4.07 for the eBay affiliate program at the time I was setting up this campaign, at which time the average returns were roughly 4 cents. My 5-cent bid, then, is very moderately aggressive, but I hope to do better than average, and I am likely to pay at least a little less than my maximum bid anyway. You can also set individual bids for each keyword, but I do not recommend it, as this will require you to track individual results as well. In the rare instance when you might wish to set a separate bid for an individual keyword, I would set up a separate ad group as well, so that the keyword has its own ad, with its own SID to track results. Be sure, however, that your keywords for each ad group are very similar in both relevance and focus (broad or narrow), or a single bid amount will not work very well.

View Traffic Estimator

Traffic estimators are not terribly accurate, as they can only guess at what your ad’s performance might be against the keywords entered, but they can give you a rough idea of whether or not your daily budget might be reached or whether your maximum bid is below the minimum amount required by certain high-volume keywords as you start to bid. Go ahead and take a quick peek, but don’t expect your own traffic to closely approximate these estimates. Most often it will be a bit off. When you are finished, click Continue to go to the Review Your Selections page.

Review Your Selections

Simply review your selections, editing any that might not be exactly what you intended them to be, before clicking on the Continue to Sign Up button at the bottom of your screen. This will take you to the Set Up Account page.

Set Up Account

If you already use any other Google services, you may use the existing e-mail address and password you use for those services; otherwise, you must select “I do not use these other services” and enter the e-mail address you would like to use for your AdWords account. Then choose a password, entering it twice in the fields provided before typing the characters from the distorted image in the box below it. Once you have done all this, click the Create Account button at the bottom of the screen to be taken to the “Sign-up complete” page.

Sign-Up Complete

Once your sign-up is complete, Google will send an e-mail to the address you provided, asking you to verify your account and submit your billing information. Once you complete these steps, your ad or ads will begin showing. After verification, you can sign in to AdWords using this e-mail address plus the password you specified earlier. Once you log back on, you will want to rename your campaign after the affiliate program it promotes. Then click on the campaign name to display the ad groups within it. The ad group you created should be renamed after the product or broad topic it advertises.

The AdWords interface is simple and intuitive, and now that you have gone through all the steps necessary to create your first campaign and ad group, you should have no problem creating additional ones. When you create additional ad groups for the same affiliate program, be sure to create them in the same campaign.

When you begin promoting a new affiliate program, create a new campaign for it, and create all the different ad groups for that affiliate program within the new campaign.