Sure, your new Adwords campaigns can be running by the end of the day, but only Setting up the bare essentials is unlikely to produce the results you were hoping for. Many advertisers new to Google Adwords simply miss many of the important default settings because they’re too busy focusing on target keywords and clever ad copy.

Keywords and ad copy are important, but launching your campaign without adjusting default settings is likely to burn through your allotted budget far faster than you anticipated. And less effectively too. It’s essential to spend time reviewing and adjusting the default settings in Adwords. The majority of changes that you should make to Google Adwords Default Campaign Settings are designed to limit spend in underperforming areas, leaving more budget for the most effective segments.

Getting Your Campaigns Set Up

In order to access many of these settings, you will need to make sure that your campaigns type is set to ALL FEATURES. This can be done on the on the first screen when creating a new campaign in Google Adwords. Here are the top four default campaign settings that every advertiser should change when setting up Google Adwords campaigns…

Locations: The default setting for US Advertisers in Google Adwords is set to serve ads is set to “United States and Canada.” Whether you are a local business that doesn’t service outside a small region,or actually want to target more than just North America, these settings should be changed when setting up your campaigns.

There is a wide variety of location targeting options to choose from under the Advanced Search selection option. Based on your business needs, you can segment and target your audience in countless ways. Keep in mind that once your campaign is set up, you will be able to adjust bids by targeted location, so you don’t have to spend the same amount in every region you select.

Ad Scheduling: Default ad scheduling settings in Adwords allow ads to run 24/7/365 at an even pace. This approach is rarely used by successful advertisers, because users behave differently at different times of the day / days of the week.

Rely on phone calls from your website for leads? Restricting ads to business hours only is a great way to start. Offer services online all the time? Update your ad schedule to segment for times of day / days of the week with lower conversion rates so that you can adjust bids accordingly. There is a limit of 6 unique time segments allowed per day in Adwords, but that should be plenty to get you started.

Demographics: Google Adwords default settings don’t discriminate. Default demographics for campaigns allows ads to be shown to all age groups and genders equally. Most companies and brands don’t target the entire spectrum of adulthood in their marketing plan, so your Adwords campaigns shouldn’t either.

These settings aren’t included during the setup process of all campaign types, so you may need to navigate to it once you’ve saved your initial campaign shell. Once there, you can decide whether you want to adjust bids based on demographics or exclude any segments entirely.

Devices: User device also plays a big factor in how people interact with your site. Figuring out the best settings for these devices can be a bit more difficult than the previous groups, but worth making some initial adjustments that reflect what you already know about your customers.

B2B companies tend to see more success on Computers, while B2C advertisers know they can’t forget about mobile devices during off-work hours. Using device conversion rate data from other channels in Google Analytics is likely to give you a good starting point for increasing or decreasing initial bids.

While adjusting initial campaign settings, keep in mind that this is only a starting point. Once you launch the campaigns it’s time to start collecting data that you can then use to optimize further. All of these campaign settings can be changed at anytime and should be updated when enough data is collected to justify updates.

Taking Adwords Management to a New Level

The default campaign settings above are just the tip of the iceberg. Each different campaign type offers a variety of other settings that can be manipulated to improve campaign performance – and in most cases, they will have more impact than swapping out a few keywords or changing up ad copy.

Our Paid Media Management Services have always emphasized strong campaign settings adjustments, and we keep up with all new options added to the Adwords platform. Advanced settings management allows us to create campaigns that launch effectively, and are well positioned for further optimization. Rather than spend your next Adwords optimization session on keyword research and ad headlines, dig deep into your existing site data and optimize your campaign settings.

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