Sign up for Google AdWords

This step takes: 1-2 min

Do you have a local business? Don't want to advertise globally or nationwide? Simply choose the geographic area where you'd like your ads to appear.

Step-by-step instructions

• Click on the Create your first campaign button.
• Go to Campaign Settings and Audience if you want to change the language settings.
• If you want to advertise in a specific location only, go to Campaign Settings and Audience to change your targeted location.
• Simply select the countries, regions or cities where you would like your ad to appear – or just exclude specific regions.

Step 3: Set your daily budget

With Google AdWords, you decide how much you're willing to pay per day. You then only pay when someone clicks on your ad. In other words, you only pay when your advertising works. This approach has allowed AdWords to establish itself as a cost-effective advertising platform for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

You set your budget under the Bidding and budget section of your campaign settings. Your budget should be the amount you're comfortable spending on AdWords advertising each day.

Tips

How high should I go?

If you're not sure how much you want to spend, try starting off with a budget of US$5 to US$10 per day. Increase your budget if you're happy with the initial results or once you've optimized your campaign.

Step 4: Control how much you spend per click on your ad

This step takes: 1 min

Under Bidding and Budget select the Automatic bidding option. AdWords will then automatically adjust your bids to try to bring you the most clicks possible within your budget.

If you want to control how much you spend per click on your ad, you can set a CPC (cost-per-click) bid limit. We recommend starting out with an amount you're comfortable spending per click on your ad (many advertisers start out with about $1.00) and then continuing to adjust as you monitor your ad's performance. If you enter a CPC bid limit that's too low, your budget may not be used up completely or your ad may not show at all. If this happens, increase your CPC bid limit or add more keywords.

You can change your CPC bid at any time. The best thing is to get started and begin experimenting.

When determining how much to bid for a click on your ad, try to estimate how valuable a click is for your business. Think of "a click" as a person that searches for one of your keywords, sees your ad, chooses to click on it and lands on your website - in other words, think of a click as "a potential customer". How much you are willing to pay for a click will largely depend on how much profit you make from a new customer.

Step 5: Create ad(s)

This step takes: 2-3 min

Creating good ads is important but not difficult. What's more, it's not like creating a newspaper advertisement. A key advantage of AdWords is that you can adjust and improve your ads at any time.