Google AdWords™ is flexible and can be adapted to your needs. This tutorial will help you set your account the right way from the beginning.

The four basic steps in creating a Google AdWords™ account are:

1. Target languages and locations
2. Create the first ad group
3. Specify your daily budget
4. Sign up

Target languages and locations

AdWords™ allows you to target people of 14 languages within 250 countries (so far). But you may not need all of them to see your ad.

Suppose you sell German history books. Most probably, you'll want to target your ads for native Germans. Then, you choose the ads to be displayed only to users that access the Internet from Germany. This can be done, because Google identifies the user's IP address.

Another slice of your market can be Google users who set their language preference on “German”, though they're not located in Germany. Those ones will get language-targeted ads.

How is this helpful to you? On one hand, you won't pay for untargeted visitors — those persons that would never buy your product. On the other hand, by taking advantage of language preferences, you increase the power of your ads to convert the visitors into customers. You're speaking their language!

The language and geographical target are not one-time settings. You can modify these options at your wish.

Create the first ad group

We say “the first” because you'll probably want to start with one ad group to have your account running, and then take a little time to prepare your keyword list. Having an account allows you to use some precious AdWords™ tools like the Traffic Estimator. Combined with the Keyword Tool (that can be used for free), you can set up your basic keyword list.

Creating an ad group requires five small steps:

Create an ad

There's no upper limit of ads that you can create per ad group. But there's a limit for the character count in your ads. Basically, one ad should be made of:

• Three lines of Text that must fit within the maximum of 95 characters: 25 for the title and 70 for the body. AdWords™ warns that large characters such as “m” and “w” can reduce the number of characters you can fit in a text line.
• A Display URL that can have a maximum of 35 characters. Your actual URL (Destination URL or landing page) can span on several lines, in an incomprehensible manner. You need to display an URL that is suggestive to the potential customer.
• The Destination URL can be up to 1,024 characters. The destination URL is the address of your actual landing page.

You can change all the fields in your ad as soon as you get to test more versions of them.

Read the Google AdWords™ editorial guidelines. If you break the rules, your ads will be disabled automatically.

The copy of your ad is the first trigger for potential customers. Read the copy-writing tips in the Write Your Ads section.

Select your keywords

As we mentioned before, at this point you can use the Keyword Tool. For now, we recommend you to opt for an exact match for all keywords; then go through our next section and learn about how to build your basic list of keywords. After you've done that, come back and set your other ad groups, based on what you've learned.

Choose your currency

This is a point where you need to be careful. You can set it up just once. So make sure the currency you choose favors you the most. The currency applies to both billing and payments.

Choose maximum cost per click (CPC)

The maximum cost per click is the sum you can afford to pay for a click. That doesn't mean you'll actually pay it. Google AdWords™ will automatically optimize your costs.

Calculate Estimates

You can try more CPCs for each keyword in the ad group and calculate estimates to see which CPC suits your budget. The traffic estimator approximates your daily costs, click-through rate and other campaign metrics. The estimations are based on real time data, so you'd probably want to re-calculate at times, and see what the thread is.

Set your daily budget

Using the estimates you can figure out how much you can afford to spend each month. It is best to set a maximum daily budget in order to have a balanced campaign.

Sign up

Here we are: the last step before your Google AdWords™ account becomes active. All you need to do is enter your email address and password, and supply some more info about yourself.

And then what?

Build your keyword-list.