Get Your Campaigns Off to a Flying Start

Whether you're running single ads or large groups of multi-ad campaigns, there are four simple steps to help get clicks from the right audience.

• Create your campaign – complete your company details, then name and organize your campaign
• Set up your ad – write a compelling sentence that will get people to click
• Choose your keywords – which words will the customer use to look for your product?
• Bid on each of your keywords – choose which words are worth paying more for. You can also upweight bids to target by age, gender, location, time and day of search

1. Creating campaigns and orders/ad groups

An order is a set of ads within a campaign that share the same theme. A campaign is a group of orders/ad groups that share one budget and run for a specified period of time. So, for example, a ‘Holiday Toy' campaign might contain orders/ad groups named ‘Toy Plane ads' and ‘Doll ads'. You can run several orders/ad groups within a campaign, and several campaigns simultaneously.

To create campaigns and orders/ad groups all you have to do is name them.

Use names that are clear and descriptive. It will make tracking, analyzing and refining your campaigns that much easier.

2. Building your ad

Each order consists of one or more ads. Your ad is what appears to viewers on the Bing results page after they've typed in a keyword to find what they're looking for.

Each ad is made up of four basic parts:

• A headline
• Some descriptive text
• The URL name that people see (these are called ‘Vanity URLs' – for example, www.adcentercanada.ca)
• The actual URL for your website that customers will go to when they click your ad

As you type this information into the ad fields, you'll get to see how your ads will look: Microsoft adCenter displays them in a window on the very same page. You can have up to 20 ads in an order.

Keep the ad copy short and descriptive, while avoiding empty promises. Every word counts! Using an evocative URL is a good way of making the most of the little space you have.

3. Selecting your keywords

Keywords can be either words or phrases that people type into search engines to focus their search. If their keywords match yours, your ad will appear (where it appears in the listings is dependent upon how relevant your ad is and how much you bid).

Selecting your keywords means typing in all the words that you want to trigger your ad. Each ad can have as many keywords as you like.

Choosing the right keywords is crucial. You can get help with keywords from our Keyword Generator (which finds similar keywords to the one you enter) and our Keyword Research Tool (which reveals the typical profile of the people searching on your keyword).

4. Setting your budget, placing your bids and submitting your ad

Once you've decided on your overall budget, you need to bid on your keywords. When your keywords are shared by other advertisers, the bidding decides whose ad appears higher in the search results.

You can also bid on our special targeting options, such as gender, location, time of day, etc. Then all you have to do is submit your ad.

After your ad goes live, adCenter's built-in reports measure its performance. You can then use the report data to optimize your ad, keyword list and targets to ensure the best possible ROI.

Try including an 800 number or other phone number if you have one – it's a great way to save space and drive prospective customers to your business.