A couple of weeks ago I got an email from those nice people at google saying that as an analytics user they would like to offer me the chance to try out the Adwords product and here was a voucher code for £75. Thanks!

This is the second voucher I've been given and so whilst I'm ramping up the link exchanging I thought I'd have a go at setting up a campaign for the scratch card site rather than letting the voucher expire (Note to self - Check expiry dates!).

Now, I already have an adwords account from several years ago when I used to run the campaigns for a couple of private clients but as I don't do those anymore it's been lying dormant for ages doing nothing whilst I have been building free search traffic to the affiliate sites.

This where I hit the first problem.

On trying to redeem the voucher code in my existing adwords account I'm told that the account is too old to qualify for the voucher. Obviously google is trying to attract new advertisers and not just giving existing advertisers free money! Makes sense.

However as I have all of my analytics profiles in the one google account if I subsequently set up a new google account so that I can take advantage of the £75 offer then I won't be able to hook the new adwords account up to the old analytics account because they will be using different email addresses.

There's no point in just setting up a new google adwords account and having a couple of shotgun blasts because if we do hit something then we'll need to know what it is and we'll end up doing the whole setup process anyway so may as well do it first time right?

So what if I delete the existing adwords account and create a new one?

That should work right?

It doesn't. Because, quite rightly, Google doesn't actually delete your data, it just cancels all account activity, so if you had some employee that got pissed off because he got asked to make the coffee one too many times then they couldn't delete five years worth of adwords data with just a couple of clicks. Quite right too.

So I can reactivate the existing google adwords account but I still can't use the voucher with that account because it's too old.

The solution then, is to delete the existing analytics profile, create a brand new google account, create the new adwords account, apply the voucher code and make the £10 payment to activate the account.

Then create a new analytics account under the same new gmail address (after deleting the old one in your everyday exisitng google account) and then tell adwords that you have an analytics account to which you'd like to send the PPC data.

All done? So now you have two google accounts, but that's ok because if your new PPC campaign goes well then you can simply give a new employee the new google account details and away they go with the new project.

That's the plan.

So now let's turn our attention to setting up the campaign.

There's not a lot of competition for scratchcards so the keyword cost is quite low at the moment. I create a control Ad (the one by which all others will be performance measured against) and then a slight variation. Sit back and watch the cash roll in right?

Err no. We seem to have a problem. They've disapproved my 'ad's.

I go back to check the small print.

You are allowed to advertise gambling content BUT ONLY if you are a registered license holder.

So that means I'm out of this game. Shame, because it was looking good. But no wonder if most of the competition is excluded from competing!

What else have we got that would be a legitimate use for our voucher?

This site needs a tidy up and bringing up to date but we won't have any problems with excluded content and we should get a good quality score so let's give this a go on Monday.

The only problem we are likely to come up against is that we exhaust the voucher value before we get enough data to know what is working and what isn't.

In fact that's the good and bad thing with adwords in general. It can cost you a lot of money to slowly eliminate the non performing keywords and as you do so you have more budget to spend on the ones that do work.

Getting rid of all the non performers is the expensive bit. And just because 100 other people are all madly spending on just two or three keywords doesn't mean that those keywords are the one's that you should be targeting. You really have to do that for yourself and the only way for that is to implement proper tracking systems.

On Monday and through next week I'll show you how to implement tracking for your site and get ready for an adwords campaign. The money is in the preparation and tracking. The execution is the easy bit.

It's looking like being a great summer weekend here in the UK so turn off the PC and get yourself out in the sunshine and chill for a bit. No peeking at your email over the weekend. Come back with all batteries fully charged and ready to go on Monday!

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