After all this,  it brings up a summary page with each size variation:

300X250 & 336X280 Square

120X600 & 160X600 Skyscraper

468X60 &728X90 Banners

They might not all look too good in every size. Maybe the text gets squashed on a skyscraper or it just looks plain funky. You can either hit the “back” button and rearrange some stuff or de-select the ones you don’t like, and do a new display ad for just those sizes that didn’t translate too well. It’s been my experience that the skyscrapers are the ones that are trickiest to make look right from the basic layouts, so you might want to do a separate display ad builder for them.

I’ve got a good deal of experience with Flash, and of-course, a display ad builder is will never replace the creativity and functionality of a made-from scratch animation, but hell, it doesn’t take hours to do it either, and they don’t look half bad.

GOOD:

• fast & flexible
• makes multiple variations from 1 display ad
• ads can be copied into other adgroups (only in same campaign)
• easy learning curve to get started quickly
• Ads look decent enough

Bad:

• cannot rearrange elements in layouts
• ads can be copied into other adgroups (only in same campaign)
• ads won’t import into Adwords Editor
• not as creative as purpose built ads

Know your market and your competition.

Some businesses are extremely underserved on the web. These businesses are “old school”, doing lots of business, but run by people reluctant to grasp the power of new technology. It’s hard to believe, but there are quite a lot of these markets out there, and if you have one, it is virtually impossible to screw it up. You could piece together the most ridiculous and undisciplined campaign, and it would still be successful as long as you are throwing money at it. I see it everyday. On the flip-side, you would have to be crazy to think you are going to spend $100/month on PPC ads for something like “Digital Cameras”, because the market is super-saturated and bids are so high, you might as well light a match to that Benjamin. I dare say $5,000.00/month would be the minimum to break into a market like that. Trust me, I tried to nonchalantly bid a little on my domain & hosting service. I didn’t quite account for the fact that 1,000 other companies were bidding on the same keywords, as well as BIG spenders like godaddy and others. Not only were my ads ridiculously expensive to serve, the revenues generated by such low-margin products didn’t even come close to justifying the expense.

When you do find an underserved market, it’s often hard to sell the idea to business owners who have always based their marketing around the old standards, namely printed media. That is changing quite rapidly, and it seems that everyone is realizing that internet marketing is the key to modern success in marketing. The returns can be astounding.

I guess to sum-up, I’d just like to say that this is not something that you are going to be a genius overnight. It takes plenty of training, patience and good deal of trial and error. Research is the MOST important aspect, even with a well established account. If you have the patience and determination to do this tedious part of the job, good things await you on the other side.

Oh, and for you domainers, I’m selling free private registration to anyone registering domain names in Bulk (5 or more).