Keywords are the cornerstone of any Paid Search campaign. 

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Prerequisites

If you are new to search marketing, you may want to review this overview of Keyword Types to get a brief summary of the different types of keywords you can choose from.

Overview

For new Paid Search accounts, we recommend starting out your campaigns with Brand keywords.  As described on the page above, Brand keywords are terms based on your brand and/or business name.  These terms tend to have the best Click Through Rate (CTR) and Effective Revenue Share (ERS), two metrics which greatly affect the profitability of your campaigns, which will help your accounts get off to a good start.  If you are starting your campaigns on a new Google Adwords account, we recommend leaving these Brand keywords in your account and not adding any new keywords for 1-2 weeks.  Google's Quality Score looks at the historical CTR of your account when assigning a keyword's individual Quality Score, so since these keywords will have a higher CTR, the keywords you launch after this will benefit from the accumulated traffic that your initial keywords get during the first 1-2 weeks.

After your brand terms have been running for 1-2 weeks, start phasing in Long Tail and Product-level keywords.  This set of terms should have the next highest CTR and ERS.  Keywords in this set may include product names and 'search friendly' variations of your product names, as well as some descriptive head (or category) terms.

Launching both Brand terms and Long Tail terms will help build a solid foundation for Paid Search success.