Beginners Guide for Building YOUR Google Ads Search Campaign

Picture shows how Google Search Ads pop up in a search. Picture from Reliablesoft.net

Google Ads is a great way to gain more traction on your website. Google Ads has different options to create ad campaigns such as Search, Display, Video, Shopping, and Mobile. This post will give a beginners guide on setting up your ad as well as maintaining it.

Basic Metrics

When creating a search campaign, there are important metrics to keep in mind that will help to determine if the campaign is successful:

Cost – Always working under a budget
Impressions – How many times people see your ad
Clicks – How many people click on your ad
CTR (Click Through Rate) – Clicks/Impressions
Average CPC (Cost Per Click) – Total cost/total number of clicks

These aren’t the only metrics to look at, but they can indicate whether an ad is performing well or not. This article by WebFX goes into more detail into some of these metrics while also identifying other metrics to be aware of.

Setting Up Your Campaign

Choosing a Campaign Goal and Budget Amount

When first setting up your campaign, the Google Ads Platform first has you choose an objective for your campaign goal. These options include sales, leads, website traffic, brand awareness and reach, and more. For an effective search campaign, sales, leads, and website traffic are the best options (choose the best one based off your business’s objective). Brand awareness and reach would be best for a display campaign.

Once a campaign goal is chosen, set an amount for how much you want to spend on your ad. This amount will be spent each day on the ad. Google will make sure that amount spent on your ad will not exceed your budget. They do this by having different ad delivery methods: standard and accelerated

Standard Delivery – Default setting for your campaign; evenly distributes your budget during the day
Accelerated Delivery – Spends your budget very quickly, usually in the morning

Language and Location Settings

Choosing a language and a location radius depends on what type of business you have. If you need to market to a Spanish speaking consumer base, for example, then you would choose the Spanish option.

Location also plays a huge factor in a successful search campaign. Keeping the radius synonymous with the type of business you have is ideal for success. For example, if you were setting up a campaign for a coffee business, the radius should be about 5 miles. Reducing the radius will reduce the number of people that see the ad. However, the ad will be more relevant for those that do see it. The best way to think about location setting is in terms of how far you would drive to get that certain product, service etc. If you wouldn’t drive far for a product/service, neither would a consumer.

Key Words and Ad Groups

An Ad Group is based around a common theme or similar target. If your business offers different products, it is a good idea to have multiples ad groups. Having multiple ad groups helps to better target your audience, which will increase ad relevance. Within these ad groups will be keywords that have a common theme around them. After choosing key words and grouping them, decide on what type of key word matching type you want to use. Below is a picture of the different key word matching types.

Description and example of the 3 key word matching types. Image from Klientboost.com

Publish and Monitor Your Campaign!

Once ad groups are chosen and ads are made, you are ready to publish your campaign! Keep track of metrics that were listed earlier in the post (Average CPC, CTR, etc). These ads are sometimes trial and error, so if you aren’t getting the results you want, change things up (could include new ad groups, different key words, different key word matching types, and more).