Transcription
So, you're looking to start advertising your business on Google Ads in 2024? Well, look no further! Right now, I'm going to take you through the step-by-step process of how you can start your first Google Ads campaign the right way, without making any costly mistakes.
Now, before we jump into a screen share to go through that step-by-step process of setting up your first campaign in Google Ads, it’s really important—especially if you’re new to Google Ads—to have a clear understanding of a core principle of how Google Ads works.
In case you don’t know, Google Ads is based on an auction system. When a user searches for a keyword, your ads are compared against all of your competitors' ads. Google quickly decides who wins the auction and who gets the different placements of ads.
Ideally, you want your ad to finish in that number one position. You can get away with number two, but you really want those top two positions. The best news about Google Ads is that, unlike other auctions, the one who’s willing to pay the most doesn’t always win.
In a house auction, the highest bidder always wins, but that’s not true with Google Ads. The reason for this is that Google doesn’t only look at your bid—how much you’re willing to pay. Google uses a formula: your bid times your quality score, which gives you a metric called the ad rank score.
This is important because a core concern for Google is ad relevancy. They want to ensure they’re showing the most relevant ads. If they continue to show irrelevant ads, and people click on them only to land on irrelevant pages, they lose confidence in the platform, and ultimately, their ad revenue diminishes.
So, if you really understand that core concept of having highly relevant ads, you’ll want to ensure that your ads are relevant to the user’s search and that they’re also sending people to the most relevant landing page.
Another core metric is the click-through ratio, and this is where your ad copy becomes crucial. This metric looks at the percentage of times someone clicks on your ad versus how many times they see it. For example, if your ad shows 100 times and someone clicks on it 10 times, you have a click-through ratio of 10%.
This is a core factor because a high click-through ratio will increase your ad rank. This works especially well for small advertisers. If you understand this core concept right at the start of your Google Ads journey, you’ll be set up for success.
Think of it this way: Google is in the business of making money, but they only get paid when someone clicks on your ad. Let’s say your maximum bid for an ad is $2 for the search term "women's summer dresses," and you have a click-through ratio of 12%.
Now, you might have a competitor with a bid of over $5—more than double what you’re willing to pay—but their click-through ratio is only 3%. Who would win that auction? The good news is that you would win the auction. Even though the competitor is willing to pay $5 and you’re only willing to pay $2, you would win because Google would prefer a 12% chance of getting $2 versus a 3% chance of getting $5.
When you play this out over 100 clicks, if Google showed your competitor's ad, they would only get $15 (3 clicks at $5 each). However, if they show your ad, even at $2, and you get 12 clicks because of your 12% click-through ratio, Google would get $24.
So, you can see clearly that there’s an incentive to ensure you have a high click-through ratio on your ads.
Now that we’ve covered all of that, let’s get into a screen share so I can take you through the process of setting up your first Google Ads campaign.
Just in case you miss any of these steps, you can follow the link in the description below to get a free download of my Google Ads campaign setup guide. This guide includes screen shares and instructions, so if you miss any steps, don’t worry—just follow that link in the description below.
Alright, let’s get into that screen share so I can show you the process of setting up your first campaign in Google Ads.
To start, I want to quickly run you through the structure you should use for your Google search campaigns.
You have your total Google Ads account, then you have what we call Google Ads campaigns. Initially, you’ll probably just have one campaign. The way to think about whether to put something in different campaigns comes down to two core factors: your spending and your different keyword themes.
For example, if you’re an accountant offering general bookkeeping services and also different business planning services, you may want to run them in completely different campaigns. This way, you can control the budgets.
From there, you have your different ad groups, keywords, and landing pages. Let’s stick with the accountant example. If you have bookkeeping services, you would run that in an ad group. You might have "bookkeeping services for small businesses" as a keyword.
In this ad group, you would have all your keywords and different ad copy, directing to the landing page for bookkeeping services. Conversely, if you have another ad group for tax planning, you would have all your tax planning keywords and your tax planning landing page.
The reason for this segregation is to ensure you have highly relevant search terms, ad copy, and landing pages.
Now that you understand that, let’s jump into Google Ads. I’ll stick with the screen share to show you the step-by-step process.
The first step is to go to ads.google.com. This will bring you to a page where you can click on "Start Now."
When you start here, you want to skip campaign creation. If you go down this path, it will set up a smart campaign for you, which isn’t the way you want to go about it. Don’t worry; I’m here to guide you step by step, and you can also download the booklet so you won’t miss any steps.
When you click on "Skip campaign creation," you’ll need to go through some steps to set up your Google Ads account. You’ll have to add your email and some payment details, but it’s all a very step-by-step process.
Then, you’ll come to a screen like this. You need to click on "New Campaign." It may look slightly different, and you may not have this gray banner at the top, but all you need to do is click on "New Campaign."
As we go through this process, I already have a Google Sheet with my keyword research and ad copy set up, so I’ll be copying and pasting that. At the end of this video, I’ll show you where you can find videos on how to complete your keyword research and ad copy.
For now, let’s go into "New Campaign." From there, you want to choose either "Sales" or "Leads." There’s not a huge difference, but I recommend choosing "Sales" if you’re an e-commerce brand. If you’re looking to create more phone calls or email inquiries, click on "Leads."
In this section, you may not have conversion actions set up yet, but you can do that later. For this example, I’ll skip this step because we want to focus on setting up your campaigns.
Next, select your campaign type. Google will recommend "Performance Max," but when you’re new to Google Ads, I strongly recommend starting with "Search." The reason is that for Performance Max to run effectively, you need to have some conversion data in your account.
From there, you need to select whether you want to get more website visits, phone calls, shop visits, app downloads, or lead form submissions. If you’re doing phone calls or shop visits, you’ll just need to enter your phone number or link your business profile with one of those options.
Now, we come to the campaign name. Google will default to something like "Lead Search 3." I always recommend using a name that makes sense to you. For us, we’ll call this "One-Bedroom Villas Search" so we know it’s a search campaign.
It doesn’t really matter what you call it since it’s for internal purposes, but having a good naming convention helps you clearly see what that campaign is about. Trust me, it saves a lot of time when you’re going through different optimization actions.
Then, click "Continue." This will bring you to a bidding strategy. At the start, I recommend starting with "Maximize Clicks." The reason is that during the first 60 to 90 days of your Google Ads campaign, you want to gather as much data as possible.
People often ask where to start your budget. You want to generate at least 10 clicks a day. If your cost per click is around $0.75 to $2.35, you can start your budget at as little as $10 a day. If your cost per click is $3, you would need to start at $30 a day.
Then, click "Next." You’ll have some different opt-in or opt-out options. I generally unselect these. This is for your Google Search Partners. The only time I would keep it selected is if you’re marketing in the U.S., as they have many search partners and traffic.
Anywhere else, I’ve never seen any benefit in adding this. For the Display Network, I definitely unselect it. If you want to do image-based ads, doing it from your search campaign will only give you text-based ads, which don’t perform as well.
When it comes to locations, I recommend keeping it country-specific or at least continent-specific. Different search terms and traffic volumes vary by country. For this example, we’ll choose Australia. You can even narrow it down to a state, city, or zip/postcode.
Next, we come to audience segments. I recommend adding at least 20 to 30 audiences to start with. When you eventually move to maximize conversions, it becomes less relevant, but especially at the start with maximize clicks, you want to add as many audiences as possible.
I have some different ones here. For example, if this is for a Bali resort, we’re adding audiences around holiday rentals, luxury travelers, and trips to Indonesia. I’ve selected nine, but I generally start with at least 20.
If you want to find extra ones, you can browse and type in keywords. For example, if you’re doing a campaign for a local plumber, you can type that in and get different audience options.
It’s important to note that this is only the observation method, so it’s not targeting those audiences directly; it’s just gathering data from them.
If you go down to more settings, I wouldn’t worry about changing any of these at the start. You can if you want to. The only time I would change it is if, for example, you’re a plumber and don’t want your ads to appear on Sundays.
Then, click "Next." You’ll see that Google is starting to use an AI tool to help with your keyword research. As I mentioned, at the end of the video, I’ll show you links on how to do your own manual keyword research and ad copy.
For now, this will be our ad group. It doesn’t matter what you call this ad group; just make sure it makes sense to you. I’ve entered my keywords, and now we’ll add in our ad copy.
Once again, after this video, I’ll show you how to create your own ad copy, but for now, let me copy and paste this ad copy in.
I’ve added my URL, headlines, and descriptions. Remember, I’ll show you that other video on how to correctly write your ad copies.
Now, you can add different site links and callouts. These are little ad extensions that appear at the bottom of your ads. I recommend filling out the rest of the details here.
For example, we can add a callout like "Book Direct and Save." This will appear on every single ad. Once you’ve done all that, click "Next."
This brings you to the recommended budget. Google will often go over the top because they want to maximize their revenue. You can see here that Google recommends an average CPC of $3.34. In our manual keyword research, we found that the top of the page bid is about $2.35.
So, we can set our own custom budget at $23 a day to get those 10 clicks. Click "Next."
Google will run through different checks, and if everything is okay, you can click "Publish Campaign."
Congratulations! You’ve pressed publish, and now you have your first campaign in Google Ads running.
Remember, if you missed any of those steps, just follow the link in the description below to access my campaign setup guide.
As promised, if you want to learn the step-by-step process for completing your keyword research, watch this video right here. If you want to see how to create high-converting ad copy in Google Ads, watch this video right here.
Once again, it’s been my absolute pleasure having you here. My name is Aaron Young from Defin Digital Academy, and I look forward to seeing you in one of these videos right now. See you later!