Your first Google Ads Search campaign – The Creation

CAMPAIGN LEVEL

The first thing you’ll need to do when you start with search campaign creation will be to choose the business goal your campaign must reach:

• Sales – Drive sales online, in-app, by phone, or in store
• Leads – Get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action
• Website traffic – Get the right people to visit your website

Let’s say we are in the first stage of our marketing process, and we want our campaign to attract as many visitors as possible. So we choose: „Website traffic“.

You’ll have the option of putting your search ads also on Display Network. Personally, I don’t recommend this kind of advertising. If you want to do something with Ads, do it right or don’t do it at all. If you need a Display campaign, use display ads. Not this.

Targeting

First targeting (and the most important) you can do is Location targeting. Target by country, region, city, whatever. You can even click on Advanced search and set a radius around your city if you want there. Yes, Ads is awesome. Note; when you scroll further down you’ll notice Advanced Location options. It looks like this:

I highly recommend that you come here and decide on which audience you want and need.

Besides locations, there is also language targeting. This one seems simple but it’s not. Think about the languages your audience is speaking and remember that this data is based on which language they use in a google search.

Bidding and budgeting, rotation, start and end dates, ad schedule

There are 7 Automated bid strategies and 1 manual. Every one of them is useful for something. If you are a beginner, I suggest you stick to the ‘Manual CPC’ or ‘Maximize clicks’. If your campaign is simple enough (more website traffic), just decide on how much you are willing to pay for a click and choose one of those two strategies. The price of your click will depend on different factors: Your ad quality, ad relevance score, keyword precision, website speed, competition… a lot of factors.
So, be careful while setting your CPC. Start small and see what happens. You can always optimize it. But more on that later.

Also, stick to the small daily budget. This is something that should be connected to your already set budget for this campaign but don’t put too much as you don’t know how your results will look like after a few days.

For now, click on ‘Standard delivery method’.

I’m sure you’ll be blown away by the number of extensions Ads is offering you. Extensions are great for your ad relevance score, so if you can, use them. But don’t go overboard.

AD GROUP LEVEL

After you’ve done with the basic settings, comes the real thing. You need to name your ad groups (yes ad groups, plural!) and give them keyword matches you want them to use in order to show your ads. If you have two or more totally different products, of course, you’ll put them in different ad groups.
Before you start with putting down keywords, you must know which matches are available:

• broad match: keyword – not too precise, as this way you are reaching everyone who is searching something that is connected to your product in any way. Broad matches are often used to see how people are using Google.
• phrase match: „keyword“ – you’re not sure how people are exactly searching for your products but you do have a small idea? No problem, a phrase match is for you.
• exact match: [keyword] – if you know or think you know how people are going to search for your products, use this match. This is maximum precision and it often results in a better response, but it is very tricky to use.

Negative keywords: – use them if you don’t want your ads to appear for something that is not applicable to you. That doesn’t mean you should type in everything. It just means that your products can sometimes appear for something similar, but not what you want.

AD LEVEL

‘The only creative’ step of the process. You need to write something that will catch the attention of the potential customer. You don’t have a lot of space to work with so do your best. It’s always good to use this:

• Headline 1 – Question about the problem?
• Headline 2 –Your solution.
• Description: Who are you and what the customer needs to do to get in touch with your products and services.

But for every product or service, there is a different approach. So, make sure to create at least two ads, as that way you can see which performs better.

There is a lot of work here, isn’t it? Well, my friends, this is only the beginning. Read my next blog post about Search campaign optimization and advanced options.
Because nothing good can come out of ‘just creating campaigns’. Besides, if you can make something that you created better, why wouldn’t you?