Now that you have created your Google Ads account, you’re going to want to jump into your first campaign, right? Right! Using AdWords can seem overwhelming at first with the keyword research, multiple bidding strategies and advanced campaign settings. We’re calling it now – once you run your first campaign and begin to understand how it works, setting up new ad groups gets easier and you can try more advanced techniques to capture your target market.
Let’s do this already!
We are going to explain, step by step, from start to finish just how you can create your first campaign.
To get you started, it’s worth explaining very briefly some common terms you will most often see when you are completing a Google Ad campaign setup.
This is a set of one or more ad groups that have the same budget, settings and location targeting.
Multiple ads that share and target the same set of keywords.
This is the max amount you are willing to spend for each time a user
The amount you would like to on average, spend each day on your ad campaign. When your daily budget has been exhausted, your ad will no longer show.
Once you have your head wrapped around the terminology, you can open your AdWords account and click on the blue +Campaign button.
To begin, select a single goal that would make your campaign a success to you. There are six options of:
Once you have made this selection, you will be prompted to select a campaign type. There are six options of:
We have chosen Search for campaign type and leads for goals as we want users to subscribe to our pottery class newsletter. As you can see, when you have selected a single goal, Google then prompts the ways you would like to reach the selected goal. For our purpose of subscribers, selecting website visits is the most suitable.
Next, we will enter a name for our AdWords campaign in a field called Campaign name.
We can then choose the networks we want the Google ads to display. At this point, you also have the option to have your Google ads display on Google’s search partners sites. This is also known as the Google Display Network, and while an opportunity to reach a vast array of users, can also be expensive in the long term.
Because of this – and to be budget friendly, we will only select the Search Network.
We now have the chance to focus on languages and locations we wish to target with our ads. For our first ad, we are only going to target Australia however it’s best to target regions you sell to also.
Hot tip: you can adjust the budget accordingly throughout the course of your campaign.
Once you have entered your amount, you can select between standard or accelerated delivery method:
For your first campaign, we would select Standard Delivery so we can take some time to analyse if the ad is successful or not.
Bidding can be quite an intricate detail to your ad. There are multiple automated bid strategies that can help you accomplish your specific goals. If you select automatic bid strategy, Google routinely sets bids for your AdWords campaign based on that ad’s possibility to result in a conversion or click. The convenient part about using an automatic bid strategy is that Google will do most of the hard work for you. Conversely, since you are not in direct power of the amount your spending, you can easily find your budget disappearing faster than you can blink.
Alternatively, if you click “Select a bid strategy directly,” you will be able to choose to Maximize your clicks. This means that you set bids to get you the most total clicks within your budget.
And finally – yes there is one more! You can select to Target Cost-per-acquisition, also known as CPA. This selection automatically sets bids to get you the most conversions while maintaining your target Cost-per-acquisition.
For beginners, we will select manual big strategy. This will allow us to set a maximum CPC bidding amount.
Google will then prompt to enable Enhanced CPC. This means Google want to automatically adjust your bids to maximise the conversions. Again, for a beginning campaign, you can skip this.
So, we’ve selected our bid strategy – but how did we decide on an amount to bid? Welcome Google’s trusty helping hands – the Google Keyword Planner.
We hear you – what is it and why is it so good? The Google Keyword Planner allows you to search for words or phrases that you think relate to your business. In addition to this, you can then view proposed bid estimates for each keyword you have searched and this is how we can determine our advertising budget.
The next step is scheduling our campaign. Let’s start by selecting a start date and an end date. You also have the option run the ad indefinitely by selecting None as the end date – a lot of people choose to do this as they will just monitor an ad to see how it’s performing and end it if it’s not right.
This is great for first campaigns, however if you are running multiple ads and for particular events then we would recommend sticking to the running dates.
When you are first creating a new campaign with Google Ads, the abundance of features can be enticing. These features can include things like adding a phone number or more webpage links to the bottom of your ad. While you can add them all, we suggest starting with just a couple.
Why do we recommend this? Put simply, it leaves some options for you to really analyse what is working for your ad and what isn’t.
The next major step is selecting your target keywords. If you are still unsure of which keywords to target in your campaign, then head over to our how to add keywords guide for a quick rundown. After you have chosen your keywords, you can familiarise yourself with match types.
This option displays your ad in searches that exactly match the term or a very similar term. To define an exact match, you will need to use square brackets. For example, [Pottery Classes].
This option displays your ad in searches that only match a phrase or a very similar phrase. These matches will include additional words before or after but not in the middle. To define a phrase match, you will need to use quotation marks around your keyword. For example “Pottery Classes”.
This option displays your ad to show when a user searches for that phrase, a similar phrase, misspellings, synonyms, related searches and so on.
For the above match types, you can enter between 5-20 keywords using the above modifiers.
Okay, so we are finally at a fun part- we promise! We can now create your Google Ads campaign.
For our example, we have decided to create three text ads. To begin, you will need to include a final URL link to a dedicated landing page or your website.
We will then create three headlines for the ad. These headlines cannot be more than 30 characters and they are separated by a vertical bar character.
Hot tip: When writing a headline for your Ads, you can use a Twitter character counter which will allow you to keep track of your character count.
Next, we will create a unique URL path. What is this? A URL path is the webpage address that shows with your ad and is most often in green text. These URLs give people an idea of where they will be directed after they have clicked an ad.
We can now write two descriptions of 80 characters each. Yes, this will mean that your Google Ads will only have 160 characters to persuade a user why they should click on your ad and visit your website. We recommend getting straight to the point and talking to a discount, offer or describing the benefits of your product or service.
You’re almost done! Once you have created the ad, you will be prompted to add your billing information.
Once you have completed the billing set up, click Finish and Create Ad and you are ready to rock and roll!
If you can’t see your ad live, don’t stress – it can take a few hours for Google to approve your ad and begin showing it to users.
