Google Ads for Training Providers: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads pay per click advertising helps training providers target people that are searching for training courses on Google. This is highly targeted advertising which targets people that are ready to signup, book, contact or purchase.

You can setup such a campaign within a few hours and get bookings for your training courses.

To get started, you’ll need to create a Google Ads account first. You can do that at ads.google.com and then setup your billing details.

Next, you’ll create your Google Ads campaign. I’ve included below instructions on how to setup your campaign.

 

Campaign objective

Google Ads helps training providers achieve their marketing and advertising objectives. It helps you choose the most relevant objectives or goals for your business by targeting people that are looking for your training solutions or courses.

There are at least five objectives to choose from and the one you select helps to set the features for your campaign. It also determines the campaign type that you are able to create.

For training centres and providers, the Leads objective is the most relevant. It allows you to get leads, enquiries, bookings, course leads and so on. The Sales objective is also good to use especially if people can pay for your training online.

 

Campaign type

 

Next, you’ll pick the most relevant campaign type to promote your training business. For the Leads objective and even the Sales one, it’s best to use a Search campaign, because this helps you target people that are actively searching for your training programmes.

So, you’ll use keywords and text ads to target people and businesses that are searching for your training business and courses.

 

Budget

Budget setting in Google Ads is a challenge for many training providers. It’s especially difficult at the beginning when you are just starting out because you have no campaign history in your account to work from. So, there is no keyword volume data and average cost per click (CPC) insights to base your budget decision on.

However, you can start with a test budget to see what returns you get before increasing it. For many training providers, a daily budget of at least $30 or £22 to start with is good enough.

And you can then increase this as you get traffic and can see your average positions and what the average CPC is. And the Auction Insights report will show you who your competitors are and where you rank relative to them.

 

Bidding

Automated and manual bidding are the two bidding types available to you in Google Ads. Training providers can use either in their campaigns and at different stages of their advertising efforts.

However, the best one to start with is automated bidding. There are at least four automated bidding strategies and they set bids automatically to achieve the best ad positions and conversions.

Maximise Clicks is a good bid strategy to start with because it tries to get you as many clicks as possible for your budget limit.

 

Keywords

Make use of the Keyword Planner tool to research the keywords that relate to your training courses.

This tool will help you find a wide range of keywords and you can use the forecasting section to see what search volumes you are likely to get and how much you’ll spend.

 

Text ads

Targeted text ads help to achieve high click through rates and great quality scores. They should include good benefits, features and calls to action.

The Responsive search ads provide you with a lot of text space to promote your training solutions. They have up to four description lines and 15 headlines and you should include your keywords too.

 

Ad schedule

For training providers, running ads when people are more likely to contact is important. So, your Ad schedule feature will help you update this to your requirements. The default setting is to target people on all days and hours.

However, you can also change this to working hours and days when most people are likely to be searching for your training or courses.

Your Time reports at the campaign level will reveal to you the best days and hours and you can change your Ad schedule to that if you want.

 

Where your ads appear

Where your ads appear is very important because it determines how much traffic you get and the number of bookings that will result from that. On Google your ads could appear in various positions depending on your bids, the competition, devices used and many other factors.

And this is true for Search partners too, if you opt into this network. And you can also opt into the Display Network to advertise on websites and apps that are part of this network.

Just make sure you keep a close watch on your campaign reports for these different networks to see how they are performing for you.

 

Case Study

Baby Academy delivers online classes and workshops to relieve the challenges of parenting for the first time by teaching parents-to-be the basics. They approached me to setup new campaigns to target the US, UK, Canada, South Africa and Ireland. There were some challenges with the search queries we were getting but with time we were able to achieve an impressive 14% click through rate and conversions increased by over 200%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

As a PPC specialist I work with many training companies in different industries. I have a lot of Google Ads experience helping training providers to promote their courses and training solutions. Use the form below to contact me to discuss.