How To Create A Google Search Ads Campaign

1. Create an account/ Sign in to your account

Go to ads.google.com to create a new Google Ads account or to login to an existing account. Make sure you change the account to Expert mode if you want to set up a new Search campaign and not just run basic Smart campaigns.

2. Click Campaigns in the left navigation menu

In the left menu you will see a number of vertical links, and Campaigns will be one of them. Click that to arrive at the Campaigns page where you will create your first search campaign.

3. Click the blue plus button

Clicking the + button brings up two options to set up your campaign. If you have older campaigns in your account, you can load campaign settings from them if they are similar to what you want for this campaign. For example, if it’s the same campaign type, goal, budgets, locations, languages etc, then you should go ahead and use this option. You can then make some tweaks to it to make sure it is well optimised. The other option is to create a new campaign and choose all the campaign settings individually.

4. Choose a goal for your campaign

Currently there are about 7 goals to choose from. These includes Sales, Leads, Website Traffic, Brand Awareness and so on. The goal type that you select determines the type of campaign you will create. For Google Search Ads you can pick one of the three main goals for this campaign type: Sales, Leads or Website Traffic. Another option is to create a campaign without a goal’s guidance and you get all the available features

5. Update campaign settings

Name your campaign and choose settings like language, location, bid strategy, budgets and more. Your budget is the maximum limit you want to spend each day advertising your products or services. You can start with a small budget and that can be as small as you want and then increase as performance improves. On average, advertisers start with a £15 daily budget and then increase this as the search targeting gets better. Because this is a Google search ads campaign that you will be running, you can focus on searches that will lead to more sales or leads and therefore can improve the ROI.

6. Add your ad extensions and click Continue

The last step in the campaign settings set up page is to add ad extensions. There are currently 10 ad extensions you can add but not all will be applicable to your business. The four main extensions to add are sitelinks, callouts, structured snippet and call extensions. Try to add as many as possible to make your ads more relevant to your search audience.

7. Create your ad group with keywords and text ads and publish your campaign

Finally, you will add keywords and then create some text ads to complete the Google search ads campaign set up. The keyword research tool in the ad group will help you find keywords that you can bid on. You can enter a related website that the tool will use to find related keywords. It will bring up a list of keywords by relevance and you can add all the ones that you want in the ad group. Also, there is an option to enter your product or service name and it will find related keywords that you can bid on. Then click the Continue button to get to your Ads page and create your first ad. Later you can add more ads with different headlines and descriptions in the ad group for testing purposes. Ideally you should have between 3-5 ads in each ad group. And as you find more keyword opportunities you can set up more ad groups in the campaign to target more potential customers.