Correctly Set Up A Google Ads Paid Search Campaign

November 25th 2019

Given the beast that it is, Google Ads is usually the platform of choice, of course there are other search engines out there that provide keyword-based search services (such as Bing and Yahoo), but for ease, we’ll focus on the former.

There are plenty of advantages to running paid search advertising campaigns (also know as Adwords, or PPC), the major ones being that it’s highly relevant traffic and if done correctly it can have a significant effect on your sales or lead generation. The key thing to phrase there is ‘if done correctly’, it’s very important to set up your campaign for success right from the off, or you’re in danger of spending lots of cash at an unbelievably quick rate, get your fingers burnt, lock away the platform in a dark room and never touch it again.

In order to scratch the surface with Google Ads, there are a few things that you must know in order to set up a Google Ads campaign correctly.

Build the campaign with relevancy in mind

This is super important and in time will mean the difference between a campaign that performs ok to one that is super charged. What I mean by this, is that if you are going to call your campaign name ‘Shoes For Men’, you better make sure there are no ad groups within that campaign that refers to anything outside of this product. Similarly, your ad groups should contain direct references to what you’ve called the ad group, using our shoes example, your first ad group within our ‘Black Shoes For Men’ campaign might be called ‘Men – Black Formal Shoes’ then all of the keywords within that ad group must be highly related to that topic, if you feel the urge to smash as many keywords as possible into the ad group (it’s easy to do with how Google takes you through the set up journey), then take a step back and think about whether the keyword ‘red stilettoes for women’ has any relevance at all to both the ad group or the campaign. The whole idea behind this is to write your ads with a specific landing page in mind so the whole journey for the user is seamless. Think about the analogy of a high street store, you wouldn’t put a sign up in the window advertising for fishing rods when all you sell is tackle, right?

Understand keyword match types

This is a bigger topic in general, and it’s worth doing your homework a little bit before you take the plunge in this area, but in short, there are 3 main match types that you can allocate for a keyword, they are exact match, broad match (with a broad match modify variation), and phrase match. Each match type has its own merits and depending on your strategy and budget, you may want to experiment with all three variants to test the outcomes in relation to your goals. In general, if you are unsure, then to begin with just use exact match as this will keep your costs in control, and you will likely have an idea of what keywords you will want people to find you with.

Get your campaign settings in check

If you haven’t looked at this, then it could be one of the easiest ways to waste money in the beginning of the campaign. The main things you want to check up on, is your ad schedule and your location settings. Depending on the nature of your business, you may want to run ads only Monday-Friday and only in the city of Sydney, changing these elements will ensure you’re reaching the most relevant people from the start. There are other elements within the campaign settings that you may find useful to change, such as device allocation, however unless there is a major reason for not running advertising across a certain device (perhaps you are promoting a mobile app) then it’s usually advisable to bid on most device types for a period of time and evaluating the effectiveness after such period. You can find your location and ad schedule settings in the sub menu on the left hand side of your account:

Understand conversion tracking

Even if all you want from the campaign is a bunch of clicks to your website, you must set up conversions in order to evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords, if you don’t do this, it’s a little bit like throwing mud against a wall blindfolded, then hoping the phone rings the next day with a multi-million dollar contract. Even if a conversion for you is having a user view 4 pages of your site or more, then get this set up.

These things are the basic fundamentals in order to get started with Google Ads, there’s obviously much more to it, but get these in check then you can start to look at things like bid adjustments, bid strategies, device targeting, and more with the peace of mind knowing you have the foundations set up correctly.