Create a new campaign
Once you’re logged in to the dashboard, click the blue “New campaign” button to create a new campaign. Choose the “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” objective type. This gives you a bit more control of your campaigns. After choosing your objective, choose the “Search” campaign type.
Choose your conversion goals
Here you can decide what goals are most important to you and your business. You may have default campaign goals which will be listed. Remove the ones you don’t need and keep those that are most valuable to you. Is it purchases, phone call leads, or submitting lead forms? It’s all up to you.
Next, you will be asked to “Select the results that you want to get from this campaign”. Leave these boxes unticked. That is Google Ads’ way to suggest recommendations to “help” you with your campaigns. This will only cost you more ad spend in the long run.
Define your campaign settings
Next, you’ll need to define your campaign settings, including the name of your campaign, the language and location you’re targeting, and your daily budget. You’ll also need to choose the bidding strategy you want to use.
Bidding
Google has recently moved to automated bidding and the only way to switch to manual control is after you have created your campaigns. Choose what you want to focus on, “Maximize clicks” or “Maximize conversions”. Don’t set a target cost per action (CPA). We can do this once you have enough data.
Network
Next up are the Network campaign settings. For now, only include the Search Network. Showing your ads on the Display network is a bit risky as your ads may show up on random websites and you will get unwanted traffic to your landing page. We are only looking for qualified leads.
Locations
Use the advance search to include more than one location to target and also to exclude specific locations.
Ensure that you select “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.
Audience segments
Choosing the correct Audience segments is crucial. You can create your own audiences, but for now, let’s choose existing audience segments in Google Ads. For example, if you’re running a restaurant, type “Restaurant” in the search bar and choose the audience lists that are relevant to your business.
At the “Target settings for this campaign” select “Observation”. This allows Google Ads to target users outside of your audience segments that they think will convert.
Automatically created assets
Leave this off for now. We will create our own ad copy.
Ad rotation
Select “Optimise: Prefer best performing ads. We only want Google Ads to show our ads that are most likely to lead to a conversion.
Ad schedule
Keep this on “All day” to begin with. If you prefer, you can set this to your business hours.
Keywords and ads
Enter your ad group name. We will be creating a brand campaign, so keep your ad name simple, like “brand name [brand]”. Only use your brand name in the keywords and make sure you only use phrase match keywords. Phrase match keywords show your ads on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. Phrase match keywords are entered in quotation marks. Avoid going broad match, as these will get unwanted searches and cost you more on unwanted clicks.
Another important step is to create a negative keyword list. These are keywords you do not want your ads
to show up for. Spend an hour or two on negative keyword research and create an extensive list.
Create your ad
Now it’s time to create your ad. You’ll need to write a headline, two lines of description, and a display URL. You can also add ad extensions, such as a phone number or a link to a specific page on your website.
Spend some time here to create ad copy that will convert. Don’t rush this step. This is what users will see when your ad pops up on their Google search.
Create at least three ads for each ad group. It’s important to test different headlines, descriptions and image variations.
Budget
Before you can publish your ad, you’ll need to set up your budget. Start with Google Ads’ recommended budget for you. If that is too high or too low for your liking. You can always set a custom budget. This is what you will be spending daily. Make sure you’re comfortable with the budget you choose and once you’re happy with all your campaign settings and ads, you can hit publish!
