Google Ads Tutorial 2024

One of the advantages of Google Ads is being able to show your message to someone when they’re actively searching. This means you can promote your product, service, or offer at the exact moment someone is looking for an answer to their problem.

Flexible targeting options let you tailor your campaigns based on geographic location, language, device type, and other signals aligned with your ideal prospect or customer. Google Ads also provides detailed reporting, enabling you to measure the performance of your ads, make data-driven decisions, and refine your advertising to achieve better results.

Whether you're looking to increase sales, generate leads, or drive website traffic, it’s likely Google Ads will be an important part of your advertising strategy.

Understanding the Foundations of Google Ads

Before jumping into the steps to create a Google Ads campaign, it's crucial to understand the elements that form an effective search campaign. The relationship and synergy between three core elements – keywords, ads, and landing pages – will determine the success of your campaigns.

Keywords should be highly relevant to the products or services you offer, ads must be compelling and clearly related to your keywords, and landing pages should provide a seamless experience that aligns to your ads and the keywords you are targeting.

Creating Your Google Ads Account

To begin advertising with Google Ads, you will need to create an account at https://ads.google.com. To do this, you will need to login with your preferred Google account and set up your first campaign.

You can think of your account as your central dashboard for creating, managing, and optimizing your campaigns. Your account also includes tools for tracking the performance of your ads, research keywords, reporting, and more.

Creating a Campaign: A Step-by-Step Guide

We’re going to focus on the most important things you will need to consider when creating your first campaign, but for an in-depth walkthrough you can watch our Google Ads tutorial.

As you create your search campaign, you will need to choose settings and features that align with your advertising objectives. Important settings and features include:

• Campaign Type: We recommend starting with a search campaign before moving on to the other types of campaigns. A search campaign allows you to show your ads as people are searching on Google and it’s generally easier to understand (and control) the elements and settings for a search campaign.
• Bidding Strategy: Choose an appropriate bidding strategy, such as focusing on clicks, conversions, or impression share, and set bids for your keywords. This affects how competitive your ads are in the auction.
• Network Settings: You can decide if you want to include Google Search Partners and the Google Display Network in your search campaign. However, we generally recommend disabling these options as you get started.
• Targeting Options: Configure geographic targeting to focus your ads on specific locations where your audience is located, and language targeting to reach users in your preferred languages.
• Keywords: Selecting the right keywords to target is critical. These should be relevant to the products, services, or content you are promoting. Keywords determine when your ads are shown in search results.
• Negative Keywords: Add negative keywords to prevent your ads from appearing for searches that are not relevant to your offering.
• Landing Page: Ensuring a strong relevance between your keywords, the ad copy, and the landing page content. The better the relationship between these elements, the better the performance of your campaign.
• Budget: Assign a daily budget for your campaign that you’re comfortable spending and that aligns with your advertising objectives.
• Assets: Create appropriate assets (previously called ‘ad extensions’) to enhance your ads with additional information, such as sitelinks, callouts, or structured snippets, which can increase your visibility and click-through rate.

For a comprehensive list of settings to review for your new and existing campaigns, download a copy of our Google Ads Checklist. It covers the most important things you need to check in your account and campaigns.

And here’s a tip – whenever you create a new campaign in Google Ads, it’s a good idea to pause the campaign before you launch it. This gives you the chance to review everything before you start spending your budget. You can check your settings, targeting, keywords, and more. Then, once you’re happy, you can enable your campaign to begin advertising your offer.

Keywords and Ad Groups

Your search campaign can contain one or more ad groups. Ad groups are like subfolders and they let you create closely related groups of keywords. The key benefit of creating well structured ad groups is that you can then write highly targeted ads that will be displayed for those keywords.

You can also adjust the keyword match types which control when your ads do (and do not) display as people are searching. Watch the Google Ads tutorial for an overview of the different keyword match types,

Launching and Monitoring Your Campaign

Once you’re ready to launch your campaign, make sure it’s enabled in your Google Ads account. You will then typically see impressions, clicks, and other campaign data appear in your account after 12 to 24 hours. Ideally, you should also have conversion tracking implemented before you launch your campaign.

By taking the time to set up conversion tracking you will be able to see how your campaigns are performing. Conversion metrics in Google Ads include:

• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• Conversion rate
• Conversion value
• Conversion value per click

Once you have enough data for your campaign, you can begin optimization. This includes adjusting your campaign settings, adding and removing keywords, assigning your budget based on conversions, and more.

Refining Your Campaign

Google Ads is not ‘set and forget’, so you will need to regularly check back in to see how your campaign is performing. Whether you’re tweaking keywords, writing new ad copy, or setting up additional assets, there’s always something to do when it comes to improving and managing your campaign.

Elements you can check and refine for your search campaign include:

• Keywords: Review the performance of your keywords, including their click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and cost per conversion. Consider pausing or removing underperforming keywords and increasing bids on high-performing ones.
• Search Terms: Analyze the search terms report to identify new keywords to target and search terms you can add as negative keywords.
• Ads: Review your ads to ensure they’re relevant, engaging, and up-to-date. Remember you’re aiming to connect with people who are searching for the keywords you are targeting in your ad groups.
• Landing Pages: Ensure your landing pages are aligned with your ads and keywords. Consider optimizing your landing pages so they’re fast to load and include a clear call-to-action that’s aligned with your advertising objectives.
• Bidding Strategy: Review your current bidding strategy and consider if changing the bidding strategy might improve performance. For example, if you have collected enough conversion data you could switch from ‘Clicks’ to ‘Conversions’ as your bidding strategy.
• Budget: Check campaign budgets and allocate more budget to high-performing campaigns. Be mindful of campaigns that are limited by budget and adjust accordingly.
• Devices: Review the performance of your campaign by the different devices people use (mobile, desktop, and tablet) and consider making bid adjustments to optimize for devices that convert better or have a lower cost per conversion.
• Location Targeting: Analyze performance by the geographic location of people clicking your ads. Adjust location targeting to focus on places where your ads perform best.
• Assets: Regularly review and update sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and other assets for your campaign.

Conclusion

Once you’ve launched your search campaign, remember you’ll need to jump back into Google Ads to monitor its performance. You can then review all of the settings we’ve covered and make any necessary adjustments to improve your campaign.

When you’re ready to take your Google Ads skills to the next level, please take a moment to check out our Google Ads course. In our course, we dive into more detail and cover even more techniques you can use to get the most out of your advertising spend.