How To Set Up Your Google Ads Campaign: A Quick Guide

Welcome to our quick guide to setting up your first Google Ads campaign. I’m going to have to pause here and really emphasize the word ‘quick.’ There is a lot to talk about when it comes to setting up and managing Google Ads (or any digital ad platform) campaigns. This is not that guide. This is a quick and simple guide to get you started with a Google Ads campaign.

Stick around with us, as we’ll go into much further detail in future posts about this subject.

Getting Started

Signing In To Google Ads

First, start by visiting the google ads homepage at ads.google.com. As with any other Google product, you’re going to need to either link an existing Google account or create a new one. If you already have one, great – simply click ‘sign in’ and login with your credentials. If you don’t, no problem – click the “Start Now” button to create a new Google Account

Pro Tip: If your business already has email set up through another provider, you don’t need to create a new email to use with Google. Simply click “Create Account,” then select “Use My Own Email Address” to register your business email address as a Google address!

Creating Your Google Ads Account

Now that you’re signed in, you’ll be met with a dialog prompting you to create a new Google Ads account. This next part may seem a bit odd – I know you’re new to Google Ads, but you should probably click the “Switch to Expert Mode” link eventually. One of my golden rules is to never trust blindly. Google Ads ‘non-expert mode’ (or whatever it should be called) does a lot of great things for you out of the box, but we don’t want what everyone else has. What happens when everyone is using the exact same tool? No one wins. What happens when one person decides to take control and customize their tool? That person wins. If ‘expert’ is too ‘expert’ for you, start learning until it isn’t.

Fill in your account details, using your business name, time zone, currency, and other general information. Keep in mind that Google assumes its advertisers are following governing laws and procedures, so keep this all boiler plate and make sure your business information is accurately updated.

Side Note: the increased use of trolls, farms, and other misleading tactics on the internet have led advertising platforms to crack down hard, this means opening up transparency and tightening restrictions on advertisers. Always make sure your contact information is correct and keep in mind that audiences have the right to know who is serving which ads to them.

When everything is correct, click the “Submit” button to create your Google Ads account!

Setting Up Billing Information

In order to run ads on Google (or any other digital advertising platform), some form of payment must be added. As your ads run, the card or account on file will be charged on a regular basis, usually on a Cost per Click or Cost Per Impression model. Some advertising platforms may also have billing thresholds, or a set amount of charges that will trigger an invoice / payment. We’ll go into all of that in a later article… for now, let’s talk about how to add your preferred payment method.

In the top right hand corner, you should see a ‘wrench’ icon. Click this and select “Billing & Payments” from the dropdown menu. Follow the onscreen prompts (Google is pretty good with these, sometimes…) to enter your desired billing preferences. They’ll ask for standard payment information, such as methods, billing address, etc.

Side note – for brand new Google Ads accounts, you typically can only set up payments through Credit Card or ACH. Invoicing does exist, but usually requires accounts that have been open longer and have a higher monthly ad spend.

Setting Up Your Account Settings

Again, we won’t go into a ton of detail here, but it is important to remember to open up your settings page and go line by line to set up your account to your needs. There isn’t a ‘common’ setup I can share with you, as it really depends on your current account.

Click on the ‘gear’ icon in the top right hand corner again. This time, click “Account Settings” from the dropdown menu. You will be met with a number of options that might enhance your particular workflow, including notifications, email preferences, and user access. Thumb through and set these up as you see fit, but always remember to have a proper notification system in place and (if working with others) user access rules.

Creating Your First Campaign

Now that the incredibly important (but often overlooked) process of setting up our account and preferences is completed, we can move on to the exciting (and often rushed to) process of setting up our first campaign. Very briefly, a ‘campaign’ refers to a time limited set of ads and keywords that you create. That’s a very simplistic definition, but you have a bit of freedom with what you can do with a campaign. At it’s core, it is the highest level of your advertising efforts.

Click on the blue circled “+ Campaign” button on the main Google Ads dashboard. Next, select the campaign type that aligns with your advertising goals. Don’t worry, we’ll go into painstakingly long detail about this in a future article… for now, let’s briefly touch upon them:

Campaign Types

1. Search – It’s not Google without ‘search.’ It’s what the word ‘Google’ has become synonymous with. When people are searching for a service, product or information, they ‘Google’ it. A Google Search campaign is your way of making sure you show up when your customer Google’s your product or service.
2. Display – Can still be shown as a result of search results, but a display campaign typically involves images, banners, and other visual elements. The best way to look at these ads are as ‘outgoing’ advertising sources. If you want to catch people before they start actively searching, display is a good way to go.
3. Video – Similar to display, but more … motion-ey(?). Video ads allow you to tell a much more compelling story. For business’ whose products need more than a few words on a page to describe, video can be an incredibly powerful advertising tool.
4. Shopping – Rather than sending ads to your homepage, why not send them directly to your product? If you run an online store, running a shopping ad campaign ensures your products are served in promotional cards at the top of search results.

Campaign Settings

The various campaign settings can get pretty involved, depending on your needs. We’ll briefly explain what some of the more common / default settings mean.

• Campaign Name – The name, of your … campaign. Sounds simple, but the easy stuff is where we learn to face the hard stuff. My advice is to create a naming system and stick to it forever. You may think it’s just for display, but when you start using programming to pull all of your ad campaigns together into one big beautiful data set / dashboard, you’re going to wish and hope that you had a naming convention that makes sense.
• Budget – Set your budget. This is usually set as a ‘daily spend’ number, so the rule of thumb is to multiply that number by 30.5 to get your average monthly spend. The reason we do this is two-fold:
  1. The number of days in the month fluctuates. This one is obvious.
  2. Your daily spend will fluctuate. This one is less obvious. Google goes into great detail about this in their help texts, so i’ll just say that setting a daily budget of $100 means Google will try to spend 100 throughout the day. It may spend 105 one day and 95 the next.
• Location Targeting – Remember one of the benefits of digital advertising we spoke about? Location targeting allows you to serve your ads anywhere you pick (assuming the place exists and legally allows your product to be advertised there.)
• Bidding Strategy – Ah, bidding strategy. This used to mean a lot before the robots (AI) took over. Back then, creativity and marketing intelligence reigned. Now, you can barely change this option. Keep it to the default. The robots won this battle, but not the war.
• Ad Extensions – Extensions are extremely important in Google Ads – they add things to your ad, such as links to your website pages, your business phone number, details about your services, and many more. At the very least, I recommend setting up your Sitelink extensions. Typically, you want to direct these to main pages on your website, such as “About”, “Contact”, and “Services.” We’ll go into further detail about extensions in a later article, but for now set up your Sitelink extensions and your phone extension with your business phone number.

Ad Groups

The next stage of setting up your campaign is creating your ‘Ad Groups.’ While this step can be skipped, I recommend setting up at least one while you’re here.

The elements above come together to create an Ad Group. While it is technically possible to put all of your keywords and ads into one Ad Group, you want to spread them out and group them by a common theme. An old strategy was SKAGs – Single Keyword Ad Groups, in which marketers would create an entire ad group around one keyword. Tedious as it was, it worked – until the robots came. The current bandit algorithm used in ad delivery and optimization simply works better with more options, so SKAGs are mostly a thing of the past. Still, keep the strategy in mind and make sure your ad groups are segmented properly and fit a common theme.

Conversion Tracking

Attribution was always king, but even more so now. We all understand the value of having good data and being able to understand and explain that data up the chain of command. However, what people often forget is that much of the bidding process going on behind the scenes is fueled by automation. AI is only as good as the data its fed. I’ll say that again:

AI is only as good as the data it is fed.

Let’s start with an example from an account I worked on recently. They set up conversions to track a contact form, but the setup logic was wrong – they ended up triggering all of their contact form conversions every time one got submitted. We were looking at 2-3x the amount of conversions being logged in Google Ads and Analytics than we were actually getting.

The ‘solution’ the previous agency came up with, was to simply ‘correct’ the stats when running reports. No harm, no foul, right? We understand our data, we can vouch for its accuracy, so what’s the problem?

Your AI. That’s the problem. Google’s system thinks you’re getting 3x the amount of conversions you actually are. It thinks its winning. It’s going to double down on the things it’s doing, because, as far as it knows, it’s working. You now have automation optimizing on false data.

That horror story out of the way, let’s talk about Conversions.

How to Set Up Conversions?

We won’t go into terribly long detail, but we will discuss some basic ways to get started tracking conversions.
Note: Since GA4, this process has expanded. You now have many options to track conversions, including many that are available ‘out-of-the-box’. We’ll talk about GA4 in a later article.

1. Google Created Conversions – Google Ads does a great job of setting up basic conversions for you already. If you added your business phone number, you can start tracking “Calls from Ads” without additional setup. GA4 also provides a number of events that can be used to track conversions.
2. Google Tag Manager – We’ll go into detail about what Google Tag Manager is and how to set it up for your business, but for now you should know what it is. Google Tag Manager is a tool that allows you to manage all of your “website tags” in one place. You may have seen a website tag when creating a Google Analytics or even your first Google Ads account. The code that you had to place at the top of your website was the ‘tag.’ With Tag Manager, you can create conversions tags manually and set them up all in one place. This also makes it useful when you start adding in more Ad channels other than Google (as you eventually should).
3. Custom Event – You can create a conversion action as an ‘event,’ in order to track just about any interaction on your website. When you configure an event, you set an Event Name, Value, Label, and other optional settings. Then, when an event matching those settings occurs on your website, Google Ads will log a conversion.

We’ll go into further detail about Conversions and conversion setup in a later article – for now, focus on having a Contact (emails or phone calls) and a Lead (form submission, intake, etc) conversion action set up or planned. If you’re not sure how to set it up, you can always contact a developer to do it for you. The most important part is planning and knowing what your conversion actions are. After all, you understand your business the best.

Starting Your Campaign

To start your campaign, you need to have at least three things set up:

1. A payment method, usually a credit card.
2. A budget set on your ads.
3. A start date set on your campaigns.

With these things ready to go, you simply need to click “Start Campaign”, or select the “status” icon on your main campaign view and set it to “Enabled.” Your ads will begin serving immediately to relevant searches.

To pause or stop your campaign, simply click the “status” icon again and select “Pause” or “Remove.”

Managing Your Campaign

We won’t go too far into this topic, as the title of this article only requires we talk about setting up your first campaign. Thankfully, i’ll be writing extensively on this topic and others – so stick around and become a pro. For now, you should know that after creating and starting your campaign, your work is far from over. Your ads are not serving in a vacuum, they are being tested endlessly in a rapidly changing environment against your own competitors. Success in advertising will not be found in “set and forget” accounts.

Ways to Manage a Campaign

There are a few things you can think about when it comes to managing your campaign:

1. Setting and hitting goals – Setting proper goals allows you to track your progress intelligently and grow at the right speed. I go into detail about this in the recent “3 things you should know before starting digital ads” article. This will keep you focused on optimizing your campaign.
2. Keyword / Cost Management – As your campaign grows and learns, it may start to show some weird stats. Some keywords might cost a fortune, while other similar ones cost a fraction. Don’t ignore signs like that – use them to tailor your keywords and cost strategies.
3. Regular Reporting – Set up reports in your Google Ads and/or Analytics accounts that reflect your business goals. Make sure your conversion actions, cost metrics, and other KPIs are included. Simply monitoring this on a regular basis will keep you focused and in control of your data.
4. A / B Testing – A/B tests take two identical ads and change one element to test its effectiveness. While this has been replaced by Bandit Algorithms in big data sets, A/B can still be effective in a small campaign. In fact, Google is already using a Bandit Algorithm to “A/B/C/D/E/x” test your headline and descriptions combinations and serve the ‘best’ one.
5. Learning – Time is never spent learning. Learn the platform, learn the medium, learn it all. It will help you get better at understanding your results and quicker at coming up with solutions to problems.

In Conclusion

Getting started with Google Ads has never been easier, but that doesn’t make the process of running and managing digital ads easy. In fact, the learning curve from going from “Intermediate” to “Pro” can be pretty steep, as it often involves some programming understanding and advanced marketing knowledge. Take the time to learn as much as you can at your pace, and seek the help of places like this to learn a bit of the insider knowledge that marketers, such as myself, have been using to get good results in the digital advertising world.

Until next time, friends!