Google Ads Display Ads Tutorial 2025 (Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide)

Key Takeaways

hello hello and welcome in this video I'm going to show you how to create a Google ads display Campaign which look like this if you go to various Google partnered websites especially news websites you will see ads at the top here and on the sides that are quite obvious that there are ads so over here for example you see an Amazon ad if you go to nbc.com you see an ad over here and if you click on some of the ads over here it will say ads by Google why this ad stop seeing this ad so on so forth if you go to USA today you will not only possibly see ads at the top but on the sides as well over here you see advertisement even though this ad isn't showing up here over here you see an ad for H&R Block and as you scroll through the page you will see more and more of these ads and these are the display ads which I'm going to show you how to do in this video now these ads are best for brand awareness so if you're looking to get immediate sales this is not the ad format that I would recommend for you if you're looking for quick sales and you're on a limited budget then I would recommend you go with Google's lowest hanging fruit campaign type which is the search campaign and I will link a video for how to set that up just below this video in the description but display ads are best for brand awareness if you have a big budget and if you're willing to play the long game which means you will be following up with your potential customers via email marketing and Via other campaigns otherwise I really don't recommend this campaign type so that said let's get straight into it so I assume you already have a Google ads account if you don't just head over to ads. goole.com and create an account next you're going to look for the campaigns tab over here on the left then click on campaigns here again and we'll click on the little plus sign to create a new campaign we're going to click on new campaign over here and don't worry about the objective this is irrelevant we're just going to click on create a campaign without a goal's guidance this just gives you a few additional extension options to your campaign campign which you could add regardless so that doesn't really matter we'll click on create a campaign without goals guidance we're going to scroll down now this campaign type is what actually matters which will have all the different options depending on what it is you're looking for so if you're looking for the lowest hanging fruit for the most bang for your buck I'd recommend the search Campaign which again I will link a video to that in the description and we're going to focus on display here in this video let me know in the comments if you would like me to make a video on any of these other campaign types so we're going to scroll down and this is assuming that you've already set up conversion tracking if you haven't make sure to check that video out as well because it is absolutely essential that you set up conversion tracking before you create your campaigns so that you're going towards a Target that you can see and not just shooting blindly we're going to click on continue and here we're going to enter the Business website in this case we're going to be promoting my new and upcoming membership site at ion mana.com marketing blueprint this is the sales page also still in progress but feel free to check it out this should be coming out within a few months so we're going to click on continue here we'll enter the campaign name so we'll say membership site and we'll click on continue and this is where we will be going through all the settings so the first option here is location you can choose what locations you want I'm going to select enter another location and I'm going to type in United States and Canada and then what you do want to make sure you do is click on location options here and select presence now this is important because even though this is the recommended option by Google this will actually drain more of your money because if you want to Target people that are exclusively in specific locations rather than searching for a specific location you want to select this option right here next we're going to go down to languages now this will not translate your ads this will simply show your ads to people who speak this language who have their browser set up to be in a certain language so if we have English here then we will'll be showing our ads to people who speak English if you create your ads in another language then make sure that you add your language here as well by clicking here and just selecting whatever language you want next you have here more settings you don't need to worry about this too much if you do have a start an end date you can set that here if you have a certain ad schedule so if you want your ads to run during certain times you can change that here if you want your ads to show up only on certain devices you can change that here but we're just going to leave all this as is the default settings are good we'll click on next next we're going to enter a daily budget so I'm going to enter $250 here but just so you know and Google here tells you on the right hand side they will not respect your daily budget which means if we have a budget of $250 we could be paying up to two times that daily budget per day so we could be spending up to $500 per day for this campaign now Google will respect your budget at the monthly level so if we set a budget of $250 they will not go over this daily amount times 30 so 250 * 30 is $7,500 so they will not exceed $7,500 per month but they could exceed the daily budget for a specific day so that is something important for you to keep in mind that when you set a budget account for it at the monthly level not the daily level next you have the bidding so if you don't have conversion tracking set up then this conversions bidding strategy will not be as effective so you would then click here select a bit strategy come in here and select maximize clicks or manual CPC and you will be able to set a Target cost per click if you do have conversion tracking enabled and set up which is what I strongly recommend then you can set maximize conversions or you can say maximize conversion value and then you would be able to enter the amount that you want so for example you could say I want to have a 200% return on ad spent and then Google will try to find you customers with this target return on ad spent in mind so it gives Google a little bit more direction if you have the conversion data to show for it now this account doesn't have a lot of conversion data so we are going to come in here and just select manual CPC so we will be setting a manual cost per click for our targeting then we're going to click on next and this targeting is the heart and soul of your display ads campaign so this is where you will be able to set what types of people you want to Target or where exactly you want to show your ads on so if we click on ad targeting over here just to make things easier I'm going to come in here and just select each of these individually first before we get into them to give you a better idea of what they are so I'm just going to come in here and just click on these and as you can see when you do that Google separates out all of these different options into two categories you have people here and you have content so people means you will be targeting specific people regardless of which website they visit and content means you will be targeting specific placements specific websites or themes or categories of websites regardless of what types of people visit that page so let me show you some of the options here that you have for both of these options so if you go to audience segments over here if you click on browse you have all of these different options you have detailed demographics where you can Target buy parental status marital status education home ownership depending on what it is you're selling they're people's Affinity so what their interests are you can come in here and you can go through all of these options in market and life events data segments combined segments so these are custom segments that you can create yourselves and so these are some of the options you can go with so in Market is really cool if you're selling something specific you can Target People based on their act ual desire to buy those products so if you click on in Market over here if you're selling anything to do with apparel and accessories you can see over here Google saying that you'll be targeting people interested in purchasing clothing footwear jewelry watches or other accessories so Google is able to track the different websites that people visit and it labels the website by the user intent whether it's just an informational website or a website that people actually go to purchase something and so if people visit those websites and they spend a lot of time on them or they make the purchases then Google labels those people as people in market for certain categories so you can then take advantage of this and Target these people if you want to sell something to them so you have these options here you can also click on search and just search for anything specific you can go to demographics and Target by specific demographics in our case I am promoting a marketing product and anybody could be interested in that so in our case it makes sense to use content targeting for this specific campaign so now we can go through the content targeting category so if we click on keywords here you can input keywords now this is different from search campaign keywords because you will not be showing your ads to people typing something into Google search rather Google will label different websites they're partnered websites with these keywords so in our case we have a marketing product so we can say for example marketing course and see what shows up so here for example we can go through some of these options let's say complete digital Market course digital marketing courses best digital marketing courses so Google will label some of their partnered sites as having these keywords and then your ads will show on those website and that is what we want in our case so online marketing course digital marketing courses online digital marketing marketing course marketing short courses marketing courses UK best marketing courses so these are good enough for now as you can see here on the right hand side for the week we're estimated to get 8.5 million impressions now the bid is very low it's 1 cent set automatically and I'm going to show you how to change that once we actually publish the campaign so that you actually do get some Impressions and clicks but here what we're doing is we're just labeling the types of websites we want our ads to show on and this is exactly what we want so now we're going to minimize that now you also have topics which is a broader version of keywords whereas with keywords you can get very specific with topics there are preset topics of websites that you can choose so again you can go through all of this and you can click on the little downward arrow and and you can go into a little more detail so feel free to explore just go through all of these different options and find something that suits your specific product you also have placements this is really cool you can Target specific websites specific YouTube channels and videos so actually if you go down here and you type in Ivon Mana for example with a space Ivon Mana my channel might show up and so hey you can show ads on my channel you can type a variety of other channels and see if they're partnered with with Google so that you can show your ads you can also do the same with websites you can type in specific websites see if they're partnered with Google and then your ads can show up there so this is very very cool if there are specific placements specific YouTube channels you want to show your ads on because it really allows for that hyper Focus but like I said expect to have a high ad spend for these display campaigns it is not easy it is not the lowest hanging fruit and you do need to play the long game and follow up with people via remarketing so we're just going to leave this as is and we're going to stick with these keywords you can also choose optimize targeting on or off if you want so this will simply expand your reach if Google determines that they can get you more customers similar to what you're looking for that expand beyond what you targeted over here and by the way one thing to note is that if you set any additional filters here such as if you select specific topics and specific placements and keywords then Google will treat that as an or which means that either the websites will have to match these keywords or these topics or the placements but if you enter something here under this people targeting and this content targeting then Google will treat that as an and which means that both criteria will have to be met so the people targeting and the specific content targeting both of them will have to be met in order for your ads to show up so just something for you to keep in mind if you go in here and start setting up a bunch of different content targeting for keyword words and topics and placements keep in mind it's going to use the or criteria not an and criteria so let's go ahead and click on next and start creating our ads so this is where we will be working on our ads so the first thing here is you see this little warning next to our site and that is because we need to make it https which it is and the warning should go away if you don't see your ad by the way make sure to disable ad blocker because that will prevent you from seeing your ad next you're going to enter your business name and then this is where we can our images our logos videos and headlines so let's come in here and add some images if we click on images over here you can see some preset images based on the URL or you can go to free stock images and this is really cool Google has a really nice integration with shutter stock I believe where you can just get free highquality images so we can type in for example learn marketing and just grab some sample images here not that they're amazing ideally of course you would create your own images but hey for the purpose of this course let's keep things nice and easy so let's select that image let's select something else that shows what we do maybe let's type in marketing course so maybe something like that we could use digital marketing and that should be okay for now now what you do have to do is go through each of these and make sure that the images look good for each of the dimensions so if we click on the little pencil icon here as you can see here this might not be perfect depending on the image so maybe we want to make it look like this so that we see the whole image there and that's for the 1X two image Dimension or roughly 1X two if we click here we want to maybe show that whole thing over there if we go to this one maybe we want to do this and then we'll click select three ratios and then we want to do the same for these other ones we want to make sure everything shows like this like that looks good and then here maybe something like like this click here and then we still have three more to do let's make sure these all look good that looks about right that looks about right and that looks about right at least for the purpose of this video we'll click on select three ratios give it a second to load then just slide down and then we'll click save and that's it for the images so now we can come down here we can add a logo so I'm going to go ahead and do that all right so I've added the logo so now we're going to going to scroll down you can add some videos if you have any and then we're going to add some headlines so we can look at more ideas and see what Google recommends for us if Nothing fits then don't worry about that we'll come up with our own so I'm just going to quickly add some headlines here all right so I've gone ahead and added some descriptions long headline and normal headlines and now we have to come down here and add the call to action button before we can see what the ad looks like so let's come down here let's click on call to action text and we can keep it at automated so that Google will automatically select the best call to action that matches the specific description and headline that we have however you could come in here and you can select what you want so learn more install visit site whatever it is you're doing of course if you're promoting an app then install would probably make the most sense but whenever I have a lot of different headline variations and descriptions I usually leave it at automated and leave it up to Google you can also add some custom colors if you like so you can set different theme colors for your ad and you have additional format options where you can let Google enhance your ads I leave all of this on because they do a good job it doesn't hurt and just add some extra good variations to your ads so that should be all for this the ad should show up you might see a little error that's saying you need to add something so here we see the ad for Gmail let's see what it looks like for YouTube here we see the ad for YouTube let's go back to display and it still says add a call to action which we have so that's quite odd and if it still gives you some sort of error that you need to add one this you need to add one that it'll change it'll always give you something else then we can just come up here and click on preview ads and that should work and show you all the different ads including the display ads so if we click on specifically display you're going to see the ads right here full online marketing cores boom it has the image and then you can scroll down and see the other ideas so here as you can see for example the theme color is this dark pinkish with red so these are the colors that you'd be able to change over here it's blue so you can set a specific the color and there you go so that's what the ads look like you can also click over here inspect preview to get a better view of what it looks like but that's pretty much it so congratulations on creating your display ads I think that looks pretty nice pretty neat you can also go to desktop and see what it'll look like on desktop so here you'll see these are the ads that are going to show up on the sides and then you'll see some of them that will show up at the top of the page as well and you can see they are all in different formats you have some that are elated like this you have some that are just squares all types of various Dimensions they have a lot a lot a lot of dimensions and then here you see some of the ads that show up at the top right at the top here digital marketing so I'm pretty happy with that let's close out of that and let's save the ad even though it's not allowing us to preview it here we're just going to scroll down to the bottom we'll click on create ad and we'll click on next and so here you just want to go down and just review everything make sure all this looks good we want to name our ad Group by the way we didn't have a chance to they didn't give give us a chance to before so we just want to say keywords here online marketing course related to that so that way if we have many different ad groups we will know exactly what each ad group targeting is and everything else here looks good let's click on publish campaign and then I have to show you how to change the bid like I told you right from the 1 cent click to whatever it is you want I'd say around 5 to 10 cents to get started with and then you can always increase it later on if you're not happy with the results so Google is telling us we need to set up our Google tag so we can start tracking conversions don't worry about that we'll just click on exit and hopefully you already did set that up so here is our display campaign right here congratulations let's click on that and then here is the ad group so here is where you can set the bid that I told you about so one cent is nothing so let's increase that to maybe 10 cents and then you could always decrease it or increase it later on but for now let's do 10 cents the cost per click is much cheaper for display campaigns but the total cost will be higher because each click is much less valuable than it is in a search campaign and then if you click on this add group right over here you will see the ads right here so the ads under review you can come in here click on edit and you could edit the ad however you want to so we have all the images we have all the headlines all of that still doesn't want to give us a preview that's okay let's click on cancel and then if you go to audience keywords and targeting you can come down here under content for example and you can adjust or change any anything you want so in this case here our content targeting has to do with keywords so you can come in here you can click on edit and then you can change those keywords or you can add different topics or different placements so you can come down here and you can say I don't want these keywords anymore I'm going to delete them so you can just come in here and just delete them so let's click cancel we don't want to do that but that's how you would do it you could also go into audiences and add different audiences so what you would do in general if you're running display campaigns is you would go back into add groups and then you would just duplicate this so you would click this you would click edit copy and then close that and paste or just contrl V and then you'd select that membership site select done or whatever the campaign is Click paste give it a few moments to successfully paste and then you would go in there and set up different targeting options for that other AD group and you would do that a few times until you have anywhere from 5 to 10 different ad groups different targeting options running at the same time just about on here give it a few more seconds and so here now it pasted this other AD group so we can come in here we can change it and instead of keywords here we can rename it we could say for example topic we could say marketing for example so we'll be targeting marketing websites and we'll click save and then we'll click on that add group we'll go down here we'll go into content we're going to delete all these keywords and instead we're going to add those topics so we can come in here we can just delete that close out of this keyword tab go to topics and instead search by something to do with marketing let's see if it's here or we can just go to search and just type in marketing and see what shows up so maybe marketing maybe email marketing maybe advertising and marketing social media marketing so this would be our targeting for this specific ad group and then we're going to go with targeting so we'll be targeting these specific groups you don't want to set observation because then it'll Target everybody in the world and it will only observe and tell you what the results are for these but it will Target everybody else as well so you do want to make sure you set it to targeting here we'll click save and then there you go now you have two different ad groups this one is for different content placements so if you go to add groups or if we go to campaigns if we click on this campaign you'll see the two different ad groups and that is all hopefully this was helpful congratulations on setting up your Google ads display campaign if you do want to learn more about Google ads and all the different options I do invite you guys to check out my new upcoming membership site at Eon mana.com marketing D blueprint and feel free to just go through the site check out this video it is not available yet but I am working on it just some editing left to do and it should be good to go you can come down here and see all the different modules and see what's included it's about 50 hours of content some of the content isn't done yet the sales page isn't done but it should give you anide idea for what's included all the different options here for website building conversion rate Mastery for tracking and analytics super super important email marketing and then of course Google ads this Google ads module here is about 10 hours long so lots of different content on remarketing on Google ads on different campaign types and optimization and scaling live sessions so on so forth so that's what I wanted to share with you guys here in this video hopefully that was helpful and I look forward to seeing you in the next video