Google Ads Tutorial for Beginners

Key Takeaways

So, you're looking to start advertising your business on Google Ads in 2024? Well, look no further because right now I'm going to be taking you through the stepbystep process and how you can start your first Google Ads campaign the right way without making any costly mistakes. Now, before we jump into a screen share so that I can take you through that step-by-step process of setting up your first campaign in Google Ads, it is really, really important, especially if you're new to Google Ads, that'll give you a clear foundation on a core principle of how Google Ads works. In case if you don't know, Google Ads is based on an auction system where when a user searches for a keyword, your ads are go up against all of your competitors ads and then Google quickly decides who wins the auction and who gets the different placements of ads. Now, ideally, you want your ad to be finishing in that number one. You can get away with number two, but you really want those top two positions. And the best news is about Google Ads is that unlike other auctions, the one who's willing to pay the most doesn't always win. So with a house auction, it very much comes down to the highest bidder always wins. That's not true with Google ads. And the reason for that is because Google doesn't only look at your bid, so how much you're willing to pay, cuz Google uses a formula, which is your bid times your quality score. And that gives you a metric which is called its ad rank score. Now, the reason for why this is so important is because a core concern for Google is the ad relevancy because they want to make sure that they're showing the most relevant ads because if they continue to show irrelevant ads, people click on the ads and they go to unrelevant pages, people lose confidence in the platform and then ultimately they'll see their ad revenue diminish. So that's why if you really really understand that core concept of making sure you've got highly relevant ads and what you always want to be doing is you want to make sure that your ads are relevant to the user search and they're also sending people to the most relevant landing page. Now another core metric is the click-through ratio. And this is where your ad copy becomes so important. And what this is really looking at is that the percentage of times that someone clicks on your ad versus when how many times they see it. So, if your ad's shown 100 times and someone clicks on your ad 10 times, you've got a click-through ratio of 10%. Now, this is the really core factor because if you have a high click-through ratio, that is going to increase your ad rank. And the reason for why this works, especially for small advertisers, because if you can understand this core concept right at the start of your Google Ads journey, you're going to be set up for success. Think of it like this. Ultimately, Google is in the business of making money, but they only get paid when someone clicks on your ad. So, let's just say that you are willing to pay a maximum or your bid for an ad is $2 for the search term women's summer addresses, and you have a click-through ratio of 12%. And you might have a competitor, they've got a bid of over $5. So, over two times what you're willing to pay, but their click-through ratio is only 3%. Who would win that auction? And the good news is is that you would win the auction cuz even though the competitor is willing to pay $5 and you're only willing to pay $2, you would win because Google would much prefer a 12% chance of getting $2 versus a 3% chance of getting $5. Cuz when it plays out over a 100 clicks, if Google showed your competitor's ad, they would only get $15. Three clicks, $5 a click, $15. Whereas, if they show your ad even at $2, but they get 12 clicks cuz you got a 12% click-through ratio, Google would get $24. So, you can see very clearly that's the incentive of making sure you've got a high click-through ratio on your ads. So, now that we've said all of that, let's get into a screen share so I can take you through the process in how to set up your first Google Ads campaign. Now, just in case you miss any of these steps, what you can do is if you follow the link in the description below, you can get a free download of my Google Ads campaign setup guide. And what that is going to do is that's got screen shares and it's also got instructions. So, if you miss any of these steps, don't worry. Just follow that link in the description below. All right, let's now get into that screen share so I can take you through the process of setting up your first campaign in Google Ads. All right. So, where we want to start with is I just want to quickly run you through the structure you should be using for your Google search campaigns. And what you want to be looking at here is obviously you've got your total Google Ads account. Then you've got what we call Google Ads campaigns. Now, to start, you'll probably just have one campaign, but the way to think about whether you want to put something in different campaigns. It all comes down to two core factors, which is your spending and also your different keyword themes. So, let's just say that you're an accountant and you run some general bookkeeping services and then you also run some different business planning services. You may want to run them into completely different campaigns so you can control the budgets. And then what you have through there is you have your different ad groups and then you have your keywords and your landing pages. So, let's stick with that example as an accountant. And if you've got bookkeeping services, you would run that in an ad group and you might have bookkeeping services for small businesses. And then what you have from there, you would have all of your keywords in this ad group and you would have your different ad copy and it would go to the landing page for bookkeeping services versus if you have another one for tax planning. This would run in a separate ad group and you'd have all your tax planning keywords and your tax planning landing page. The reason why it's important to have that segregation remembering how it's important to have a really highly relevant search term, ad copy, and landing page. So you have your highly relevant search terms, your highly relevant ad groups going to your highly relevant landing pages. All right. So, now that you understand that, let's jump into Google Ads. And we'll stick with the screen share so I can show you the step-by-step process. Now, the first step where you want to go, you want to go to ads.google.com. And this will bring you to this page here. And then when you click on start now, it will take you on a screen like this. Now, what I do want to do is that when you're starting here, you want to go to skip campaign creation because if you go down this path, it's going to set up a smart campaign for you. And it's not really the way that we want to go about it. You don't need to worry because obviously I'm here step by step and you can also download the booklet so you won't miss any of these steps. And when you click on skip campaign creation, you do have to go through some steps of setting up your own Google Ads account. You'll have to add in your email. You'll have to add in some payment details. But it's all a very very step-by-step process. And then you'll come to a screen like this. Now what you need to do is you need to click on new campaign. It may look slightly different. You may not have this gray banner at the top. But all you need to do is to click on new campaign. And as we go through this process, I've already got a Google sheet with my keyword research and my ad copy set up. So I'm just going to be copying and pasting that. But at the end of this video, I am going to show you where you can go through to see videos how to complete the keyword research and the ad copy. But just for the time in this individual tutorial, I've got them already set up. But as I said, don't worry if you're not sure how to do that. I'll show you some videos on how to complete your keyword research and ad copy. So, you want to go into new campaign and then from there you want to be either choosing sales or leads. There's not a huge amount of difference, but I do recommend either choosing sales or leads. If you're an e-commerce brand, stick with sales. If you're looking at creating some more phone calls or email inquiries, click on leads. And then what will happen in here is that you may not have conversion actions already set up, but you can do them at a later date. So, for this example, I will just skip this step because we want to get into the step-by-step process of setting up your own campaigns. And then you want to go through and click select your campaign type. Now, Google will be recommending performance max, but when you're new to Google Ads, I strongly recommend you start on search. The reason being is because for performance max, for them to really run effectively, you need to have some conversion data in your account. So, start with search to start with. And then from there, you need to select whether you want to get some more website visits, phone calls, shop visits, app downloads, or lead form submissions. Now, if you are doing phone calls or shop visits, it'll just be a matter of you entering your phone number or linking your business profile. With one of those options, they're quite an easy process. The only thing with phone calls is that the phone number that you do enter in here, it does need to be on your website. So, then we come down to our campaign name. Now, Google will just do it like lead search 3. What I always recommend is I always recommend to use a name that makes sense for you. So for us, we're going to be having a campaign which is around about one-bedroom villas. So what we would do here is I would call this one-bedroom villas and search just so we know it's a search campaign. It doesn't really matter what you call it because it's only for internal purposes. But the benefit, especially if you're going to be running multiple campaigns in the future, by having a good naming convention, it allows you to very clearly see what that campaign is about. And trust me, it saves a lot of time when you're going through some different optimization actions. And then go through and click continue. Then this will bring this down to a bidding strategy. Now, at the start, I would just start with maximize clicks. The reason being is because what we're wanting to do, especially over the first 60 to 90 days of your Google Ads campaign, you're wanting to get as much data as possible. Now, people always ask, where should you start your budget? For me, you're wanting to generate at least 10 clicks a day. So, for us, we know that our cost per click is around about 75 to about $2.35. So, we could start our budget at as little as $10 a day. If your cost per click was at $3, you would have to start it at $30 a day. Then you go through and click next. You'll have some different optin or opt- out options. Now, I generally unselect this. This is your Google search partners. The only time that I would keep it relevant and keep it selected is that if you are marketing inside of the US because they do have a lot of search partners, especially they got a lot of search traffic around AOL and some different sites like that. Anywhere else apart from the US, I've just never seen any benefit in adding in this search network. Display network, I definitely unselect it. The reason being is if you want to do some image based ads, if you're doing it from your search campaign, you're only getting textbased ads and they just don't perform as well. So that's why I unselect that one. When it comes to locations, I do recommend that you keep it country specific or at least continent specific. The reason for why is because obviously different search terms and also there's different traffic volumes around different countries. So for this example, we're just going to choose Australia. If you want to, you can even take that down to a state, a city, or a zip or postcode. And then it comes into your audience segments. Now, I do recommend that you add at least 20 to 30 audiences to start with. When you eventually move over to maximize conversions, it doesn't become as as relevant, but especially at the start when you're using maximize clicks. You want to be adding in as many audiences as possible. So, I've got some different ones in here. And the way that you do this is just obviously this is for a barley resort. So, we're adding in things around holiday rentals, luxury travelers, trips to Indonesia. So I've added in a couple. As I said, I've just selected nine. I would generally start with at least 20, but just for the purposes of examples, we will start with those. If you want to find some extra ones, you can just go browse and you can just type in some, you know, if we type in barley, it brings up some different options. If you were to be in, say, for example, doing a campaign for a local plumber, you can see here you can just type that in and get the different audiences in there. It's important to note that this is only the observation method. So it's not only going to those audiences, it's just that we're getting the data from these audiences. Now, if you go down to more settings with all of these right at the start, I don't worry about changing any of these. You can if you want to. The only time I would change it, especially if you were, say, for example, like a plumber and you did not want your ads to appear on a Sunday, you could then go through and change that ad schedule. Then we go through and click next. Now, you will see in here, Google is starting to use this AI tool for helping with your keyword research. As I said, at the end of the video, I will go through and show you some links on how to do your own manual keyword research and your ad copy. Even in 2024, I still recommend that you do it that way. So, what I'm going to be doing in through here is obviously this is going to be our 1DV. Once again, it doesn't matter what you call this ad group. You're only going to be seeing it, but you want to make sure it's something that makes sense to you. And then I've just gone through and entered in my keywords from there. And then we also go through and add in our ad copy. Once again, after this video, I'll be showing you how to create your own ad copy. But for the time being, let me just go through and copy and paste this ad copy in. All right, so I've gone now through and I've added in my URL. I've also added in my headlines and my descriptions. Remember, I'm going to be showing you the other video on how to correctly write your ad copies. Now, you can go through and add in some different site links and call outs. Now, what these are, these are little ad extensions which you can have at the bottom of your ads. So, if we were just to add some in here, I would recommend that you go through and fill out the rest of the details in there. But, as you can see here, we just add it in here. And this allows you to go to different parts of your website. Same with the call outs. I'm just going to add in one example here. So, you can see here this little text here, book direct, and save. That's a little call out. And that will appear on every single ad. And once you've done all that, you just go through and click next. Now, this comes through to the recommended budget. And as you can see, Google will go over the top. Obviously, they want to get as much money as possible. Now you can see here Google is giving us the recommendation of an average CPC of $3.34. In our manual keyword research, you can see here we've got data that the top of page bid is at about $235. So what we're happy to do, we can set our own custom budget. We would be setting that at $23 a day cuz we wanted to get those 10 clicks. We go through and click on next. And then what will happen through here is that Google will be going through running through the different checks. And because everything is now all okay, we can just go through and click publish campaign. So, congratulations. You've pressed publish and you've now got your first campaign in Google Ads running. Now, remember, if you did miss any of those steps, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below and you can get access to my campaign setup guide. And now, as promised, if you want to learn the step-by-step process in how to complete your keyword research, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Or if you want to see how to create high converting ad copy in Google Ads, go through and watch this video right here. Once again, it's been my absolute pleasure having you here. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy, and I look forward to seeing you one of these videos right now.