Google Ads (AdWords) Tutorial 2020 [Step-by-Step]

Key Takeaways

So, in this video, I'm going to show you everything that you need to know, a step-by-step process of using Google AdWords. And look, this could seem a little bit intimidating at first. I know when I first started running ads on Google, it just looked very confusing and the platform was difficult to understand, but I promise you that if you watch this video through, not only are you going to have the basics of how to use Google Ads, but you're actually going to learn some different advanced tactics that we've used to increase profit margins, to reach more people, and get better conversion rates all around the board. So, I'm going to walk you through as simple as possible here. If you're new here to the channel, you want to learn more about this type of content, make sure you subscribe to the channel, drop a like if you find any value in it, and let's just get started here. Now, if at any time I you find me talking a little bit too fast, I apologize. I get a little bit excited sometimes when I'm trying to get you the most value here for your time, but if you need to, you can just slow down the video to .75 speed, or you can go back and rewatch some of this. But, let's go through this process here. The first thing you need to do, obviously, is to make sure that you have a Google account, right? So, most people have a Gmail. If you don't have one, you're going to have to sign up for one. And then you're going to go to ads.google.com. And once you get to this page, you're going to go up to the corner here and click start now. Now, there's a couple of things that we want to be careful of when we go through this process of beginning our ads journey. And it's it's important to understand that everybody has different sort of goals. Maybe you're a plumber and you want to just get more leads, more more clients in your local, say, Philadelphia or New York area. And then maybe you're somebody who has no physical service business, not tied down to one location, but you'd rather go for, say, an e-commerce business where you're selling washing machines or something just obscure. I don't know. But, whatever you're doing, it's all going to be sort of funneled into this video here. So, this will fit everybody's business model here. Or if you're running a political campaign, you want to run some ads, anything should really fit into this video here. So, we're going to start our campaign right here. And so, we're creating our first campaign, and it's going to try to walk us through like a nice little easy way to do this. Uh but because you're watching this video and you want to just get to it, what we're going to do is we're going to scroll down here and click switch to expert mode. Okay. Now, this is what I would recommend for people even when you're getting started cuz they're going to walk you through a bunch of things, bunch of through different hoops, and it just kind of gets annoying. So, switch to expert mode because you're watching this video, you should be able to handle it. Uh but we can get to making those ads much quicker and get to what we actually want to do. Now, I want to remind you that when you're running ads and there's number of different ads that we have available to us right here, but I want to remind you that your first ad, it might not be the most optimized ad out there. And this is something important to to realize because I think sometimes people think that they need to create this perfect ad and the first one that they try is going to have the best conversion rate, and they're going to be a genius about it. But even the the master marketers in the world, people who are spending billions of dollars for their company for marketing, they understand the idea of using something called split testing and AB testing. And so, this is essentially what this means is that look, the first ads that you make on Google AdWords here, they might not be the best ads. And in fact, you might end up losing money. You might not make as many sales as what you used for those ads. But guess what happens? You start to get better. You start to tweak them, and over time, they start to become more and more and more profitable once you find those exact keywords that people are looking for, what they're willing to click on, and the conversion rates behind that. So, don't be sort of um um you know, feeling bad if you find yourself in a position where you watch this video, you run a couple of different ads on Google, and you find yourself, you know, not making as much money or not getting as many conversions. A lot of that just comes with time. So, so don't so sort of fall into that trap of just thinking that Google Ads are not ever going to work for yourself. Okay. So, we have a bunch of different options right here. So, we have sales, leads, website traffic, product and brand consideration, brand awareness, app promotion. What we're going to do for this is we're going to go for website traffic. Um you know, I know a lot of people have different things that they might be doing, but landing somebody on your website is a great way to at least get more publicity and hopefully uh get people to call you, whatever it might be. Uh let's just go for website traffic for this. Now, we're going to have a bunch of different options here. Uh and if you're not going for website traffic, just to clarify here, you can just create an account uh without a campaign and that works totally fine as well. Uh but we we just like our different campaign types here. What I would suggest doing for people who are just starting off with Google Ads uh and they're just trying to get their feet wet, trying to get into it, I would suggest going for search-based ads. Um there's a lot of different types out there. You can do display, you can even run YouTube ads, so video, uh shopping. Uh what I would do is just stick with search-based for now. It's the simplest, uh most common sense approach to doing this. And what I mean by this is let's open up a new tab here and let's type in men's watches, right? So, the search-based ads are all these ones that are popping up at the top here, right? So, we see this ad right here. So, we see this ad right here, right? Uh and we see these three ads right here at the top. These are search-based ads. And so, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to show you how to craft these ads, how to get the best words in there, uh really packing a punch, but more importantly, how we can use these to really get better conversion rates, okay? So, let's go back and let's click on search-based ads. And then we're going to have to put in our business's website. Now, so for this example, uh we're just going to use something arbitrary here. So, let's say we're using uh a website called men's watches for you. This is a terrible website name, but I just totally made this up right now. And I don't even know if this is a real website, but this is just for the purpose of this video. Let's say that you are selling watches for men uh and you have a number of different products that you're selling, but you're going after the watch market, which trust me, there's a lot of money in that uh niche. So, let's click continue here. And then we're going to get rolling with actually creating this first ad. Now, keep in mind that look, this first ad, like I said, this is not going to be the final product because what we need to do is we need to go through this creating a campaign of using our Google Ads account so that we can start to use something called the Google Keyword Planner. So, we're going to really look for a lot of keywords here so we can optimize our ads as best as possible. Okay, so our goal here is website traffic. Let's just keep our campaign name as men's watches. And then we're going to go through and we're going to unclick search network and display network. Now, I see people keep this sometimes. This this essentially is if it's outside of Google. So, if you're on a different site and you see this on the sidebar somewhere, this isn't something that I necessarily recommend and I see a lot of people recommending against it as well. What we're going after is the people who go on to Google and they search for men's watches in this case and we're popping up at the top there for one of our ads. Okay, so we're not going to want to be in their search networks or their display networks for other websites, okay? So, that's just what we want to do here. You might decide to change these settings at some point or if you think convert better for your specific business, then totally go for it. It's up to you. This is not a set in stone what works and what doesn't work for Google Ads. There's a lot of things that definitely vary from place to place and business to business. Now, when we go to these these more settings here, there's a couple things we can look at. One of them is the start date and the end date, okay? Now, the end date, I would actually suggest setting this for maybe a week out, two weeks out. What's good about this is that if you can set an end date, if something happens, say you get locked out of your account, you forget, or maybe you just end up not having access to internet for the next couple weeks, I don't know why, but Google, if you don't set an end date, will just continue to run these ads, charge your credit card continuously. So, having an end date uh is just going to help so so sort of prevent, you know, something happening and then you not being able to get in your account for a month and you're just getting charged by Google every single day for running ads. So, our start date we're going to set for today, but let's set our end date for uh maybe January 4th. So, we're just going to run ads for what's that about 11 days? That's pretty short. I would generally keep this a little bit longer, but just for the hell of this video we'll keep it at that. Uh but then we're going to go down and for locations, this is an important factor here. But what you want to look at is if and I don't want to tell people how to run their business, but I know for myself that I generally only will run ads in the US. Uh if you are selling a physical product and you're running ads in say India, uh but you live in America and you're selling a product that uh is going to cost a lot more to ship to India or to other countries in the world, then it might not be very worth it from a business standpoint. So, I'm targeting people in the US. Uh obviously, if you have a local business, if if you are a plumber in the city of Philadelphia, you're going to want to go after Philadelphia, right? You want to go after the Philadelphia zip code in that specific area. Uh but you also want to realize that as you get more niched down, as you get more sort of focused on one specific country, one city, one zip code, that's actually going to end up likely in most cases costing you more money when you're running ads, okay? So, keeping it kind of broad can be helpful if you have a product that's pretty broad, uh but I always like to keep them in the US or United States and Canada, uh but just kind of figure that out for yourself and it depends on the product or the service that you are selling. So, for this because uh we're selling watches, we're just going to keep it US-based, uh even though maybe we have customers overseas, we just want to really go after those Americans right now uh because, you know, it's around Christmas time, might have some deep pockets, so that's what we're going for. The languages, we're going to stick with English here. This this is probably pretty obvious, pretty straightforward. Obviously, if you have a different language you're going after, use that language, but if you see something in Spanish popping up for an English search, it just doesn't really make much sense, right? And then we're going to go down to our budget. Now, for this, I would suggest doing for your campaign, maybe about $5 to $10 a day. Obviously, it depends on how much money you have willing to spend on your business, but you want to remember that if you have a really low budget. So, for this, let's set our daily budget to $10, okay? But if if you set your daily budget to $1, it's going to be difficult to see how your ads are actually working because that might only be a couple of clicks. For $1, you might pay a dollar to get one click on your ad, depending on what area it's in, or even in some cases, no clicks whatsoever if your campaign budget is a dollar per day. So, for this, we're setting it for $10. I'm going to show you how to do some split testing, some AB testing as well later on in this video, but we're setting it to $10 for now. And then we can set a maximum cost per click. So, this is just kind of kind of prevent us from ending up kind of losing our shirts and ending up paying like $10 for a single click for a watch because maybe it's a really competitive market. So, for this, just because we're creating our first ad, we can just take a guess at this, and let's just say that our maximum bid is going to be $1.25, okay? And once we get into this, we'll learn whether $1.25 is a lot or a little, depending on the watch industry, and what kind of the standard is for that. So, then we're going to go through and we're going to save and continue here, okay? Now, this is setting up our campaign, and there's really three different layers to Google AdWords. And hopefully I'm not losing here losing you here at any point. I know this can be a little bit complicated. Maybe I'll put up a little diagram right here. But essentially, we have campaigns, which is what we're creating now, and now we're going into creating an ad group. And then after that ad group, we can create ads for that ad group, okay? So, this is the part where we're actually going to enter in some keywords, some phrases that we think we want to target for our ads on Google uh uh okay? So, for this, because we're selling men's watches in this example, uh we can kind of go through and sort of take a guess at what it is that we want to try to use as keywords. Now, I don't like using guessing entirely. What I would suggest doing is using Google Keyword Planner, but it's kind of a catch-22 because to access Google Keyword Planner, you need to have a Google Ads account. So, we're going through this right now to get access to that Google Keywords Planner. Uh now, there's also a lot of other different tools you can use like keywords.io uh or you can use uh some other ones as well. I think Neil Patel has some really good ones. I think it's Ubersuggest that he has. It's really good for finding different keywords. But right now, we're just going to go through here and add a couple of phrases or keywords that we think of uh that come off the top of our heads, okay? So, let's start with maybe men's watches. So, men's watches, maybe we'll go for um men's luxury watches. Watches for men. But, there's really Okay, so, if you look down here, you'll see three different things right here. So, there's keyword equals broad match. What does that mean? It means that what we're typing in right here, this is just a broad match. So, this could come up anywhere within what somebody's searching on Google. And if it's anything closely related to this, it will show your ad. Now, if we put parentheses on there, uh that is going to be a phrase match, okay? So, that's a little bit more niche down. Essentially, what that's going to be is uh if they see that combination of those keywords, they're going to run an ad on that. Uh and then we have brackets, which is the exact match. I like to use brackets a lot because I know exactly what I'm getting. So, if we put brackets around this, it's going to limit it to this exact phrase that we're using, okay? So, this is really helpful to kind of figure out what's going to work best for you. But having those brackets around it is going to be when people search for watches for men, they have to write watches for men for your ad to show up in Google. If If they're typing in uh uh watch for men instead of not watches for men, your ad's not going to show up when you use these brackets, okay? So, using brackets, using parentheses, or using nothing, it's going to have a difference there when you're actually creating this ad group, okay? So, you want to just remember that going forward, okay? So, this is going to show us that our daily estimates are about 124 clicks at a cost of $9.80, which is only about 8 cents per click. That's not too bad for this, depending on how much we're selling these watches for, obviously. But, let's just save and continue this just for the purpose of this video, so we can continue to move on here. Now, we're actually creating our ad. Now, like I said, because this is your first ad, it's important to think pretty heavily about what it is that you're going to use for the headlines, what you're going to use for the descriptions, but at the same time, there's going to be some AB testing, some split testing, where maybe you make your first ad, and you make a couple different ads here, right? Cuz this is our first ad that we're making right here. But, with this $10 that we're spending per day, we can actually split this to run multiple different ads to see which one performs best, and whatever ad performs best is the one that we can put more money into, and then kind of forget about the other ones or start to tweak the other ones so that they all perform very, very well. Hopefully, you see where I'm coming from here. So, let's create our ad right here. And for this, because our site is men's watches for you, I don't know if somebody actually owns this site. If they do, they're probably getting some traffic here. But, uh so, the headline that we're going to do is Let's get something sort of catchy, a little bit click-baity, but nothing too spammy in a sense. So, let's say we want to go for luxury men's watches, right? Apostrophe there. Men's watches, right? So, that's headline one, and then headline two, let's make it something that's pretty attractive, like free worldwide shipping, let's do. So, something sort of attractive that you can put in those front two headlines there. So, now we going to Google and if somebody's seeing my ad right here, it's going to say luxury men's watches free worldwide shipping. Looks kind of attractive. Maybe we could make it better. This is just making this video right now. We're just doing this off the cuff here. So, you know, we can make it a lot better and then we can add another headline if we like to. Uh but, we're going to go through here and fill out the description. So, what do we want to put in here? Uh maybe, you know, the best or let's do the number one luxury watch brand in the world. And then in description two, we can do say made in Switzerland, right? Or handcrafted in Switzerland. That'd just be an example there that we could pull off here. But, you can see that we are putting in a couple of different headlines and then we're putting it in our descriptions. Uh and then we're going to save and continue. And now we're almost done here for creating our very first ad. Uh but, this is just really the beginning. There's so many advanced settings that we're going to need to go through. Uh this is your your payment info. So, with this, uh I would suggest finding a a a promo code. I see a lot of promotional codes where you'll get like $100 in Google AdWords credits. Wonderful. I would definitely look into that. Just do like a quick Google search for Google Ads credits, especially if you're a first-time user. Uh and then go through here, add in your credit card details, your billing information. And then what we're going to do after we submit this payment info, it's going to put us into the Google AdWords platform. And this is where it gets interesting. This is where I'm going to show you how to use negative keywords so that you're not getting certain uh uh things so that you are not having your ads displayed on certain search terms that you don't want them on. So, we can use negative keywords. But, I'm also going to show you a number of other different things that we can use for Google AdWords to really optimize our ads that we're using, okay? So, let's just put in our information here for our credit card, and then let's move on to the next segment here. All right, so we just created our first campaign. Let's click on explore campaign here, uh and let's start talking about some of these different things that we want to look at, okay? So, this is our homepage right here. Now, the first thing I want to show you is this little tab up here called tools and settings. This is how you access the Google Keyword Planner, and this is how we can further optimize our ad that we created cuz we just did sort of like a quick and dirty little ad that we thought of off the top of our head, thought about some terms that we could use. So, what we're going to do is we're going to go up here to tools and settings, and we're going to click on our planning tab here, which is going to take us to the Keyword Planner. This is one of my favorite tools. I used to use this for when I would grow my YouTube channel. I grew that to a few hundred thousand subscribers, and a lot of that was thanks to this Keyword Planner actually for finding terms that people use to search on Google. So, it's going to show you the different traffic, uh but it's going to also going to give you a lot of different ideas for terms that you can use, okay? So, we can get search volume and forecast, but I actually prefer to go over and uh discover new keywords here. So, this is going to allow us to see the average CPM or the average cost per click that you'll have available, uh but also give you a number of different ideas, right? So, let's type in men's watches, and let's see what type of ideas they come up with for us. Okay, so we're going to get some results right here. And once it loads, we're going to see a bunch of different options. Now, first of all, you're going to see, "Wow, okay, that's a lot of traffic to this." This is probably a pretty highly competitive area when it comes to watches. Probably because a lot of watches are pretty expensive, especially if you got a Rolex, you got like a Patek or something, you're looking at like 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars, right? Uh but you look at Michael Kors, Gucci watch, a a Casio watch, right? These are getting uh almost 100,000 searches per month, but they're all very very high competition. So, what we can also do is we can go through and maybe try to find something that's a little bit more niche down. So, if we type in say men's luxury watches and then search for that. And we're going to see some different search terms that come up for this, but then we can just kind of get different ideas. Now, generally it is good to have lower competition because what that's going to mean is that there's going to be a a a lower sort of cost per click because if you look at these ones with high competition, the bid range here, the high range for some of these bids is almost $10, which means you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for some of these different things if if people are searching for uh luxury watch brands and the average cost per click is somewhere between $2.27 and $7.29, you better be ready to pay quite a bit of money for that, okay? So, we can go through here and find some ones that are relatively lower competition. We can sort all of this, which is really cool, through this Google Keyword Planner. So, we can see ones with lower competition, higher competition, uh and this is going to give us a pretty good idea looking at all these different rates and then how we can find ones that will really fit into our ads that we want to create. So, once we kind of add some of these, we can say, "All right, I like this one. Uh I like this one." We're just going through here and just clicking a couple random ones for the sake of this video. Uh and then we can add them to an ad group, right? So, this is really cool that we can do this, but we're going to create a new ad group here uh called called ads two, right? Create that. And we just added those to that ad group right there like that. And that's going to allow us to then run ads for that specific ad group from those specific terms uh to hopefully kind of get more niche down for that. So, hopefully that's making sense to you right now. Uh and if we go back to what we were looking at from the Google Ads platform. So, if we exit out of the Keyword Planner, which I suggest doing a lot of research on this, you're going to find so much great value in using this. But, let's go back now and let's go to the primary page here and looks like they suspended my account because I put in some different credit card information. Make sure that's accurate credit card information that you put in. Pro tip there. So, what we're going to do is is we're going to click on keywords right over here on the sidebar. We're going to click on keywords and now we're going to add negative keywords onto our ads, okay? And what this will do is it'll actually allow us to essentially block certain keywords that people are searching for so that we don't end up in something that's not relevant to our ads. So, go up here uh right on the screen here and click negative keywords. Hopefully you see where my mouse is right here. Negative keywords, okay? We click on that, we can add negative keywords, okay? So, we're going to go through and let's add it to our campaign here. And let's say that we don't want our ad showing up when somebody uh types in the word coupon, right? Or somebody types in the word uh say Amazon because if you're selling a product and you're using your own site, but they want to buy it on Amazon. Say they type in men's luxury watches Amazon and then you show up, it might not be very relevant uh and you might end up having people just accidentally clicking on your uh uh link without, you know, purposely doing that and then clicking off and it's not going to be a good look all around the board, right? So, go through it here and add some negative keywords that you just don't think would be very good for your business. Once again, if you're a plumber in Philadelphia, then you could block some different negative keywords like uh some different areas around the city that you don't want to drive to. Say New Jersey, right? You don't want to do business in New Jersey. So, you put a negative keyword in here for New Jersey, okay? So, that's a perfect example of what you could do there. Then we can go down, we can save this and that's going to block certain keywords when we're running ads, okay? So, like I said earlier, guys, the whole strategy here is to start doing some split testing. Start doing some different things where we have these different ad groups, we start to run different ads under those ad groups to hopefully find ones that are going to perform the best. So, this $10 budget should allow us to hopefully run, I would argue to say about three to four ads at the same time. I wouldn't spread it out too thin where if you have a $10 budget and you try to run 10 or 20 different ads, that could be only $0.50 per day per ad and that could be difficult to actually see any real results from that cuz you won't know if you only got five clicks in a span of a week from an ad, was it a good ad? Was it a bad ad? How well was it converting? There's not that much data to actually see how well it was doing. So, with a $10 budget, I would try to go with a couple of different ads, two to three or four ads would be the perfect number for what I've seen from my experience. So, hopefully you found some value in this. We're going to go more in-depth in in in future videos on this channel if you're interested in learning more about running ads. So, whether that be on Facebook, on on Google, Instagram, YouTube, it's all going to be covered in this channel. And if you have any questions, leave them down in the comment section below. We do our best to get back to everyone as soon as possible. Sometimes it can get a little bit difficult, but we are really looking forward to helping you guys out here. This is all free content. We don't sell anything here and hopefully you found some value in this. I promise you once you start to just learn more about this and start to navigate, it's just going to become easier and eventually you just become an expert on it just by simply doing this and practicing and rinsing and repeating everything that's going on here. So, thanks for watching the video. Thanks for subscribing to the channel and I'll see everybody in the next video.