How to Set Up Your First Campaign in Google Ads

Google ad campaigns have great potential to maximize a website’s visibility as they help in lead generation. Creating an ad campaign in Google Ads allows you to promote your company via Google’s vast network of search results, mobile apps, videos, websites, and much more. This article is a step-by-step guide for initializing your first campaign in Google ads.

1. Account Creation

The first step in creating your first ad campaign is to start with a Google Ads account. To do this, visit the site ads.google.com and click on “Start now.” You’ll need to sign in with a Google email account; you can create a new one for your company or use a personal account. Once you are done with the account creation and signed in, you will first see a question to ask you about your main advertising goals. This screen will also have an expert mode for professional marketers. Choose accordingly so that you can proceed to the next step.

2. Set Campaign Goals.

Step 2 is about setting your campaign goals. After you have switched to the expert mode, you can easily set up your campaign using a wide variety of goal-based options. The options are categorized as:

• Sales.
• Leads.
• Website traffic.
• Product and brand consideration.
• Brand awareness and reach.
• App promotion.

Though this step provides you with many goal-oriented options, you can also choose to create a campaign without any goal selection. It allows you to take your campaign decisions by yourself instead of sticking to the categories suggested by Google Ads.

3. Select Campaign Type.

The next step is to choose a campaign type, which can be of the following types:

• Shopping.
• Search.
• Display.
• Video.
• App.
• Smart campaign.

There are two other additional types, i.e., shopping and discovery. However, these are unavailable if you have recently created your account. A brief description of the campaign types is below.

• Search: A search campaign is the simplest of all. You need to write text ads and use relevant keywords to reach out to the target audience. This campaign type works well for driving more traffic towards your website and generates more sales and leads.
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• Display: The display campaign allows you to add visually engaging elements to your ads to impact your audience’s minds. It helps you to reach out to maximum people and expand your outreach. A display campaign is a great way to target new and old customers.
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• Video: Video campaigns help boost your brand awareness. These ads play on YouTube, which is a great platform to target an audience. Most people are immediately impressed by video ads than other forms.
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• App: The app campaign helps find new app users and is a great way to generate more leads for your business. App campaign is a form of multi-channel marketing that automatically optimizes ads across YouTube, Discover, Search, Play, and many other platforms.
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• Shopping: Shopping campaigns help in retail marketing to promote the products of a business. They help in lead generation and boosting your local store in nearby locations.
• Smart Campaign: Smart campaigns help in automating your campaigns. These are very budget-friendly and focused campaigns that eventually result in bigger sales. The advanced optimization in smart campaigns is a great way to increase leads for your business/brand.

Tip: If you are new to PPC advertising, a search campaign is the best for you. It does not require any premium subscriptions and is easy to create compared to other types.

Creating an ad campaign in Google Ads allows you to promote your company via Google’s vast network of search results, mobile apps, videos, websites, and much more.

4. Choose Campaign Settings Accordingly.

After choosing the campaign type, you can then move on to select campaign settings. The settings are:

• General settings.
• Budget and bidding.
• Targeting and audiences.
• And ad extensions.

The general settings are about choosing a campaign name and the network where you want to show your ad. There are more setting options beneath the network section. You can skip it, especially if you are setting the campaign for the very first time. The budget and bidding section is about the money you want to spend for the campaign for each day and the bidding strategy which works best for you. Google will also help you set the right bidding strategy for the results you expect. The default recommendations at this step are:

• Clicks and impression share.
• Conversion value.
• Conversions.

Also, you will see the following bidding strategies recommended by Google. These are:

• Target impression share.
• Maximize clicks.
• Maximize conversions and conversion value.
• Target ROAS (Return-On-Ad-Spend) or Target CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition).

The targeting and audiences section is about choosing a location, language of your preference, and targeted audience. The ad extensions are the final section of this step. The primary extension types include the following:

• Call out extensions.
• Call extensions.
• Sitelink extensions.

You can choose to call out extensions to highlight things like promotions, discounts, or your brand’s competitive advantage. The call extensions help lead generation and show a phone number and the ad so that people can directly call you for further information. The site link extensions help to educate the customers about the offerings made by your business. Moreover, it also links them with different pages of your website.

5. Create Ad Groups and Choose Your Keywords.

Step no.5 is about creating ad groups and choosing appropriate keywords. It is good to start with one ad group initially and use Google keyword planner for picking the right keywords about your brand.

6. Write an Ad with Descriptions.

At this step, you need to create an ad along with a few descriptions. Here you need to give special importance to the headlines, the final URL page on your website, and the display path. Make sure that you need to be creative in communicating with your customers. Each headline consists of 30 characters in total, and you can choose up to 3 headlines with your ad. The final URL is the website page where your ad will be linked. Give special importance to the content of this page and make it inclined with your ad promotion content. It is good to use keywords in the display path to have a better idea about your brand and the page they’ll reach.

7. Enter the Billing Information.

The last step is about entering your billing information. Here you have multiple options for funding. You can either choose a debit or credit card or a bank account otherwise. You can also use a promotional Google code if you have it.

Conclusion

It is crucial to ensure that your campaign is free of any errors before the publishing phase. However, if there are any troubling issues, correct them in the very first place. Otherwise, you’ll encounter certain problems with publishing Happy first campaign creation!

Resources:

What is Google Ads?