[Full Guide] How to utilize Google ads for your business

It is a no-brainer to google anything you want and to search when you want to buy anything before buying it, checking a few service providers, compare prices before finally making the decision to buy; especially for high-end valued items & expensive services. With over 259 million unique visitors and almost 6 billion daily searches on Google, businesses ought to use the google ads services to show to their potential clients.

In the following guide, you will learn how to use the best Google campaign for your business, big or small.

First Let’s know the difference between the campaigns objectives inside Google ads, after that we will pick a few industries and mention the best Google ads approach that fits their business goals.

Before You Begin – Optimizing Your Landing Page For Google Ads

A landing page is a web page that you decide that people will “land on” when they click on your ad.

• Content

Content should contain a clear and targeted description of what you are offering, a person who has no clue about your company should understand who you are and what you are doing by visiting your landing page.

• CTA (Call To Action)

What do you want your visitors to do? You need to tell them exactly what action they should take on your page and what they will get in return for doing it.

• Keywords

Make sure to add some of your targeted keywords in the page title, content to send a signal to google that you are consistent.

• Lead Magnit

This has nothing to do with the tangible settings of the campaign, it is for you in order to give intensives to whomever visits your page to take an action. Why should they give you their details or why should they buy from you?

If you are collecting leads or selling products, you should know whatever will hook your potential customers, what will make dealing with you special? Call it: competitive advantage, unique selling point or just the “Why”. Is it customer service? Is it warranty period? Whatever added value you will give them, make sure to add it clearly in the landing page to enhance the conversion rate. 

• User Experience (UX)

User Experience in the page is crucial to your conversion rate, adhering to mobile responsiveness and different browsers’ experience is a no brainer. People would never convert in a very slow page or unclear buttons or small screens..etc 

• Design

Do I even need to explain anything here?

What is the Ideal Google ads’ account structure?

The final objective of running ads on google is, of course, to get new customers, hopefully paying ones.

But baby steps First: 

To get a click.

This click will happen if your ad shows. 

Your ad will show if it was triggered by a proper keyword that is matched between what the customer is looking for and what you have as keywords.

Ad groups will determine which is the most effective ad to show. Campaign will maximize your budget and ROI on your ad spend so the ad groups can do their work.

A good Google ads account structure: 

For a certain Campaign >> ## of ad groups >> each ad group has 3 ads (and/or one responsive ad)  

A good account structure will improve your quality score, thus reducing costs.

The number of ad groups can be as many as you want, BUT you have to consider putting all related keywords in ONE ad group. 

Google ads Goals & Campaign Types

The goals explanation from google are very similar, the algorithms will do their own thing, all you need to know is when to use each goal and how to get the best out of them to increase your ROI and ROAS.

When to create google ad search campaigns?

You want to target people searching for whatever you’re offering? Google ads search campaigns are the one to serve you here. We have 50% of our clients coming from our Google ads search campaign using keywords like “digital marketing agency” and “ppc agency”.

1. Sales and leads: Boost your online sales and signups. If you have a long sales cycle (like real estate or high-valued items) use the leads goal for your search campaigns, otherwise choose sales, traffic or no goal at all.
2. Easy setup: Write text ads and pick keywords. No special files or assets needed. Try Smart campaigns for an even easier setup. Note that Easy setup is the default campaign when you first create a google ads account. You can pause it later to create more professional detailed campaigns.
3. Highly specific targeting: Reach people actively searching for what you offer.

Google & The Marketing Funnel:

Funnel, marketing levels, steps, whatever the name is, customers need time to know who you are and what you are offering before buying from you, we can say there are 3 main steps for any purchase process:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Purchase

Some marketers added a lot of in-between funnels like: 

• Asking, which comes after interest

• Loyalty, which comes after purchase

Nevertheless, you get the idea. You cannot go to people in a restaurant asking them to buy your products, but you can definitely hand them a leaflet of your services. BIG DIFFERENCE.

The beauty with Google search ads is that your customer is already searching for you, so you jumped to Interests, you have to convince him (with your ads) that you’re the one he’s searching for!

• Awareness and consideration: Create memorable images & video ads to make people aware of your brand or consider your product.
• Expand your reach: Expand your reach beyond search results to target people browsing websites and apps
• Remarketing: Follow up with people who’ve already seen your ads or visited your site or engaged with a specific page or sections in your website

Google ads goal: Sales

Sales for Search Campaign: 

1. We use it to Drive sales or conversions online, in app, by phone, or in store. 
2. Engage with customers who have already contacted you or are close to making a purchase decision

Sales for Display Campaign: 

1. Drive sales or conversions from customers who are ready to act
2. Engage with customers who have already contacted you or are very close to making a purchase decision (Remarketing)

Google ads goal: Leads

1. Use it when you want to collect leads or signups.

Google ads goal: Website Traffic

1. Use it when you want to push your traffic & increase visitors, especially in 2 cases: 
   1. Your website is new
   2. Your services rely on traffic

Google ads goal: Product and Brand Consideration

This helps you build brand recognition, such as compelling visual ads, bid strategies that drive views, and other features that help attract new customers and capture their attention

Google ads goal: Brand Awareness & Reach

Increase awareness of your products or services. Introduce customers to what you offer when releasing a new product or expanding your business into a new area

Google ads goal: App Promotions

Use this to promote your application for installs/downloads. Third party tools might be needed to connect to apple store app, otherwise you won’t be able to track installs directly from Google ads.

Google ads goal: Local Store Visits & Promotions

Use this to push near-by customers to find your physical store location.

Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance 

Use this if you don’t know what to do and let google decide for you.

How to plan for your campaign?

Planning your campaigns ahead is essential for you, you will be organized and your thoughts and ideas will reflect an action plan. Something simple like this would do: 

• Campaign: Digiutm Business Owners
• Budget: $20 per day
• Network: Search Only
• Campaign Start Date: Feb 15
• Campaign End Date: March 15
• Ad Schedule: all the time
• Geo: Egypt
• Devices: All

It is crucial to plan ahead for your campaign to avoid losing money or missing something that would narrow your targeting and save your budget to be spent correctly.

Which Goal should you choose?

From my own experience, which exceeds 2M$ in ads, if your account doesn’t have information or data yet, choose the “no goal” campaign. On the other hand, if your campaign has some information, follow the rules mentioned above.

Pre-Launch Planning:

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the expected metric that you want to hit? 

Increase your subscriber list, sales, or signups? Be specific.

1. Who is your competitor?
   

   Analyze what your competitors do, use Semrush toolkit for PPC to understand their position. Check out their ads, landing pages, keywords that trigger their ads. 

How to know your competitors ads on Google?

• If you are in the same location as they are, just google the thing that you want your potential clients to search for and see who your competitors are! You might be surprised! 
• However, if you are not in the same country as the business, or doing ads for another client, just open google, hit settings, choose the country where the business is, save and refresh, then type the search term. That’s the easiest free method to get a hold of what your competition is doing.

• Who is the target audience?
  Make sure you know the location, device types, and times of the day are right.e. 

You can define your audience at both the campaign and ad group level, each level has some of the definition features; for example, you can only choose the country/city at the campaign level, while you can choose age, device and other demographic aspect on the ad group level.

What Keywords should trigger your ad?
What do you offer as a business? When do you want to appear for searchers and what type of searchers do you want to show in front of?

• How much are you going to spend per day?

If you use semrush PPC tool to show your competition keywords’ and spending, you will get an idea of how much you should spend per day, otherwise just allocate whatever you see fit for your budget and take it from there.

• Do you have the tracking setup correctly?

What you need to do is, simply ask your developer to add a “thank you” page so once any visitor view this page, it will count as a conversion, make sure to create a conversion from google ads conversion tab, there is always 2 parts of coding, one part to be added in all the website, the other one will be added only to the “thank you”.

Google ads Tips:

• Ad groups

Campaign structure doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. However, we suggest using ad groups to organize your ads by a common theme. Try sorting ad groups by the type of product or service you offer. Limit the number of keywords you use in each ad group. As a best practice, use only one keyword per ad group.

• Keywords

Go for a broad match to maximize the reach of your ads, but be careful; more clicks means more money spent. To show your ads to a narrower but more relevant audience, use modified broad, phrase or exact match types.

• Negative Keywords

Sometimes, you’ll notice that some of your ads might actually be competing with one another. This happens, but try to avoid it. To do so, add cross-group negative keywords to the appropriate ad groups to set parameters around which ads appear for specific search terms and which ones do not.

• Ads

Writing compelling copy with a clear and prominent call-to-action is crucial to the success of your ads. You can see limitations of characters while writing the copy, so be creative! 

Less is more! 

• Ad Extensions

One advice: USE THEM, A LOT! Extensions show as snippets in your ad, see the difference it makes? Extensions boost your CTA, engagements and eventually acquisition.  

• Understand Google ads Bids

You can Bid more on keywords that you expect to have more value to your business or bring in more serious traffic, for branded and exact match terms. If you are not sure what results to expect from a keyword, start slow with the budget, start bidding 5-20$ per day depending on your target location, then monitor the outcome closely and adjust accordingly 

• Maximize Conversion 

Use this bid when you first launch a campaign for ecommerce or lead generation campaigns. Google algorithms will get you paying customers or match hot leads and show your ad to them. 

Cons: It might cost a bit until the system is learning, you can then know how much does a conversion cost.

• Maximize Clicks 

Use this bid when:

• You are running campaigns to boost traffic
• You care about traffic and website reach more than conversion
• When you just want to spread the view of your website/landing page  

• Target CPA

Use this bid when your account has had some time collecting data and you know you only want to pay for xx amount per a conversion, CPA is: Cost Per Acquisition which means, cost per conversion. Whether your conversion is a sale or a lead, you can choose a CPA that fits your budget. 

Notes:

1. If your products are expensive, and your account average cpa is 20$ for instance and you add a low CPA, the campaign won’t spend any of its allocated budget and you will be forced to increase the CPA to 20 or more.
2. If your account average cpa is 20 and you bid a 30$ cpa, that doesn’t mean your average cpa will change, it just means the targeting will be enhanced, increased and eventually your average cpa might or might not change! 

LAUNCHING YOUR CAMPAIGN!

Double check everything and launch your campaigns, check daily, make weekly and monthly reports, nothing fancy, you just need to track performance.

DAILY/WEEKLY Checkpoints for Monitoring your Google ads campaigns:

Budget

Keep an eye on the progress of your campaigns each day by checking your overall spend vs. conversions. Doing so will help you to see whether the campaign is performing as planned or if you need to make adjustments.

If your account is new, be patient for the account to collect data and learn. This patience equals money spent on learning.

Bid

When you track the progress of your campaigns, make sure to adjust your bids for the top performing ads accordingly to get the most out of the campaign.

Search Terms – Search Campaigns

Use the Search Terms Report in Google Ads to monitor the actual search queries your ads have showing for, see the engagement of the customers, if there’s a term you think your ad should not be triggered by it, add it as a negative keyword for the campaign so your ad won’t be triggered nor shown.

Placements – Display Campaigns

Use “Where ads showed” to check platforms/apps where your ad has been displayed, if you do not approve any of the placements, you can select and exclude it from the campaign or the ad group.

Google ads Monthly Report – Template

What should be in your monthly report for a google ads search campaign?

What should be in your monthly report for a google ads display campaign?

Download our template for planning and reporting on google ads – excel file

The best google ads strategy for Service agencies

Create a search campaign for your services, add all similar keywords in an ad group and then each ad group should have a responsive ad and a 3 old-type ads. 

The best google ads strategy for a small Ecommerce 

If you have only one product, create a campaign for the product, inside the campaign, create 1 dynamic ad group and 1 keyword targeted ad group. Continue with the same structure on the ad level: One responsive ad and 3 general ones.

The best google ads strategy for a huge catalog

If you have 10K+ SKUs and multiple category product catalog, you will need to plan this:

Dynamic Search Campaigns	All products / categories
Google Display Campaigns	Branding campaign / Retargeting campaign / +Product Feed
Feeds for important products – Smart Display Campaign
Keyword Targeted Search	Important products / competition / branding

 

FINAL THOUGHT: WHEN TO USE GOOGLE ADS SMART DISPLAY CAMPAIGNS

When you have large account data, meaning you have been running google ads for a while, you can safely create a smart display ad and let google do its magic in the targeting, you can only exclude targeting here, the rest of the targeting work depends on the AI according to your account data and the type of conversion you have had.

Focus on Responsive Display Ads

Advertisers are putting a much heavier focus on responsive ads; 72% of the display ads SEMrush reviewed in the latest research were from responsive ads, and this makes sense. Advertisers have limited time and resources, but an overwhelming number of products to promote. Responsive ads were the easiest way to reach users in the display network.

Leverage In-Market Audiences For Search

These audiences are designed for advertisers focused on getting conversions from likely buyers. In-market audiences can help drive remarketing performance and reach consumers close to completing a purchase. In-market audiences can be used not only as a targeting option for display campaigns, but as bid modifiers for search campaigns. In 2018, Google launched several new in-market segments and gave access to this feature to a greater number of advertisers. The best tactic to employ with in-market audiences is increasing bets for searchers from those segments: they will be potentially more interested in your product or service.

Use Responsive Search Ads

Responsive search ads let you create an ad that adapts to show more relevant messages and text to your customers. The ad works based on AI: the advertiser adds up to 15 headlines (each one up to 30 characters long) and four descriptions up to 90 characters long. Google combines the headlines and descriptions to figure out the best performing combinations, generating up to 43,680 ad variations – a tough number to test manually.

Google Ads Editor (Formerly Adword Editor)

GAE is a desktop application. Only use google ads editor if you have a massive account with +50 active campaigns that might need bulk editing at some point. Otherwise, the platform online is just fine.

Main reasons marketers use google ads editor:

• Make bulk edits

• Copy/paste ad features / helps especially with bulk edits

• Prepare or edit campaigns offline before launch

If you don’t have a massive google ads account, forget about using google ads editor, it will just add to your plate what you do not need.

Got a google ads question? We have got answers!