The Ultimate Google Ads Guide
Google Ads are perhaps the most complex platform to develop an effective strategy for. With all of the different features, network partners, and campaign elements, choosing the most cost effective strategy for a local business can be difficult. If you’re a small business trying to run Google Ads and have found yourself experiencing outrageous costs, little to no results, and low quality leads, look no further. Here’s your ultimate guide to running affordable Google Ads.
TOC
Campaign
Ad Sets
Ads
Using Google Ads as a part of your local online marketing strategy can help scale profits quickly and cost efficiently.
We’ve broken this guide down into the three main steps for creating a Google Ads campaign. Under each step, we will break down the different elements and how to use them to optimize your ad spend. Not only will you discover how to bring down your costs, but you’ll find out how to improve the quality of the leads and conversions your campaigns are generating.
Campaign
Objective
Networks
Scheduling
Location
Audience
Budget
Bidding
Ad extensions
Setting up a campaign involves the most amount of elements, but will take the least amount of time. Here’s a breakdown of each step.
Objective
What is the goal of your ad? Keep in mind that some objectives are more expensive than others. Quick tip: when using a remarketing audience, traffic will most likely be your best option.
Leads and Sales (conversions) objectives are the most efficient in acquiring customers or leads for a certain cost. These ads are also the most expensive, and are generally most effective with a budget of over $50 a day (depending on your industry).
Choose the objective that most closely aligns with your goal and continue to the next step.
Network
This simply means where your ads will appear. Do you want them to appear in Google Search results? As display ads on websites and network partners? As video ads on YouTube?
Display ads are often the cheapest, but search ads produce more clicks. Video ads are great for conversions, but can be very costly. Choose your network in accordance to your objective, and make sure you have the budget to back it up.
Side note: LinkedIn is a part of Google’s Display Network, so you can actually run ads on LinkedIn for much lower costs through display ads on Google versus a campaign on LinkedIn.
Scheduling
How long will your ad run? What times of day will it run? This is most effectively used when practicing day parting - a strategy for leveraging desktop-specific campaigns for certain hours of the day and mobile-specific campaigns for others.
Location
Where is your ideal customer located? If you’re a service provider, where can your ideal client receive your service? If you have an in-person storefront, how far is your customer willing to travel to purchase your product? Can they purchase it online?
Also, make sure to select the best option for your campaign as far as what type of location targeting you choose. Does your ideal customer live in the area or just visit it frequently? Do they have to live in the area or can they show interest in it as well?
Audience
There are three different types of audience segments available on Google.
Demographics - Known information about each user’s work, family, homeowner status, etc.
Affinity - Interests that are recognized by Google based on frequently searched keywords, visited sites, etc.
In-Market - Product and service categories that the user is actively shopping for on Google.
These segments are great if you are promoting a product or service that is listed in these categories. They also work well if you have a detailed persona for your ideal customer. If you understand their spending habits, interests, similar products or services they might buy, etc., you can narrow in on your exact customer and reduce the amount of ad spend wasted on irrelevant or low intent users.
If you choose the display or video network, you can also create your own custom audiences.
Budget
Figuring out your budget may take a lot of trial and error. Once you choose a budget, knowing how to allocate that budget will be your biggest challenge.
As mentioned before, different objectives cost different amounts. Conversions will cost more than leads, and leads will cost more than traffic. Knowing industry benchmarks for pay-per-click ads will help you determine the most cost effective strategy for choosing a budget.
I would highly recommend choosing the Lifetime budget option, so your campaign can spend more freely on better performing days than worse.
Bidding
Choosing a bid strategy tells Google what you want to see as your results. Optimizing for conversions will target users that are most likely to complete a desired action. These actions can be defined by creating events within your conversion settings.
For example, you want to generate form submissions on your website. Your campaign should send users to the location of your form so Google can prioritize users that are most likely to complete similar actions. You can tell Google about this action by placing a Google Tag on your thank you page that users are redirected to after submitting a form. This will allow your campaign to prioritize users who are most likely to end up on your thank you page.
Your bid strategy not only tells you what event you want your campaign to target, but it allows you to define how much you are willing to spend to achieve each completed event. This is known as targeting cost per action (CPA). Often, it’s best to have a 1:50 ratio between this number and your daily ad spend limit, but this also depends on your objective and placement (most video ads require this).
You can find an effective cost cap by calculating your cost per acquisition. Metrics like your cost per lead, conversion rate, average conversion value, and cost-per-click can also help you determine this number.
Ad Extensions
Adding extensions to your ads can primarily help you achieve two things.
Your ad takes up more space in search results, pushing your competitors further down the page.
Detailing specific offers and calls-to-action in your ad to allows your ad elements to change based on the intent and search query of each user. For example, if one of your keywords is “free oil change” and you have an extension for a “free oil change”, your extension will very likely appear to a user searching for that specific keyword, increasing your chances of converting them.
Ad extensions can redirect users to a different landing page than the one from your ad, can promote phone calls, and can help you narrow in on specific categories within your campaign objective.
Ad Sets
Each ad set is defined by an ad group. This is a group of specific keywords that you want to target within your campaign. Each ad set can have 3 ads, so there are a couple reasons why you should consider creating multiple sets.
The best way to use ad groups is by:
Identifying the offer or offers that you want to promote in your campaign
Do you have different landing pages that you want to promote?
Do you have more than one offer that you want to use?
Do you offer more than one product or service?
Grouping category-specific keywords
Do you have dozens of keywords that are not perfectly relevant?
Do you have more than 25 keywords that you want to target?
Do you want to test out different keywords or phrases?
For example, let’s say you are offering a free oil change and a free tire rotation. Obviously, people who are looking for one are not always looking for the other. This would be a good opportunity to separate keywords that are relevant to oil changes from keywords that are relevant to tire rotations.
You could then use both ad sets to target those two different service categories and create relevant ads for each. That way, you can effectively target both oil changes and tire rotations without competing against yourself.
For the other example, let’s say you’re in real estate and you work with both buyers and sellers. You may be tempted to target “sell a home” and “buy a home” within the same ad group. Despite only one word changing, those those two search queues have entirely opposite meanings.
Use two different ad sets to build an ad group for people looking to buy a home and a group for people looking to sell. That way you have more variety in your ads and in your offers, and aren’t limiting your own results.
Ads
Each ad has three primary elements.
Headline
Description
Destination
Your headline should be appealing and follow all the guidelines for how to write a good headline. It should pique curiosity, be relevant to the ad text and landing page, and should illustrate an actionable benefit. Most often, it includes an irresistible offer.
Your headline is the most important element of your ad because it’s often what will determine if people stop and click or keep scrolling. It’s also crucial that your headlines include your most relevant keywords. The keywords in your headlines will determine what search queues your ads appear for.
If you are promoting oil changes but your headline mentions nothing about oil changes, your ad will rank low and go unnoticed. If you are promoting oil changes but your headline sounds like an algorithm wrote it, you will rank high, but your ads will be easy to skip over.
For that very reason, your headlines should be personable, actionable, engaging, and be as relevant to your keywords as humanly possible.
The other element that determines your success is the description. Keywords also matter here, but it is more important to focus on illustrating a compelling support point in 90 characters or less. Illustrate the benefit of your offer and explain how the user can achieve it, while focusing on relevant keywords that are targeted in your headline.
Lastly, your destination page has an immeasurable affect on your ad performance. The keywords and topics mentioned throughout your landing page will determine not only the relevance of the keywords in your ad groups and ad text, but will determine how many results you will see.
Your landing page can be optimized for your objective by following best practices for landing pages. Elements like your content, keywords, headlines, CTA, and sales copy will all impact whether or not a user takes action.
Takeaways:
The best ways to manage a cost effective Google Ads campaign:
Cost control - Reduce your costs and maximize your results by defining a cost limit for achieving each desired action.
Ad groups - Separate irrelevant keywords and offers by using multiple ad groups.
Keywords - Target niche keywords that are defined by phrases, rather than a broad match.
Headline - Create keyword relevant headlines that appeal to human emotions and desires.
Landing page - Optimize your landing page with relevant keywords, potent sales copy, and a clear call to action.
