Google Ads – Get More Clients In 28 Crystal Clear Steps!
If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you already know why Google Ads should be a key part of your marketing strategy.
You will be showing your ads to people looking for your product or service at the exact moment when they are looking for your product or service. It’s a not a free way to get clients, but it’s definitely the most direct and precise marketing approaches available to your business.
The following steps will take you from a complete Google Ads novice to being in the top 1% of all Google Advertisers out there.
Part 1 - Opening A Google Ads Account
Step 1 - Google Ads free ad credit
Let’s start with some free money. Google knows that once you understand and control Google Ads, you’ll come back to use the platform again and again. So it’s giving incentives to businesses to try it out. Google offers £75 pound in ad credit as soon as you spend £25.
You can get your Free Google Ads coupon here:
https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/lp/coupons/
If the offer is not available in your country or if you’ve used it already, you’ll have to head to the standard start page:
https://ads.google.com/home/
Click on start now, and you’re in!Step 2 - Your main advertising goal
The next page will look like
or
This is the page you’ll see if it’s the first time you enter your Google Ads account.
We know that by default Google will try and guide you with your account setup. It’s a good idea, but the setup assistant always asks way too many questions, without explaining how this will actually impact your advertising performance.
This 1st question is a great example:
What is your main advertising goal?Calls
Visits to your physical location
Website sales or sign-ups
Option 1 - calls
If you have a service type business, you probably do want more calls. But do you want all types of calls? Do you want calls in the middle of the night? Are you okay with time wasters... as they could be good for your branding? Basically, are all calls equal to you?
Option 2 - visits to your physical location
If you have an offline shop, you probably do want more visits to your store, but are you ready to track these visitors ? How will you know if visitors coming from google actually buy in your store? And if somebody buys, how do you know if that customer comes from Google?
Option 3 - website sales or sign-ups
This
3rd option is for businesses with an online service or product. Now this should be the most obvious choice and yes, you will want more sales or signups, but does this mean that if you do get sales online that you can’t get calls or appointments? Does this mean that if you get signups to your newsletter that you won’t get online sales?
Whether you are a complete beginner or a Google Ads specialist, this 1st question from the assistant will definitely bring more questions than answers.
But Google knows this already and offers a nice little “Experienced with Google Ads” or “Switch to Expert Mode” link just below. If you are completely new to Google Ads, don’t worry, you won’t be soon so let’s go ahead and click on the link!
Step 3 - The premature Google ads new campaign screen
Google’s goal here is to get you to create your first advertising campaign as soon as possible. But this 1st page asks a lot of questions and your account is not 100% setup yet. It’s a better idea to finish opening your account and we’ll get back to this in a few pages.
Click on the link at the bottom of the page:
“Create an account without a campaign”
Step 4 - Confirm your business information
3 questions to answer :
Billing country
Timezone
Currency
This should be fairly straight forward for most businesses.
However, quick note for businesses with international markets: you will NOT be able to change your currency at a later stage. This is a quick list of problems and solutions:
######## Ignore if you are just targeting a local market for now
Problems
Currency - If you’re bidding in Euros in a market where the currency is Euros but your bank account is in Pounds (GBP), you will be paying extra foreign exchange costs each time you pay Google.
Currency - If you are bidding in Pounds in a market where the currency is in Euros, your bidding strategy will be fixed in pounds, but it will be subject to exchange rate in Euros.
Timezone - If you are targeting a country in another timezone from your business location, your Google ads can be out of sync with your analytics and accounting.
Solution
Currency 1 - Stick to 1 account for each currency market you are targeting.
Currency 2 - Even if you bank account is in Pounds GBP, choose the currency of the market you are targeting. It’s quite easy to open a currency bank account, not so easy to transfer a Google Ads account.
Currency 3 - Setup a foreign currency bank account or use Revolut to take the sting out of foreign currency transfers. You can save up to 5% on each transaction.
Timezone - It will be difficult to sync everything but make sure that at least your Google analytics and Google calendar have the same timezone as your Google ads account.
##################################################
Click on submit
Step 5 - Congrats your Google Ads account is set up!
Click on Explore your account
Step 6 - Take a quick tour of Google Ads
This is your Google Ads dashboard. It’s completely empty at the moment, but you’ll learn to love and hate this page very soon ;-)
Click on Campaigns in the left menu
This is where you’ll see the performance of each of your campaigns: clicks, costs and conversions.
Click on “new campaign” at the bottom of the page, or by clicking on the blue + button.
You’re back to creating a new campaign!
You’ll recognise this step from higher up in this article. We’re back again, but this time ready to create our very 1st Google Ads campaign!
Part 2 - Create your first Google Ads campaign
Your Google Ads account should now be open. If it isn’t please head back to the beginning of this article and follow our very simple screen by screen setup guide.
When you’re ready, Click on “Create A New campaign”
Step 7 - Select your campaign goal
You will have to choose a goal between the following options :
(1) - Sales
(2) - Leads
(3) - Website Traffic
(4) - Product and Brand consideration
(5) - Brand awareness and reach
(6) - App promotion
Google is really good at giving you confusing options to choose from.
Once you have launched your first successful campaign you will have lots of time to go back to test different goal options. The purpose of this guide is to get you to that first successful campaign as fast as possible, so let’s start by narrowing down our options.
Website traffic (3), product and brand consideration (4), brand awareness and reach (5), app promotion (6)… these 4 options really all have one same goal: a lead or a sale. We could also argue that each lead is a step towards a sale, but let’s keep this simple for now:
If you are selling a product directly online with an online payment > choose sale (1)
If not > choose lead (2)
A final note if you are still hesitating - these 2 options will give you exactly the same setup on the next page.
And that’s that!
Step 8 - Choose your campaign type
Now it’s becoming interesting! We’re going to dive into the different ad formats available on Google Ads.
>> select a campaign type
Search
Display
Smart
Shopping
Video
Let’s dig in. What are these types?
SearchThese ads will be shown on the original google.. the search engine that we all use regularly. You insert a keyword and google produces a selection of relevant results.
In these results you’ll find organic links (free listing), pictures, videos, local related content and of course paid results. Paid results is where your ad will appear if Google thinks it is an answer to a user’s problem.
DisplayIf you chose display, your ads will show as an image,text or video on websites and apps that are in the Google network. The Google network includes properties owned by Google such as Youtube but also any other website or app that has created a partnership with Google. And Google has millions of partners!
Display is a very powerful campaign type and you can generate a lot of cheap traffic. However, all of these partner sites can have completely different acquisition strategies and conversion rates. This can be difficult to manage in the early days of your Google Ads setup.
SmartThis campaign type is Google trying to help by taking control over your Google Ads account. This is not what we are trying to do here. We want you to understand what is going on, so you can make decisions yourself on how to grow your business with Google Ads. So let’s happily ignore this type for now.
ShoppingThe shopping campaign type will show ads on google search and google shopping with the picture and price of your product. This isn’t really useful for lead based businesses but it’s good for ecommerce. You will have less control over what is shown to the user than with a Search campaign, but if you’re an ecommerce player, you should definitely put Shopping in your todo list in a step 2 of your marketing plan.
VideoThe final campaign type is Video or in other words Youtube. With short and long form video ads, this is an awesome way to scale your business. It’s very powerful, offers lots of cheap clicks and is often underutilised. However the volume is so high that even cheap clicks can quickly get out of control. This is definitely for advanced Google Ads advertisers.
So which campaign type should I choose?
These 5 options all work independently and you will learn how to build a complete advertising strategy with at least 2 of these campaigns. In the short term however, it is very important that you always start with Search!
Why Search First?All of these campaign categories do seem useful. This is where we start thinking about your potential clients. A user will always be in 1 of these 2 states:
consuming content: reading an email, an article, watching a video, playing a game
searching for something
When a user is consuming content, he is generally focused on what he is doing. An advertiser will have to distract the user from his current activity in order to start selling to him.
Think of this as advertising in a magazine. Your potential clients are flipping through the pages, looking at beautiful supercars, and on one of the pages you show an ad for your online Tyre shop. This could lead to a sale, but you could also be wasting your advertising budget showing an ad for tyres to a 15 year old supercar enthusiast that doesn’t own a car.
Searching for somethingWhen a user is searching online, he is actively looking for something. And the easiest way to sell to that user is to show your product or service exactly at the moment when he is looking for it. It’s simple, a user is looking for car tyres, so you show him car tyres.
Let’s bring this back to Google Ads.
If you have a shop selling car tyres.. then the easiest way to sell tyres it to show your ad in front of people looking for the keyword “car tyres”.
If you are a plumber in Manchester… then the easiest way to find clients is to show your ad when people are looking for the keyword: “plumber in Manchester”.
It’s as simple as that.
Obviously, all of this needs to be setup and structured in the next steps, but guys this is it, this is the not so hidden secret of Google Ads:
It will never ever be easier to sell your product or service to people who are actually looking for it! (Well… actually it does get even easier.. but that’s for later in this course)
You can go ahead and select “Search”
Step 9 - Select ways to reach Google Ads your goal
Website visits
Phone calls
Shop visits
App downloads
Lead form submissions
I’m not going to go into detail here. I would be repeating a lot of what was said above. This guide is specially targeted at businesses with websites so please select the option 1: “website visits” and then enter your website address.
Step 10 - Choose your campaign name
Campaign names can be as complicated as you’d like. There are quite a few naming conventions out there. At this stage, it is key to be able to analyse what’s going on in your Google Ads account in a few seconds. This means recognising in an instant which part of your business is generating the best quality traffic.
These 2 examples below would be a good place to start for most businesses.
If you sell shoes online, your campaign name could be:
Men - Shoes - Trainers
Women - Shoes - Stilettos
[Gender] - [Product] - [Product Category]
If you’re a plumber in the north of England, your campaign name could be:
Plumber - Boiler - Manchester
Plumber - Broken WC - Liverpool
[Activity] - [Category] - [Location]
Just remember to keep it simple. In order to manipulate the data and make decisions to grow your business, you need to understand your campaign names in a heartbeat. Letters and codes are great, but make sure they are very obvious for you.
Step 11 - Choose your network
Just under the campaign name selection you’ll 2 networks to choose from. Here comes Google again asking if we want to promote our ads on google search and google display.
Google asking again? Are you starting to see a pattern here? Even if we did decide to use Display advertising from the get go, we would NEVER build a campaign with both types of networks at the same time.
Google Ads is so powerful because you can control everything. But the control is only worthwhile if you can use it to make impactful decisions. And you need to be able to make decisions based on how users react to your ads.
The idea is to tailor your user experience to your potential customers. A user that clicks on your ad when he is searching for your product or service and a user that came across your ad while looking for something else will NOT have the same requirements and reactions.
You’ll see over the next steps that structuring your account into how you think your user will react, is the most important part of growing your client base with Google.
Search NetworkIn the search Network you have Google search engine that we all know. And then just below Google asks if you also want your ads to be included on the Google Search Network.
The Google Search Network are other partner websites that use the Google search functionalities.
Unfortunately, Google does not provide a precise list of these websites and you can’t pick and choose them. And although you can segment your stats to seek out the proportion of clicks coming from search partners, it is quite an opaque situation which is not great for making marketing decisions.
The few things we do know:
For those who already know about quality score, we have discovered that stats from partner search sites do not affect your account CTR (click through rate) and therefore the quality score of your campaign.
Generally your CTR and conversion rate will be lower than on Google search.
(Don’t worry we’ll clearly define CTR later in this course)
The Google search network still shows intent, which will have higher conversion rate than display advertising. And for branding campaigns the results are actually quite good as there is less competition.
If you have a limited budget however, I recommend that you spend everything you can on Google Search first. And you can always open to the Google search network later when you are ready to scale. I would definitely click on Google Search Partners before opening to the display network.
Display NetworkThis is going to be easy. Obviously, please uncheck display network. Now I am not saying that you should never advertise on the display network. As I’ve said before, it’s a very powerful and exciting acquisition channel, especially when telling your story through remarketing. It’s comparable to niche magazine advertising. People are interested in dogs, and you show these people an ad for dogs. However, trying to sell your product to people actually looking for your product will always be the easier option.
In any case, never ever mix network settings in the same campaign. Remember it’s all about expected user reactions. You’re trying to put together groups of users that should react in the same way.
Please ignore the “show more settings” just under Network selection for. We’ll be looking at that that later.
Step 12 - Locations (Targeting and Audience)
Businesses selling to a national audience should choose your country. If you’re selling to a local market you can apply towns, postcodes and distances.
Followers of this guide should immediately jump and say: “users in this area won’t have the same requirements and reactions of another! So we should split the campaigns accordingly!”
1st of all, thank you for following ;-), secondly you’re absolutely right. That will be our goal throughout this process.
However, although we know for sure that people react differently depending on their device and at which stage they are in the buying process, geographical reactions is still a guessing game at this stage. So splitting campaigns now could be a complete waste of time and make decisions difficult to take if there is not enough data in certain locations.
If you really do have enough location based data in your business please feel free to set a target local audience. Just please please make sure this audience is big enough to have enough stats.
You sell a discrete link called Location options. This is very important to open.
Targeta) People in, and showing interest in, these locations (recommended)
b) People in these locations
c) People searching for these locations
Be very careful. Showing interest in a location is not the same as being in a location! If you are selling a plumbing service in Manchester, you want your clients to be IN Manchester. You do not want your clients to be in London but look regularly for news about Manchester (United...).
Now your clients could be on holiday in another part of the country and be looking for a service in their hometown. However in this case, their state of mind will already be different.
This is true for products and services. Make your life easier, target only people IN your location.
Select b): people in these locations
And not a) the option recommended by Google.
ExcludeSelect a) People in your excluded locations
Step 13 - Choose your language
The next step in your campaign settings is choosing the language of your campaign.
2 things to remember here:
1) The language you will choose, is the language that has been selected in your user's browser.
So, if you are targeting a pish speaking population that live in the UK. And this population searches from an office environment or a public library. Then choosing the pish language will not mean that your ad will be shown to them.
If you are targeting French speaking students that have just arrived in the UK. They are probably all searching on their French laptop, even when they search in English. In this case, remember to select English and French.
2)
Your ads need to be in the same language as the targeted user's language.
In other words, Google does not translate your ads for you if you select another language!
Please ignore “Audiences” for now. That’s for later.
Step 14 - Choose your budget (Budget and Bidding)
This is always opens a lot of questions for new account owners. How do you know which amount to choose?
First it's important to know what Google actually does with this information. If you put a budget of £50/day, Google will allow your campaign spending to go up to £100 (double) in one particular day but it will never go over the £50/day budget on average over a 30 day period.
You will never spend more than £1500/month, but you may spend £1000 over 10 days (10 x £100).
When you make an estimation for your budget, you need to make sure that you can cover a higher spend in the early stages of your campaigns.
There is not one right answer here. This depends on your global business budget, profit margins and impact on the number of clicks/leads on your sales team.
You are in the learning phase. So it is key to put a maximum budget that you are comfortable with even if the results are not great at the beginning.
This sounds like basic finance investing advice: “do not invest what you are not prepared to lose”. But it is good advice. If you become stressed about spending money on Google Ads, it may paralyse you in your day job (constantly refreshing stats) and also force you to make rash decisions on your Google Ads account. And that is a key for disaster!!
Step 15 - Bidding (Budget and Bidding)
What do you want to focus on ?
Default Google Ads bidding options
(1) Conversions
(2) Conversion value
(3) Clicks
(4) Impression share
Conversions
Google will “help” you by bidding more on keywords that will drive the most conversions
Conversion value
Google will “help” you by bidding more on the keywords that will drive the conversions with the most value
Clicks
Google will “help” you by bidding more on the keywords that will drive the most clicks
Impression share
Google will “help” you by bidding more on the keywords where you will get the most impressions vs your competition
Well thank you google for all this help ! ;-)
Here is the issue.. Google is smart, maybe even smarter than you (definitely is smarter than me..!)… but there is no magic here. Google can not guess without knowing anything about your business or ads which keywords will drive the most conversions, clicks or impressions. It’s just impossible.
Teach Google about your business
What Google does is bid on keywords, learns from visitor reactions and only then does Google start optimising for clicks, impressions or conversions.
Google has to learn about your data before he can decide anything.
Now, the person that knows the most about your business is you. You know your history, your margins and your vision for the business going forward.
What we need to do is feed your knowledge to Google with a structure that it can digest as fast as possible. Then Google will be able to help you generate more sales and leads.
You’ll notice a link at the bottom of these Bidding options:
“Or, select a bid strategy directly”
Create your own bidding strategy
Target CPA : target conversion cost
Target ROAS: target return on investment (target on return ad spend)
Maximise clicks: get as many clicks as possible
Maximise conversions: get as many conversions as possible
Target search page location: target a position on google search
Target outranking share: target a higher position than your competition
Enhanced CPC: keyword bid price + an extra bid if google thinks it’s a good idea
Target impression share: target a market share of impression (think vs competition)
Or… and finally:
Manual CPC
I’m sure you’ve guessed already. The best option at this stage is to select “Manual CPC”.
We want to control what’s happening here. Learn about the market and all the reactions that our users could have. We are trying to create the best possible data structure to hand over to Google and we can only do that if we completely understand our market.
Choosing Manual CPC is for the top 1% of Google advertisers. But that is exactly what you will be by the end of these steps.
You'll can also learn when to use automatic bidding in this article.Go ahead and select Manual CPC and please ignore the “show more settings” for now
Step 16 - Ad Extensions
On certain accounts you may see an extra message
“
Get up to 15% higher clickthrough rate by showing additional information on your ads”. And it’s true, ad extensions will make your ad space bigger on search results, thus raising your click rates.
Sitelinks
Callouts
Call extensions
This is a critical part of your campaign setup, it is one of the key ingredients to getting a real edge on your competition. We’ll get into this in detail when we talk about your ads so you can skip this section for now.
Click on “Save and Continue”
Part 3 - Setup your Google Ads Adgroups
Here, Google is trying to get you to create ads as soon as possible without really understanding how an account is structured. Let’s do a quick crash course in account structure.
This is what a basic Google Ads account looks like:
Campaign 1
Adgroup 1
Keywords
Ads
Adgroup 2
Keywords
Ads
Campaign 2
Adgroup 1
Keywords
Ads
Adgroup 2
Keywords
Ads
If you’re selling products
- campaigns could be product categories
- adgroups could be sub product categories
Campaign: Table
Adgroup: Dining table
Keyword: large dining table, small dining table, 4 seater dining table etc.
If you’re selling services
- campaigns could be service categories
- adgroups could be sub service categories
Campaign: Plumber
Adgroup: Boiler problems
Keyword: boiler not working, plumber boiler, boiler emergency.
If you’re selling just 1 single product or service. Campaigns and Adgroups could be audience types.
Step 17 - Creating your first discovery adgroup
Let’s start by creating your “discovery” adgroup. Instead of guessing what your clients are looking for, we’re going to let real data help us build your account structure. And we do that by creating a discovery adgroup.
This first adgroup will be your most generic category.
For plumbers this will be for people looking for the keyword: plumber
For table shops this will be for buyers looking for the keyword: table
It will probably not be your best performing adgroup, but it will be the adgroup with the most data. And you’ll learn to use this data to spinoff new campaigns and adgroups.
Google asks a first question:
Which adgroup type would you like: Standard or DynamicAs usual, we need to keep control over our account, so we’ll choose “Standard”.
Default bid:The default bid is very difficult to guess at this stage, I’d recommend being conservative here starting at 20-30p/click and you can work up from there.
Step 18 - Keywords
You can add keywords to adgroups in 4 formats
Broad match: big table
Modified broad match: +big +table
Phrase match: “big table”
Exact match: [big table]
Broad match: big table
Your ad will be shown to people looking for the keyword “big table” and “table that is big” but it could also be shown for “large table” or “table for a big caravane”. You are giving google the right to guess synonyms and extra keywords it feels is relevant to the user’s search. With broad match, the order of the words do not matter.
Modified broad match: +big +table
Google will show your ad to people looking for keyword with the word [big] AND [table]. Both words with a + in front will need to be searched at the same time.
Big table and chairs : Yes
Large table: No
Phrase match: “big table”
Phrase keywords are all about word order. Your ad will be shown for “big table” and “very big table”. But your ads will not show for “table big”
Exact match: [big table]
Your ad will only show for the keyword [big table].
Step 19 - Add keywords to your discovery adgroup
As this is a discovery adgroup, you want to give enough space to Google to come up with new keyword ideas. But, if you give too much space you’ll have too much data to analyse and make decisions.
To add some level of control, we will not use broad match. Only:
Modified broad
Phrase match
Exact match
In the keyword section of your adgroup setup, you can add your equivalent to:
+table
“table”
[table]
Or
+plumber
“plumber”
[plumber]
Step 20 - Free Keyword Tools
For 1 keyword, adding 3 match types is is quick and easy. But for hundreds of keywords, this can be time consuming. Here are 2 cool and FREE tools to help you out:
Keyword Wrapper:
https://www.adwordswrapper.com/aw.cgi
Simply enter your keywords in the 1st box and click on wrap. The app will produce a list of keywords already wrapped with different match types.
Keyword Merger:
https://www.toptal.com/marketing/mergewords
This is for keyword combinations. Try this:
1st box: table
2nd box: big, small, large
3rd box: for sale, buy, price, discount
Click on “Merge” and the tool will produce a full list of combinations. You’ll probably need to remove a few keywords in the list but this tool will speed up your keyword research.
Finish setting up your first adgroupOnce you’ve added your main keyword with modified broad, phrase and exact match you’ll see that on the right google recommends further keywords. You can ignore that for now. You can also ignore the daily estimates and the “new adgroup” button.
It's time to click on “save and continue”
Part 4 - Create your first Google Ad
Time to get creative! With extra headlines, description areas and display urls, Google is giving more and more space to advertisers.
Step 21 - Let’s decompose a typical ad
a) Final URL
b) Headline 1 (30 characters max)
c) Headline 2 (30 characters max)
d) Headline 3 (30 characters max)
e) Display Path (2 x 15 characters max)
f)
Description 1 (90 characters max)
g) Description 2 (90 characters max)
h) Ad Url options
a) Final Url
This is the full url of your landing page. It’s where users will be sent once they click on your ad. Please test and double test this url. We can do all the optimisations and tactics, if your landing page is broken, it’s all pointless. You’ll be surprised how quick this can happen when you’re working with hundreds of Adgroups.
b+c+d) Headlines
Headlines are the most important parts of your ad. And Headline 1 is more important than 2, and 2 is more important than 3.
Often Google does not show all three headlines at the same time. So each headline needs to reinforce each other but they also need to be quite independent. Do not cut an argument between 2 headlines.
e) Display Url
This is the url shown to the user. This is NOT your final url and it does not have to be a real working URL. The display url allows you to give a snapshot of your business structure. Your headlines and description are about marketing and pre-selling. Display urls will prepare users to what they are going to see next in a very structured tree fashion.
f) and g): Descriptions
Google will generally not show these 2 descriptions at the same time. So make them independent, and although everything counts, description 1 is more important than description 2.
h) Url options
This is where you’ll be adding parameters and extra tracking information. It’s quite advanced and won’t be useful for a while so you can ignore for now.
Step 22 - The CTR, meet the magic number
Before we more forward, we should learn more about CTR.
Before you start writing your ads, let’s focus on what we’re trying to do. We want users to:
search for a keyword
see your ad
click on your ad
read your landing page
Convert into a sale or a lead
The mix Keyword + Bid + Ad + Landing page is going to lead to a conversion. It is also how Google determines if you are offering relevant information for products and services to your users.
Your ad plays a key role as it’s the link between the keyword and your landing page. Too optimistic and the user will click on your ad but not convert. If you ad is too pessimistic users will not click on your ad and nothing will happen apart from google raising your click prices.
If you bid on the keywords “table” and put the words “free table” in your ads. You will get a lot of clicks on your ads, but no conversions on your landing pages.
Creating an ad is a balancing act. However to start off you do need to get the user to click on your ads.
It’s time to introduce the CTR: Click Through Rate.
The CTR is the % of clicks on your ad VS impressions of your ad: Clicks/Impressions. The higher your CTR, the more your ad is relevant to the keywords you are bidding on.
It’s a key indicator for Google to decide if you’re doing a good job. It’s also a great benchmark for you to always try and create better ads.
Step 23 - What you cannot do to raise your Google Ads CTR
Your ads offer quite a lot of room to play with, but you cannot do anything. Here is the list of rules that you must follow in your ads. Please read this carefully. If you abuse these rules too often it can get your Google Ads account banned. And coming back from a ban is not easy.
No all caps: Google does not like SHOUTING. But title case is good in your headlines. It’s even recommended
No cursing: In general keep you language clean
No alcohol / gambling / porn / weapons / tobacco / smoking
You’ll find a full list of prohibited and restricted product categories here:
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=en-GB
No exceeding character limit
No extra spaces between letters. Write in english.
Not too much punctuation and exclamation marks: you can have 1 exclamation in description but never in headlines
No vague call to actions (CTA) messages > you cannot ask visitors to just “click here”.
No asterisks or symbols
Do not repeat words in your ad. You can add a keyword on headline 1 and in headline 2. But no: Table Table Table, Buy Our Tables.
No phone numbers: you can use “call only ads” or “call extensions”
In general be creative but stay polite and low key and you’ll be fine. Google will send you a friendly “disapproved ad” message if it’s not happy.
Step 24 - How to boost your Click Through Rate
Unfortunately, I cannot write the ads for you on this course. But you’ll find below a list of tactics that have proved to work great on improving CTRs in hundreds of sectors and thousands of ads we’ve been managing.
Headlines and descriptions
Give you clients a solution. Don’t repeat their problem. This is about knowing your market.
Example: If a user makes a Search for “Sell my car” -> Ad Headline: “We will buy your car”
Use numbers but not exact numbers.
Include price, promotions, sales, exclusive offers, reviews as long as they are true
Be careful with offers. Too cheap can seem too cheap.. Or fake!
Don’t use unproven superlatives like “we are the best”. If it’s legitimate and verifiable then use them.
Don’t talk about you, only about what you can do to help
Appeal to Users’ Sense of Entitlement : Address your audience. Use the words You/Your : make it personal.
Example: we will protect your best interests (divorce lawyer).
Try and create positive emotion: hopefulness, relief, and the feeling of being liked or admired by others
Try and remove negative emotion: Avoid going to jail / Don’t lose your dog / Dog tags,it’s the law!
Remove objections: list common objections to your service and address those preemptively in your ad copy.
Highlight what makes your company unique. Legitimacy. Social proof. How many items have you sold? How many people came to your event?
Use a registered or trademark symbol in your ads. That is the only symbol allowed.
Use offline sales tactics: scarcity, urgency, interest, motivation and triggers
Most people make decisions based on headlines, so put your efforts in headlines.
Use all the space but put the most important copy at the beginning
Unique selling point: why are you different?
Don’t forget your call to action (CTA): Start your call to action with a strong verb – something like “Get,” “Save,” “Build,” or “Join.”
If you are offering a new service or product, focus on benefits
If your product or service is already known like a vacuum cleaner, focus on features. You need to show how you are different.
On mobile: if you have text/call/location then make sure you use these extensions.
Display URL
Display URL: put main keyword + heavy call to action
It's not just about ads
Add at least 2 ads in each adgroup
Don’t forget sitelinks
Don’t forget your callouts
Create 1 dedicated landing page for each ad
Align ad copy with your landing page
Make sure your landing page is appropriate and connected to you ad. Your landing page should be an extended version of your ad. Mess it up and you ad relevance will go down and cost per click will go up.
If you can go local, go local!
Part 5 - Google Ads Billing
Step 25 - Billing information
This next page is to setup your billing. You’ll find all the usual payment options here.
This is where you can add your promotional code for your introductory offer.
Nothing special, however once you are up and running with several regular payments under your belt, you will quickly get the option to open a 30 day credit account with Google. That’s always handy.
Step 26 - Congrats page (again)
This is the second time that Google has shown us a congrats page to us. But this time you should have your 1st campaign, adgroup, keywords and ad all setup.
Important: Remember you campaign this is now live and active with your billing method in place. I’d recommend you pause your campaign now while you digest all of this new information.
Click on Explore Campaigns (blue button)
Step 27 - Pause your campaign (IMPORTANT)
In your dashboard click on:
Left Menu > Campaigns
Click on the green dot near your active campaign
Click on pause your campaign
Now breath… ;-) Well done! It’s my turn to say congrats.
This was the hardest part of Google Ads. There is still more to learn but these are all the steps you need to know to setup a solid campaign.
Step 28 - The mega Google Ads recap
Show your products and services to users that are looking for them
Structure your account so you can decide what works best in a heartbeat
Make sure all the elements of your combo [keyword + ad + landing page] are all related
Don’t panic. Do not make any brutal changes. If you’re hesitating, simply pause your campaigns and read this guide again before you jump back in.