Intro to Google Ads: How to Run Ads Like a Pro

Thinking Google Ads? Good.

If you’re not, here’s 10 reasons you should (number 7 is my personal favorite):

Massive Reach
Ability to target
You control your ad spend and campaigns
You set your own terms
Much faster than SEO
Help build brand awareness
Find buyers with intent to purchase
Earn more conversions
Largest search engine on the planet
Can help with local businesses (learn why here)

Google ads is the way to go whether you own a service or product business.

Here’s what you need before you get started with Google Ads

A. Landing Page that’s optimized for Google ads

You have a website, that’s good.

But is your website optimized for conversions?

If you sell multiple products or services, you’ll want to create a separate landing page to send your traffic to.

A landing page has one purpose only, to be your best salesman to convert visitors to leads.

Your page will be convincing enough to get your potential customers to share their information with you.

And it also needs to be optimized so that there’s as little friction as possible.

Remove the fluff (ie: don’t ask for an address if you don’t need it).

B. Google Ads account

Head over to ads.google.com and create your account. In a few days, you should receive an email about free ad credit of upwards of $100.

After you open an account, make sure to turn off your campaigns so Google doesn’t charge you while you build out your campaigns.

C. Determine what keywords may work for your business

Start by creating a list of keywords or phrases someone would use to find a business like yours online.

For example, If you’re a realtor, here’s a few you’d use:

Create a list of 5-10 keywords if you’re just starting out.

D. Do your competitor research

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel on this one.

See what your competitors in your space are already doing and mimic what already works.

Head over to google.com and type in the potential keywords or phrases that make sense for you business.

Examine and record notes on potential ad copy you use for your business.

The Google ad campaign overview

There’s a few key elements you should know when building your first campaign.

It’s the campaign itself, the ad groups, keywords and the ad.

The campaign is the overall group that contains your ad groups.

The ad groups are groups that contain your keywords and your ads.

The keywords are terms you chose to be identified with.

And the ads are the copy that show up on google.com when someone uses your keywords.

Important notes:

Keep your campaign unique to each product or service (ie: dog toy and cat toys would be two separate campaigns)

Keep your ad groups unique to keywords with the same niche. (Ie: chewy toys and hard toys would be two separate and groups).

Keep your keywords unique to the ad group. (Ie: chewy toy, soft toys, mushy toys will all belong to the chewy toy ad group and not the hard toy ad group)

These notes are important because Google appreciates their advertisers to organize their ads in such a way that it helps their searchers.

Google will reward you with higher quality scores, thus cheaper costs per click.

Here’s a visual break down:

Organizing your keywords for optimizing in search

If you’re starting off, you want to organize your keywords in ‘modified broad’ structure. So if your keyword is ‘real estate agent’, you’d write it as +real +estate +agent in your ad group.

Phrase match and exact match versions can also be included in your ad group as experiments to learn which phrase match makes the most sense after you gather some data.

Take a look at the several phrase match types here:

Creating strong ad copy

You’ve built your campaign, you structured you ad groups and set you keywords in the correct phrase type.

Now it’s time to build the ads.

Start with selecting a text ad and have another tab open with a google search of the keywords your are planning to use.

Examine your competitors ad copy you find on your google search and mimic the themes you see.

Here’s an example of a real estate agent ad:

Notice how it’s structured and written.

By doing this, you’d save time and money on testing ad copy because you’re copying what already works.

Budgets and bidding strategy

If you’re new, I’d recommend working you way up to higher budgets and cost per clicks (CPC).

Start with a manual CPC method to have complete control of your ad spend and CPC.

Set your ad groups to low budgets, say $1-1.50 per ad group.

And your overall campaign to $20.

This would allow you to examine your data throughout the week without exhausting all your marketing budget.

You can make timely adjustments as you gather data.

Once you have at least 25+ leads per month, you can start using the Target CPA & Max conversion methods to allow Google to optimize your campaigns for you.

But until then, examine your ads and keywords every couple days and make adjustments that fit your preferred customer acquisition costs (CPA).

Why and when to hire an agency

In this blog we discussed why it’s important to run google ads, how to open an account, what you’ll need before you get started, how to do your research to save on testing, optimize your keywords, create appealing ad copy and set your budget and bidding strategies.

This overview should help you get started today and bring in traffic to your website.

It’s important to know that all data is useful even when you’re not converting at the numbers you are aiming for.

There is no bad data when it comes to digital marketing.

If you’re still struggling getting the results you wish for, or simply don’t have enough time to spend 40+ hours a month on your data then you should consider hiring an agency to help with this.

At RunAmplify, we specialize in Google Ads to help businesses of all sizes with their PPC campaigns.