11 Easy Steps to set up a Google Ads Search Campaign [2023 Google Ads Tutorial]

Welcome to my new Google Ads tutorial teaching series called Get Google Ready in 2023. And in this 10 part teaching series, I'm going to be taking you through how to set up every single type of Google Ads campaign you need to be using in 2023. Plus, we're going to take it a step further and I'm also going to show you the correct way of how you need to be going about and optimizing each of those campaigns. But right now, I'm going to be taking you through the step by step process in how to set up a Google Search campaign. And the exc. Is that the process and the strategy and the structure that I'm going to be taking you through in this video is the exact same strategy that I use on my Google Ads search campaigns right now, regardless of whether they're a small campaign or a large campaign. So I use this structure and strategy, the campaigns that are spending only $300 a month all the way up to campaigns that are spending up to and over $200,000 every single month on Google search ads. And that is one of the best things about Google Ads in that when you initially set up your campaign, if you set with the correct structure and the correct strategy, you can easily scale and grow your campaign as your business grows. So with Google Ads, you don't always have to be on the hunt for the latest new trend, because success with Google Ads is all about understanding how the Google Ads platform works and then using the correct strategies and structures in order to get the best results. If we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And if you want to see all of these teaching videos in my Get Google Ready in 2023 teaching series, I want you to make sure that you've not only subscribed to my channel, but you've also turned on that notification button so that you get notified every single time I release a new video in this series. But with all that said, let's get straight into it now before we get into that step by step process of how you need to go through and set up your Google Search campaign, I do want to take you through a little bit of a screen share to show you how you need to structure your Google search campaigns. And this is an important note because if you just rush in and then quickly set up your Google Search campaign without giving a thought or making sure that you're using the correct structure, you're going to be losing a lot of money in Google Ads really, really quickly. Because by using the correct structure in your Google Ads search campaigns, you can really quickly see which parts of your campaign are being successful and which parts are not being successful. And if you're not using that correct structure, it becomes a lot harder to do the really important things that we need to be doing like going through and checking our search term audits to limit out any unwanted traffic, being able to add in really clear split tests, and then also going through and making sure that we're reviewing our audiences and our locations and our devices and all of those high level optimizations that you do need for success in Google Ads. So let me go through and show you this structure right now. And the structure that we want to be using is what we call the one keyword theme method. Now you need to understand that with Google search campaigns that it's built on search, but it's also built on the goal of Google wanting to achieve. And what Google wants to achieve is that it wants to match highly relevant ads with highly relevant search terms which are then taking people through to highly relevant landing pages. So when you got your Google Ads account is that you would break in your account into different campaigns. Now I'm using the example of a villa resort in Bali. So we would have one campaign and built around one bedroom villas. We'd have a second campaign built around two bedroom villas and then a third campaign built around general Bali villas and luxury Bali villa keywords. And then underneath each of these campaigns you would have your individual ad groups and I've got an ad group around one bedroom villas. And this is where we're targeting all of our one bedroom villa keywords which would then take people through to our one bedroom villa page. Same with the two bedroom villa, it's got an ad group around two bedroom villas, which has got the keywords around two bedroom Bali villas and two bedroom seminar vil through to these relevant landing pages. So the reason why we set it up this way because if someone was to complete a search for one bedroom villa, it would take them through to a relevant one bedroom villa landing page. Whereas if they were doing a search for a two bedroom villa, it would take them through to this relevant page. So for example, if you're electrician and you offer air conditioning installation services and then also services about installing new lights or new smoke alarms, you would have different campaigns. So one for air conditioning, one for general electricity and lights and then one for smoke alarms. Or if you were an e commerce store and you had a men's and women's cl. And you can even break it down like this. Where you would have your men's clothes, we see different ad groups around shirts, T shirts and jumpers. Same for women's. You would have your women's clothes and have different ad groups based around summer dresses, T shirts and shorts. And then this would all take them through to those relevant landing pages targeting those relevant keywords. So now that I've taken you through how you need to go about and structure your Google search campaign, let's now go through that step by step process process of setting up your very own search campaign with Google Ads. Now I do need to stress that I do run through these steps quite quickly, but never fear because if you stick around to the end of this video, I'm going to share a link with you so that you can download my Google Ads search campaign setup guide. And this has screenshots of all of these individual steps which I'm about to take you through. So as I said, we will be moving through it quite quickly. But never fear because you can download that guide if you stick around to the end. Let's get straight into it. So to start setting up your Google Ads campaign, you want to go into your Google Ads dashboard. If you don't have a Google Ads account yet, all you need to do is you need to go to ads.google.com follow this link and then it will take you through the process of getting started. This is quite an easy process, so we're not going to focus on that today. And once you've got that set up, you'll see a dashboard like this. And what we need to do is we need to go through and click on new campaign. Now the other thing that I do want to mention that when I get to the process of setting up my Google Ads campaign campaign, I have already gone through and completed my keyword research and I also go through it and I've completed my ad copy. Now in the description of this video, I will put through how I go through and complete my keyword research and also create my ad copy. And what that does is that just saves time that when we come to that stage of adding in a keyword research and also ad copy, we can just cut and copy that across. And the benefit of that is that it also means that we've gone through and already correctly structured our campaign. So once you click on new campaign, you want to be selecting either sales or leads. Now the difference between these that if you're a service based industry and you're looking to generate phone calls or form inquiries, I would use leads. If you're an E commerce, you're looking at doing online sales through your search campaign, I would use the sales objective. And now I know some people just say don't worry about this and create a campaign without a goals guidance. But the reason for why one of these two are the one that you should be using is because this does give Google an early indication that you are wanting your Google Ads to be focused on sales or leads. And what that does do is that Google does use a lot of indexed data. So even if you're running a new campaign or a new account, it will pull in some index data or industry standards from similar competitors. So that's why it is really important to either select sales or leads. And because we're going to be setting this up for our villa resort in Bali where we're looking for people to give us an inquiry, we're going to select leads. And if you've got some conversion actions already set up in your account, these will be put in here. But if you're not, you can just go through and skip this page. So we just go through and press continue. And then obviously we want to be selecting search because that's the campaign we're setting up today. And then you can, if you wanted to, if you wanted to add in a bit of a focus, I'm happy with all of these, but let's just say that you did want to focus just on phone calls, you could select this one. But let's just keep this blank for the time being. Now when it comes to the campaign name. So because we're looking at running multiple search campaigns in this example, and because I'm a really big believer in you want to be using a proper naming convention. And the reason for that is because even if you're only running one campaign at the moment, but three or four or five months down the track, you may be wanting to add in some different campaigns. And if you've got Search Campaign one and Search Campaign two, you don't really know which one you're talking about. Now for this one I've typed in one BV Seminyak Search. And the reason for that is because this is just a naming convention that I like to use, it lets me know we're talking about one bedroom villas in Seminyak. And this is a search campaign. You don't have to do this. But once again, there's no set rules here and the only people will see the campaign name are people with internal access to the account. So it's all just about naming it something that makes sense to you, that you quickly from a glance know exactly what this campaign is targeting. Then we go through and press continue now for bidding. This is kind of a bigger conversation. But right now if this is a new campaign and you've got no account history, so this is the first time you've run a campaign for quite a while, I'd be recommending switching it over to clicks and then you can look to add in a conversions bidding strategy later down the track. But if this is account where you already have some active conversions within the last 30 days, you can just go straight to conversions. But I wouldn't be setting up a target CPA yet. The reason for that is because we firstly want to see how this campaign performs before we start setting up any target CPAs. Then we just need to go through and click next. Now Google will pre fill the search network and the display network. Now the search network, these are search partners. So these are sites outside of Google, say for example like AOL or other similar sites. And display network is the image based networks. Now I unselect the search network, the reason for that, even though Google says most advertisers include it. I've consulted to numerous different digital agencies and I've never seen anyone as best practice include this. And just comes down to you just don't get the same level of data. And in regards to display network, the reason why I unselect this is because if you're going to be setting up a display campaign, you're better off to go through and actually add proper images to it and do it properly. Because if you're just using text images, you're never going to get the same cut through as another advertiser who's doing a display network with display images. Then we come down to our location targeting. So there's a couple of options here. You can do a worldwide campaign or you can select the country of origin. So obviously this campaign is being set up in Australia. So I could select Australia or if you wanted to, you could select multiple locations. So with this one we know I'm just going to add in three or four different countries that we know we get really good results from. You could go through and add in more if you wanted to. What you can also do too is you can also target this down to not only by country, but also by city, region, state or even a postcode. And if you wanted to do that, you would just type in say for example Queensland and you could Also target that one in there. Now when it comes to location options, I would generally select this presence option. And what that does is, is that that's then focusing people who are only in or regularly in your targeted locations. So this would only target people who are regularly in Australia, Singapore or United Arid Emirates. And the other reason why I do only select presence only is because I have found that this does help to limit any spam bot activity. It doesn't cut out 100% of it, but it definitely does limit those numbers. Then if you wanted to, you can add some exclusions, but I generally don't do that on the setup with the languages. Now, because the UAE has English and Arab, but because all our ad copy and our search terms are going to be in English, I recommend that you only use the language which your ad copy is in. So if you want to do a separate campaign for the Arab speaking market, you would want to have ad copy that is set in that language because Google doesn't translate that ad copy for you. And then when we get down to is we want to go through and add in some audience segments. Now it's really important to add these in because what I need to stress that for success with Google Ads, it's not just about targeting search terms, it's also targeting the right types of audiences who are completing certain search terms. So what you want to do in here now the other thing that I want to clarify with your audience segments is that you're going to be using the observation method. So by selecting, and I'm just selecting these 13 that Google is recommending, it doesn't mean that it's not going beyond these selections. It just means that we're getting this data so that we're not only getting the data in regards to different search terms, but we're also going to be getting data. So we can see does the audience of trips to Bali convert more than travel buffs? And with that data we can then add in some extra optimizations. So if anyone is saying to a search campaign that you can just skip over this section of audience segments, I would be really worried about the advice that they're giving you. And then from here as well, you can add more of these. One section that I do like to go into is this, who are they? And then I like to go in and add in this demographic data. And because this then really allows us to see a bit of a profile on who is actually coming in and interacting with our ads, once again, remembering it doesn't have to be targeted around the industry or the sector that you're in because once again we're just asking for the data and then we can make the optimization decisions later. So you can go through and add in more and more of these but just added in 34 to start with. Now when it gets down to the more settings is that the main one that I would look at is that if you are actually looking at starting this campaign sort of five or seven days in advance, which especially if you want the campaign. So let's just say we needed this campaign to start by the 10th of November. What I'd be recommending is I'd be recommending setting this up three or four days before just to make sure that everything is approved and then you can go through and say we want this to start on the 10th of November. Now I don't normally add an end date and the reason for that is because Google search campaigns are very much an always on campaign. Mean by that is that the best success is done by week on week, month on month optimization. So you're really looking at running this campaign for a long term. I've seen some people do examples of setting a campaign 10 days in advance just doesn't work for search. The reason for that is because when you're setting up a new campaign you're going to be in a learning phase for the first seven to 10 days. The only other thing that you may want to change here, especially if you're a service based business and you only want to be receiving enquiries like phone calls between Monday and Friday and office hours, you can add in the schedule in here. So we say we only want Monday to Friday between 8am and let's take it through to 630. But I'm going to clear that out because I don't want this for this campaign. Then we can go through and click on next. Now comes the time we need to go through and add in our ad groups, keywords and ads. And this is where I said remember that I've already got my spreadsheet ready with my segmentation by campaigns, ad groups and keywords. I'm doing this campaign for One Bedroom Villa. So we're going to call this ad group 1BV. Once again remembering with the naming conventions it's all about something that makes sense for you. So you can do this keyword research in here. But as I said because I've already completed mine, I'm just cutting and copying, pasting it here. Same with the ads, we've got our responsive search ads in Here, start with our URL. And then it's just a matter of putting all of this information in here. So I'll go through and add this in here now. Okay, so I've gone through, and we've got our keywords in here. We've also got our ad copy happening in here. And you can see that we've got all of our headlines and our descriptions working. And you can also see through here that we've already got our site links set up. Now, this is the section where you can add them in here. If you don't have them already, you just click the site link section. And what this does is this adds in some extra elements underneath your ad. Also, to you don't stress, because you don't have to add this through your campaign setup. You can go through and do this at a later date once your campaign is set live. And then from there we just click done. And then we go to next. And now we need to go through and set our budget. Now, Google has changed this in that they add in a recommended budget, but we can set our own custom budget. Let's just say we only want to spend $450 a month. We would type in $15. The reason for that is because Google runs on what's called a daily budget, and then it averages out to the month. So the way that happens is that because we put it in $15 a day, Google will budget this out so that we're spending $450 a month. There will be some days where we will spend more than $15, and there'll be other days that we spent less than $15, but the average per month will be that $450. If you only wanted to spend $300, you would take that down to $10. If you wanted to spend $3,000, you would have your budget at $100. Then from there, we click next. And then all we need to do is we just need to go through and just review all of these sections. And once we're happy with that, we just go through and click Publish Campaign. Congratulations. That's how you go through and set up your very own Google Ads search campaign. And remember, if you've missed any of those steps or you'd like to download my free Google Ads search campaign setup guide. All you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. And remember, please.