Google Ads Tutorial [2022] | How to Set Up a Google Ads Campaign [from a 15,000hr Google Ads Master]

Hello, my name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads Master. Today, what we're going to be going through is I want to take you through the step by step process on how you can set up your very own campaign in Google Ads. Now, I want to make this very clear right from the start that I'm actually pitching this at people who are very new to Google Ads. So you've got either no experience or only a very limited experience in Google Ads. But before we get into that, what I also wanted to let you know is, is that if you stay around to the end of this video, I've actually got a free gift for you. And that is actually I want to give you a free download of my Google Ads Optimization checklist. Because obviously after we have set up your campaign, we're going to need to optimize that. And what this checklist is is this checklist is something that I've developed over the last 12 years of managing Google Ads campaigns. And it's something that I still use every day. I use it for all of my clients, whether they be some of my small business clients with smaller budgets of under $1,000, and I use it for my really large clients and international clients who've got budgets of up to $85,000 a month. The great thing about this checklist is it's part of my system and my process, and it works for whatever campaign, whatever size of campaign you're running, and whatever niche or niche that your campaign is in. And what it actually does is it actually goes through a checklist and lets you know what you need to optimize every 72 hours, every week, every month, every three months, and also every year. So a free gift that I want to give to you just for sticking around on this video with me. Right now, let's jump into this step by step process of getting your campaign started. Okay, so the first step of what we want to do is we want to do a search for Google Ads. Once you've done that search, you can just click on this and just go straight into your Google Ads landing page. If you do have a Google account or a Google Ads account, you can already just go in and sign in. Or if you wanted to, you can actually create a new Google account and a Google Ads account. And the benefit of that is on your first campaign, you do actually get $100 ad credit after you spend your first $75. So let's set this up and I'm going to say we're not a robot. Now that will email me a code which I can get and then I want to click on start now. Now, the first time that you actually jump into Google Ads, it'll actually bring you into what's called smart mode. But you don't want to actually stay in the smart mode. And the reason for that is if you were to stay in smart mode, it sets up what's called smart campaigns. And now the issue with that is that you actually don't get any visibility on what is happening in your account. Essentially you just put in your website, you put in some keywords that you think would match and then Google actually runs your campaign. But what we're going to be teaching you is the way to go through it. So don't get scared by the switch to expert mode because with the smart mode is that for the life of that campaign, Google doesn't give you visibility on what search terms people are actually using. You can't add in some key optimizations like adding in audiences and an extra low location targeting and bid optimizations. And I don't want you to get scared by all of those words because through this video and other videos, I'm going to be taking you through this process on a step by step basis. So essentially what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're actually switching to this expert mode. Okay. And then once you switch to expert mode it'll bring you to this screen and you want to look for this new campaign button. So what we're doing here is we go through and press new campaign. Now for this video I'm only gonna be focusing on a Google search campaign, which is those ads you may see when you put in a Google search and they're the text based ads. And for those, for a Google search campaign, there's only three different campaign types that we can use and this is either sales leads or website traffic. Sales and leads are pretty close together. But obviously the difference is, is that sales is probably more bent to people who are, who are using sort of E commerce products. So you're selling physical products. And what leads is, is that's actually more people who you're wanting them to either give you a phone call or you're wanting them to fill out a contact form. Website traffic is actually more for people who probably have a larger budget. For most businesses I'd be sticking in the sales and the leads campaign types. And the reason for that is because obviously when you're, you're starting out, you're really wanting to Limit those costs and make sure you're getting the best conversion values and the the highest number of sales or the highest number of inqu for the lowest price. Unless you're a big business and you've got and you really want to or you really want to be aggressive with your branding and get your name and your branding out there, I'd really be sticking to that's what website traffic can be used for. But I'd be sticking to your sales and your leads. It is important to note as well is that you actually can't change this. So once you've actually set this up, you can't go back and change this option. That that's actually this is one of the only options that you can't change. So just important to keep it in mind. But for most people sales and leads will be fine. So we go through and select the sales and then as we said, obviously we're dealing with search campaigns today. So we then select on that. Now if you want to, you can actually add in these, select the ways you'd like to reach your goals. So whether you want to go by website visits or phone calls, store visits, I mean obviously we're not talking about app downloads today, but for the phone calls that's going to be an option for you to add in a call extension which we will do later and I'll explain that through. So we can just leave that blank. And same with website conversions, we will leave that blank for the moment because that's not what we're talking about in this video. But don't stress we can set that up at a later date. Now you'll see through here is this Google will give you the option of the Search one as the campaign name. My methodology and what I recommend is I very much recommend that you actually change this name. And the reason why you want to change this name is it's something which we talk about in naming conventions and it's actually really, really important. And if you just keep that as Sales Search one later down the track when you might have multiple different campaigns running, if they're all called Sales Search one and Sales Search two, you actually don't know what they're about. So you actually have to dive into each individual campaign as opposed to being able to take it from a top level approach so you can see which campaigns or which products are performing, performing better. So I'm going to be running this for a villa resort that we manage in Bali and they have one bedroom and two bedroom villas. So I'm going to be running this example off of this and we're going to be calling it One Bedroom Seminyak. So for me that actually becomes really important. I know what that means. I know that the one BV is the slang that we use internally for One Bedroom Villa and Seminyak because we do use other campaigns targeting Bali and Barley keywords. So, so but for you, like say for example, if you're selling men's, you're selling shoes, you might have a campaign for men's shoes and then you might have another campaign for women's shoes and then you might have another campaign for kids shoes. And then also if you wanted to, you can either. A good strategy is if you, if you're marketing to different locations, so different cities, sorry, different states or different countries, you could put men's shoes Australia or men's shoes Europe. So there's a lot of different options. But the main goal of that is that you're just wanting to have a really name of your campaign so that when you're looking at reviewing your campaign down the track, you know exactly what you're talking about. Then we press Continue and then after we've got our campaign name, we select Continue. It actually brings us to your budget. Now with Google Ads, it's important to remember that your budget is actually set on a daily budget, but it's actually run over a monthly average. So if you wanted to spend say for example, three, $300 a month, you would put your budget in at $10 a day. But it's important to note with this is that some days as your campaign is running, you may spend $12, some days, other days you may spend $8. But it's looking at that over the month that your campaign spend will be in and around that $300. There is a little bit of a variance of around about 5% either way. And another important thing to note is that as your campaign gets more mature and you're starting to get good results, Google will actually start to use some different automatic optimizations. So for example, if there becomes really clear data that you're getting better conversions or better sales on the weekends, say for example, from Friday night through to Sunday night, Google will start automatically putting in some extra budget and extra focus on those days and then coming off and having a little bit less budget on the Mondays and Tuesdays. So don't be worried if one day you know your budget set at $10 and you see $15 spent. Google does work it out so that over a 30 day or a month average, you're spending in and around that average from your daily budget. All right, so then it gets into your bidding and you've got a couple of options here. You can either now if you had have added in some conversions at the start, you can actually choose to be going down by conversions which is basically looking at focusing on the number of conversions or conversion value. That's actually more for if you've got an E Commerce and you've actually got like a price for products. But regardless of that, even if they were an option always I always start a new campaign focused on clicks. Now the reason for this is because even if we do have some conversion values in there, I want to be able to control the campaign settings and I won't switch it over to maximize conversions or maximize conversion value until we have some actual conversions tracking. And I'm happy with the quality of those conversions. And once I know that I'm happy with the quality of conversions and level of conversions, we then will switch over from clicks to maximize conversions generally around about the 45 to 60 day mark. And then you will see this little section down here for more settings we can skip them because it will automatically set it to prefer the best performance which is what we want. And obviously we said we'll set up that conversion tracking at a later date then we click next. Alright, so this now brings you to. You'll see the network options and you can see that pre selected you'll actually have including the search partners. Now search partners are other networks outside of Google. So AOL and other sites which actually sort of take and factor in Google searches. To be honest with you, I've never in my 12 years of running Google Ads campaigns I've never seen two things I've never seen. I've never seen the Google search partners outperform the Google search network. And the Google search partners you just don't get as much information. Sorry, you don't get as much clicks and impressions and you just don't get the same level of information from those search partners. So because I don't see any value in it, I just always unselect that. And then also with the display network now the display network is sort of the image based ads and the remarketing and retargeting ads which you may have heard about. Now because today we're only talking about the search or the text ads, I actually don't select that either. Because if we do want to advertise in the Google Display network, I'm a big believer in that you're actually better off setting up a separate display campaign with focused image ads. Because if you've got search ads, you know, text based ads, which Google is just pushing out on the display network to try and pad out your budget, you're never going to get as much cut through and as much results compared to other advertisers who have got specific image based ads for the display network. All right, moving into locations. So this really comes down to your product and whether it's worthwhile. So for this one we're marketing a resort in Bali. So we've got some internal information because we have run campaigns on this before that, you know, we would target places like Australia. So you can target that. We know that we get really good market from places like Singapore, so we can target that. And then also we actually get a really good basis from some of the UAE states. But you could also add, you know, United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates. So there's a lot of different sections you can add there. But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. You'll know your own location targeting, but just also know that if you wanted to, you can actually set this up by down to cities and you can also set this up via postcodes or zip codes, even down to that level as well. So you add those. But what I wanted to talk about is the location options. Now there's essentially two main options. There's presence and interest. So presence is when people are regularly in your targeted locations. And so that's people who. So if you're targeting, say for example, Sydney, you're only going to be targeting people who are regularly in. So basically people who live or work in your targeted locations. Where search interest is people who are searching for your targeted locations. So for most campaigns you'd be using presence or interest. The only time that I would use presence only is if you're offering a specific product or service in a really tight area. So if you're only if you're offering, say for example, you're a plumber or a carpenter and your services are only for one city, I'd only be using presence just because you really want to be targeting people who are living and working in your areas, you can then add some exclusions. But at the moment that will be fine. But we're going to keep for this one because we're not only wanting to target people who are in Bali at the moment because we also do get people who are there currently and doing some last minute bookings, but then we're also looking at targeting people who aren't actually in our physical area, which is Bali. And we're wanting to target those different countries. Okay. From there as well, if you wanted to, you can also target via languages. Now, in regards to languages, you're better off keeping it to your individual language. So obviously for this campaign, you know, I speak English, so we're going to be targeting in English. If you do have a product or your company that has different languages, I would recommend breaking that out and splitting that out into different languages. So you'd have a campaign for English speakers, campaign for Portuguese or Spanish or Chinese, whatever other language they speak. And the reason for that is so that, that way you can have particular ad copies. Now, audience segments, this is a bit of a pain point for me because the amount of times I see people teaching and they just say, oh, you can just skip over this. Audience segments. I really want to stress to you that audience segments are not an optional extra. You need to be adding your audience segments right from the very start. Now, Google Ads, we do a lot of targeting by keywords, but I would say just as important is the actual audiences that you're targeting. And so what you can do here is that obviously we're targeting a, we're targeting a holiday destination. So we would be looking at, you know, you can do a search for holiday, and then, you know, we can target all of these people who are currently looking at, searching different holidays. So we can add, you know, add them family vac, beachbound, snowboard, you know, we'll add all of those. Even though obviously snowboard, you can't. There's no snow in Bali. But there's. Because we're, we're setting this to an observation method. And, and what that actually means is that we're not actually, we're not cutting out people who aren't in these audiences that we select. But it's just going to give us some extra data that we can report on. And how that really helps is if we actually see that after the campaign is going, we're actually seeing that the travel audience is outperforming the water sports enthusiast audience. We can actually focus an extra budget in on that. So at the start, all you need to know is that let's just add as many audiences as possible and you can remove them down the track. The value in it is that it just gives you another whole set of data that you can actually use to optimize your campaign in the future. So it's just a matter of selecting all of those. And then we, we see them added in There and then down the more settings there are options to start this. So if you wanted to start it say on a particular date, say three or four days from now, you could do that with an end date. You can add an end date. But what I'm if you are going to end the end date, I do see also some people set up campaigns for like sort of seven days or 10 days. That's actually not really recommended. And the reason for that is because when you start a new campaign, it actually does go into a learning phase of a round of sometimes up to sort of 14 days. So I wouldn't be starting a Google Ads campaign if you're not going to be running it for at least 30 to 60 days. But obviously with the majority of campaigns you can be running this and it's going to be going to continue going the ad schedule. If you know there are some businesses where you only want your ads to run on a certain day, so you may not want those ads to run on a Sunday. What you can actually do is that you can actually add in here and we're saying, you know, we just want it to run Monday to Friday. We want it to start at 9 o' clock in the morning and run through to, let's just say 9 o' clock at night. I see those settings very much. Especially if you're a service based industry, you know, so like if you're a doctor surgery and you only want people calling you or contacting you when you're open, you can add those. But for this campaign, because it's a holiday campaign, we want people to be booking any time of the day. All right, then we can go to next. Now we come to the time where we actually add in our keywords and ads. Now if you're unfamiliar with Google Ads, it's built around keyword targeting. So these are the actual keywords and search phrases that you're going to be targeting so that when someone searches certain keywords you actually want your ads to appear. Now when you do, add in your website and I'll add in our website for the villas my villasandbali.com it will actually, you do have an option of actually getting keywords. Now I've actually got another video on this which is in and around keyword research and I'll actually put this in the link because I don't actually recommend using this function. And the reason for that is because what, what you actually want to end up and start doing is that you want to have your keywords and your ad groups actually really structured into different keyword themes. And the reason for that is because, you know, we're advertising one bedroom villas and two bedroom villas and we don't want everything crammed into one campaign or one ad group. So I do have another video, as I said, which I'll have a link on that, which will show you this process so that you can actually create a spreadsheet like this. But we're going to be focusing in on. I've got this campaign for one bedroom villas and one bedroom Seminyak. So I'm going to take all of those keywords and then it's a matter of cutting them. I'll get rid of all these ones and then you will see our keywords from here. Now there is. Because we haven't put in all the locations, you'll see this coming. But I wouldn't actually really worry about this because we know that there's search traffic for these keywords because I can see it in here and I know that that's in there. So we don't need to be stressed about that. Now, the ad group as well. So similar to what we did with the naming convention in and around the campaign where we called it one bedroom Seminyak, we would be calling this the same. So we can go one bedroom Seminyak. And the reason for that is I might have some other ad groups in this campaign in and around, you know, Bali or different spellings, but we want to do that for the same reason again is that when we're looking at our campaign and how it's performing, so that you don't have to go into every single campaign and every single ad group, you know exactly what that ad group is talking about. So you can see here, there's the one bedroom Villa Seminyak. And we know that these keywords are just talking about one bedroom villa seminar. We're not targeting two bedroom villas, we're not targeting holiday accommodation in Bali. We'll put them into separate ad groups, campaigns. Once again, using your example, if you're selling shoes, you might have an ad group for men's shoes and then another ad group for women's shoes. The ad group for men's shoes, you'd just be talking about men's shoes. And then the ad group for women's shoes be talking from there. And then the next section that comes down to is your ads. So you would add in your. Your URL, which for us is. And then now, similar to the keyword research, I've actually got another video on this which we can Actually, which I'll also put that link on there for ad copy. So similar to your keyword research is that I would have actually done this before. And what we actually do is that we create a spreadsheet where we've got all of our ad copies in there. And the reason for why I do this is actually pretty simple. Once again, it's just so that I just find it's a better way that I can actually plan out my ad copy, make sure hitting all of our core messages and rather than just in here just going oh what, what am I going to type and what are we going to do? I also find for quality control it just allows you to make sure little things like you've got all your spelling done correctly and if you've got any industry regulation concerns, you can just make sure that everything is done, done correctly. And so once you've done that, it's just a matter of copying over your headlines and then copying over your ad descriptions. Also what we talking with this one is I'm only dealing with responsive search ads. And the reason for that is because come June 2022, some of you may have been familiar with expanded text ads. But if you're new to Google Ads and you have no idea what I'm talking about, this is going to be the standard type of ad that you can use. So what actually happens is you can see your ad through here is that Google actually displays three different headlines, two descriptions, but you actually have the option of adding up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions. What happens from there is that in these responsive search ads, Google, it has some built in split testing where Google will display the ad copies, the headlines and descriptions in different manners so they can work out which ads are getting the best results and which combinations are getting the best, you know, highest number of click throughs and ultimately the highest number of conversions. So I just basically go back to my sheet and start copying everything across the different lines we want to use. We've got a, we've already got that sale one where we offer a guaranteed best price. And then what you can also do if you did want to, I mean obviously I was going to put my, my name in there, our branded name in there as well is that you do want to make sure that you're actually hitting off these keyword searches in there. And the reason for that is because if someone actually searches one bedroom Villa Seminyak, you want them to be able to see it in their keyword text. Now another thing to note as well is that you do have character limits for your headlines. You've got 30 characters that you can use for your headlines and 90 that you can use for your descriptions. So we can go through and add more, but for the process of today I'll just add those. Then we've got my two descriptions you're going to be adding. Once again you can add some extra ones. And then up here you can actually see the display path. The display path is where you can actually put something in like one bedroom Seminyak Villas. And what that actually does, if you can actually see here in the ad, this will actually appear after it. And once again it just adds helps with the targeting of what's happening in here. Now one thing I will notice in here you see this little warning is that you do want to make sure that you're actually sending it to a secure website. So a site that has a safety certificate or SSL certificate on it. Because if you don't do that, when people click on the ad they will actually get a bit of a warning. So just make sure that you are sending it to the HTTPs version of your website. So you can see here, that's an example how the ad looks. And with those responsive ads you can see here, you can run through the display different previews and you can just see how Google is just going to be running some different headlines and different descriptions in different orders. That's how it looks on mobile. And then you can also switch over to see how it looks on your desktop. If you did want to, you can then actually go through and create other ad groups. But we're not going to do this for this example. But that's. If you wanted to do other ad groups, you just recreate that process of adding in your keywords and your ad copy. So then after this, this actually brings you to your extensions. So I'm just going to give a brief overview on this. But obviously your sitelink extensions are options for you to be able to send people to different parts of your website. So if you wanted to. So for us in this we're advertising a one bedroom Seminyak Villas, but we've also got two bedroom Seminyak Villas. So we could actually send them to that two bedroom villa site. You can also send them to your contact page or your gallery, whatever the situation is there, that you can add those site links in. But we will do that at another time. Call out extensions. These are little phrases that actually appear after your, after your ads and that will appear on all of your ads. So for us we do, we do offer things like free airport transfer. We can type that in. You know, if you were running a E commerce brand and you offered a free delivery, you might want to type in, you know, free delivery or you might want to type in 90 day returns policy. But it's basically just an opportunity for you to use some unique selling points and add that into your ads. But similar to that, we won't add these in at the moment. And then finally, call extensions. So this is actually where you can actually get your phone number to appear at the bottom of the ad. So if you want to have people actually call you, you just enter in your phone number and this will actually automatically set up conversion tracking, which is great. So, so you can actually get tracking in Google Ads, which actually lets you know how many times people have actually seen your ad and clicked on your phone number. If you've ever seen it before where you've, you've done a Google search and you've clicked on an ad and it hasn't taken you to the website, it's taking you directly to their phone number and then you've got the option to ring them. That's what a call extension is. The only thing I will say with call extensions is that whatever phone number you put in here that actually does need to appear on your website. So whatever phone number you have on your website, it needs to be in the call extension as well. All right, and then we get to our review section. So you see your campaign name, we see that it's a search sales, then we actually see our budget, you see your bidding, and then you just. So what you're basically doing, you're just going through and checking that you're happy with everything. And then you get to see this little button through here. If you're happy with everything, you then press Publish campaign and you're good to go. Okay, so you've done it, you've pressed publish and you've got your first campaign live. So as I promised at the start of this video, the next step is actually now that we've got your campaign running live, is that you actually need to know what optimizations you need to be completing every 72 hours, every day, every week, every month, every quarter, and then also every year. So what I've actually put together for you is, is I've actually put together my Google Ads optimization checklist. So if you actually go to our website, which is defined Digital Academy and then Google Ads Checklist, you'll have the option to be able to actually download this checklist and you'll actually get access to that form straight away. And then what we also do do is we actually, we release videos like this every single week with great training. So you will be notified when they come out. That's my free gift for you. Thank you for watching this video. Remember, I'll put this Google Ads checklist link in the description down below and we look forward to seeing you on our next training video. Thank you.