Google Ads For Beginners (2025 Complete Guide)

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads and in today's video I am going to give you a complete breakdown on how to get started with Google Ads the right way and start a campaign from scratch that hopefully starts generating sales for you today. This is the exact process that I would use if I were creating a new account or a new campaign today. If you don't know me, my name is Austin Leclair. I am co founder of Grow My Ads. I have been in this game for a decade. I've built two seven figure agencies. I've audited over 1,000 Google Ads accounts. We manage millions of dollars here at Grow My Ads per month. So we've seen it all. From small mom and pop stores to billion dollar corporations. From spending millions of dollars per month in Google Ads, we've seen it all. I hope that this is one of the best resources for free online for beginners. I get a lot of beginners that ask me questions and I'm like I have to build something for them that will be easy to follow and can get them making money right away and avoid costly mistakes that a lot of beginners make with Google Ads. Also, there's going to be a complete notion framework that I have built and I'll be reviewing in this video as I go along while also diving into an account and showing you step by step how to build out campaigns, ads, ad groups, keywords, etc. But this notion doc has everything you're going to need. It's totally broken out. I have all the content in here. There's a lot of settings too that I have other videos on our YouTube channel ready to go. So they complement sections that we'll be talking about. So this is basically a complete free course. So when you hit certain sections you'll have the videos easily to get to. Now a lot of those videos will be in the description below in this YouTube video. But if you want the ease of of following from beginning to end, in this notion doc we have a free school group called PPC Launchpad. I will have this notion doc in the classroom section of our free school group. All you have to do is sign up again, it's completely free. The sign up for that school group will be in the description below. Enough with all of that. Let's dive into actually starting to build a campaign and a brand new account with Google Ads. Okay, before we actually get into an account and we start building out ads, there's some fundamentals that we have to talk about and this is actually key for all beginners. This is what a lot of beginners will miss and it will be costly to them. So I'm here to hopefully save you money. I'm also here to make you money. But. But usually beginners waste a lot of money. And in fact, many of you watching this video probably shouldn't even be running Google Ads to begin with because you haven't really thought about what the heck it is you want, how much is going to cost, and how could you actually achieve your goals. So fundamentals number one, setting expectations before you spend a single penny. So you should be aiming for 10 clicks per day. Why? Click volume is important in today's world. With Google Ads five years ago, you could get away with lower volume because manual bidding, which I'll talk about bidding later, was key to operating a Google Ads account. Today, it's very much driven by Google's AI capabilities and technologies. So you're utilizing something called smart bidding. A lot of times. Smart bidding and machine learning needs lots of volume in order for it to work consistently and in a way that's going to make your account behave in a manner that you would want. So you absolutely, in the beginning, need to get enough click volume to eventually get enough, hopefully conversion volume to actually be able to do anything within your account. If you don't get enough click volume, what happens is you're going to suffocate the campaign's ability to get you enough data to be able to even get any conversion volume to be able to even optimize anything. So what happens is you'll spend some money month one, two, and by month three, usually you're giving up on it and say Google Ads doesn't work well, it's because the fundamentals and expectations weren't set correctly in the beginning. So aim for 10 clicks per day. This will give you enough breathing room to eventually allow the machine learning to work. Once we get to that stage, which I'll talk about now, you have to look what are average CPCS in my industry? I will talk about keyword research a little bit later on in this video, but in the keyword research phase, you start to see what average CPCS are for keywords that you want to start targeting. So to give you an example, if you're in an industry with $20 clicks, which by the way, there are many I run, grow my ads right, and for me to bid on Google Ads agency keywords cost me hundreds of dollars per click. So it will key or CPCS will be different and vary by the industry you're in, but there are Some very expensive clicks out there because they're competitive and obviously make those businesses a lot of money. So if you're in a high CPC industry and you're like, well, I only have $500 per month, you're going to waste your money. You can't get any click volume if CPCs are 20 bucks and you only have a $500 per month budget. So you absolutely, before you even go and build a campaign, you must do research in the beginning. So you need to look at what are the terms I should be going after. I'll be talking about that at the start with seed, keywords, section of this course and video. But you need to be looking at what are the keywords, what are the CPCS of the keywords that I want to be targeting. Do I have enough to get 10 clicks per day in budget? So if my CPCs are $20 a click, am I willing or do I have $200 per day to actually spend to get the click volume I need? Now, if you're in a cheaper industry and you know clicks are only a dollar on average, it's very rare to find these days by the way. But then, yeah, okay, you can maybe get away with $10 per day budget. So maybe you only, you know, your, your actual few hundred do budget will, will work. But in most cases you need to have enough money in order to generate enough clicks and that will be dependent on what industry you are in. So this will be some research that you'll have to do on your own. If you ignore this, you will absolutely not make Google Ads work. You will more than likely fail and you're going to think Google Ads doesn't work for you. It's not the case. It's this. You failed yourself by not doing the initial research. So set the expectations early. Do the research. Then you need to understand Google Ads takes time to make money. If you are getting into this thinking, yeah, month one, let's spend $1,000 and I hope to get back $5,000 in return right away. Then save your money, go buy a billboard or a radio ad. I don't know, you will not make money more than likely month one, you will more than likely not make money month two and if you're lucky, you'll start making money month three, but more than likely you won't even be making money month three, you'll be setting the foundation though for the next 90 days normally to start making money. But do not go into Google Ads thinking you are going to print money right away. This is a Long term game. In fact, I have clients that have been with us for many, many years, some almost 10 years. They did not start out spending what they're spending today. I have clients who spend hundreds, hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. They make millions of dollars from Google Ads. They didn't start day one spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and generating millions in revenue from it. No, they started small, they collected data. We optimize the data. We've matured and we've grown and we've evolved over the last 10 years. Now they're printing millions of dollars from Google Ads. That will not happen. Now I'm not saying you need to take 10 years to make this to work, but if you can't gut, especially if you're a brand new account, if you can't get three to six months of not making profit right away, then Google Ads just might not be for you. Now again, there are cases where we're making money months too and we are profitable. But go into it knowing you're probably not going to be super profitable right away. However, if you get this thing dialed in, if you follow the process I'm going to give you to you, and you spend the time collecting the data, being able to optimize the data, then this is a long term money printer that you could build for your business. And if your competition's not already running ads, more than likely they won't be able to gut spending money at a loss for a couple months. I hope I'm not scaring too many of you away, but you have to set real expectations. If you don't set those expectations, you're going to do all of this and then you're going to fail anyway. So I want to save your money to prevent that if Google Ads might not be the right channel for you at this time in your business. So that's for you to decide and think about. But make sure to set realistic expectations so you don't set yourself up for failure. Okay, defining your goal, Next stage of the fundamental process. What do you actually want out of Google Ads? You've got to ask yourself that. So not only did I just say you need to set realistic expectations, but what the heck do you actually want? I'll ask people this all the time and you know what everyone says, well I, you know, I want more sales and more profit. Yeah, you know, everyone does. Okay, that's not a real answer and that tells me you haven't even thought about this. So you know, saying you just want more leads, more sales and more profit. And you want all that at once and you want it today. Good luck. Not going to happen. I wish I could turn my money into millions of dollars today just like that too. But this is not magic, this is real work. And there needs to be some logical thinking behind the strategy that's being developed. So normally you must choose a path. Profit or growth. In rare cases, can you have both? Sometimes in a short amount of period of time, especially in a newer account, there are cases where you're actually kind of getting both. But in a lot of times you have to choose. All right, what do I want from this? Are we in a growth phase of our company or am I just trying to squeeze as much profit? The problem is if you set your profit goal too high, you're going to stiffen growth. And if you try to grow too aggressively, you're going to burn cash. So you really do need to figure out what the heck is it that I want and what am I willing to actually invest to make these goals happen, if they're even realistic goals. So this is up to you to decide for your business. But a lot of people go into Google Ads thinking they're just going to throw money at it, get some sales and everything will be fine. That's not normally the case. You have to build and steer your account to the ultimate goal that you're looking for. In most cases. I will say again, I've done a thousand audits, worked with hundreds of businesses large and small. Millions and millions of dollars here at Growman Ads being managed. I will say most companies are at a phase where they're utilizing Google Ads to bring in sales, but bring in sales profitably, but not too profitably because if they get too profitable, their competition will wipe them. They'll just not have enough, they won't be aggressive enough to even keep up. And so they'll get scraps. And so who cares if you are profitable on $5,000 in sales? I would rather have $100,000 in sales and less margin on that, but more customer acquisition volume. So I would say most businesses are operating within a happy sweet medium spot that they've been able to find. I don't know what that will be for you. You'll have to determine that. It's rare, but we do have clients that operate essentially at a loss upfront because they're operating under a lifetime value play and they are maybe VC backed. So. So they've got a lot of cash. Then there are those companies that they're bigger, they've been around for a while and they're at a stage where they're trying to be as profitable as possible right now due to, you know, an exit strategy that they're working on in the future. So there they actually might slow the growth of their Google Ads account down. They might start getting less aggressive on new customer acquisition because they're trying to increase the efficiency that they're getting from the account. Again, I just said three different types of strategies companies are deploying. Again, most of them are finding a sweet spot of, hey, I want to acquire as many customers as possible, but I do have to make some profit doing that. So they find a sweet spot. But there are many strategies. And so when clients come to me or prospects come to me and I ask them what their goals are and they have no idea, this is serious. You have to take this seriously. You have to know what the heck you ultimately want out of this in order to ever even be able to optimize the account. Once you start getting data, thankfully we have a YouTube video. This will be in the Notion Doc, if you go and get the notion doc inside of our school group, if you sign up for that for free. How to calculate your perfect Google Ads goal. We have a free calculator here whether you're E commerce or lead generation and this will allow you to sort of help determine your goal. Again, free. Full breakdown of that in a free video that we have on YouTube that will be in the description below and then also in this Notion Doc if you sign up for it. Okay, before we get into the nitty gritty, how the heck does Google Ads actually work? I don't want to go too crazy with that, but this is a nice infographic that WordPress, another agency did. And so I do give them credit, but they start off by saying, you know, it all starts with keywords. So someone types in and pet adoption and boom. Are any advertisers bidding on this keyword? Yep. Auction begins. Well, how does Google determine who even shows? Right, well, it's going to be a quality score. Times your bid equals ad rank. So that's the reason this is key. And I, at this point in the stage, I actually think Google Ads is fixed pricing. And I mean, Google's a monopoly, but I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole in this video. However, this is what they claim actually does happen. So there's a quality score, it's your bid, and then this equals an ad rank. And so the ads with the highest ad rank actually get shown further up the page, right? So in this scenario, Sam has a 10 quality score, a $2 max bid and an ad rank of 20. So they win as position number one. You'll notice Jane has a quality score of one, an $8 bid and they're way down at position three because their ad ran an eight. Actually, they might actually even be lower than that. And then you have ad pat with a quality score of 2, max bid of 6, ad rank of 12. So needless to say, what does this even mean? It means that and this was genius by Google, it doesn't mean who has the most money wins because Google wants relevancy. They want how am I going to give the searcher the absolute best answer. And so Google rewards that through something called ad rank. And that's determined also by a quality score. If you want to know more information on all of that, we have, and this will be in the Notion Doc. We have a whole on our website, growminds.com we have a section called Ultimate Guides. If you go to Google Ads Fundamentals, I have all of this broken down. How does Google Ads work? We talk about quality scores, ad ranks. It gets into the nitty gritty. I don't want to make a one hour video on ad rank and quality score right now. But just know it's not just your bid, it's also the quality of your ads and the keywords you're going after and the quality score that Google's giving you to ultimately have a higher ad rank to beat your competition, not just by spending more per click. So the ad rank goes into place during this auction, then a price gets set and this is how the CPC gets determined and what competitors are paying what per click. And so again, you'll notice that Sam, who was actually an ad position number one, paid less per click than Mary and Pat, who had lower ultimate quality scores and ad ranks. So they had to pay higher and they actually were in a lower ad position than Sam. So there's a nice little infographic on at least how the auction works, especially when you're doing a search. Again, if you want to go crazy and learn more, I have all that information for you too on our website. And this will be in the Notion Doc on how Google Ads works. We have a full blog post on that. Okay, rules of the game. And then I promise we're going to get into building an account. So number one, don't trust Google. Google is always trying to, in my opinion, fleece the advertiser these days. So they are trying to continue to increase their revenue, which they are. And so be leery of Google's advice. Don't take it as the ultimate wisdom. In most cases today it's not. So if Google's recommending you do something, second guess it. Now, I'm not saying some of the recommendations aren't good. They are. But always second guess Google. Don't 100% trust Google. I've done many audits where people like Google told me to do this and then it blew up our account. I've done many, many of those consultations. It makes me sick to my stomach. And it's because you've got basically salespeople these days at Google, not actual strategists who know what the heck they're talking about. I'm trying to tell people what to do within their account. So don't trust Google. Number one. Rule number two, patience wins. I just told you how to set realistic expectation. This is not a game of throwing money into it like a meme stock and hoping you're going to 10x your money in one month won't happen. You're going to have to have some patience in this game. Patience wins. My most successful clients, the most successful companies I talk to who are minting money from Google Ads, they played the long game with it and they made it work. So patience wins. Have a goal. Know your numbers. I talked about that. We have that whole video on how to set the perfect goal for your account. Know your numbers. Note no lifetime values, no conversion rates from leads, know your margins, etc. I've talked to companies who are operating, they had no idea they were losing money because they didn't consider the cost involved of operating and selling and shipping products. They didn't even think about that. I've talked to many companies who were stiffening growth because they didn't think of their LTV lifetime value, right? So I'm like, guys, you've got, your customers are coming back every month to order your product, whether it's a supplement or cosmetics or something. And here you are trying to operate this at like insane upfront margin. You're going to get slaughtered out there because a lot of your competitors are operating at this ltv. Can you make this happen? Let's dive into the numbers. So know your numbers. This is huge. If you don't know your numbers, then you're going to set yourself up for potential failure. If your offer is poop emoji, so will your results. Winners have the following dialed in. Great offer, great price, great website, great funnel. Okay. Many people have come to me and I'm like, you guys, your price is like 2x what the competition is. And I don't see anything different in regards to what you offer and they offer. Okay, so if your offer is crap, you're not going to magically make Google Ads work. If your price is higher, but you don't have the value for that higher price, people will go to the lower price in their research. So great offer, great price, great website. If your website sucks, if it's broken, you can't magically throw traffic at it and think you're just going to grow. You have to compete at all levels if you want to be at the top of this game. And then a great funnel. This would be for form fills and lead generation. So many companies, they'll spend all this money on Google Ads and then they have no funnel, they have no backend. It's like, what would you guys do with those leads? Leads. Oh well. And then you go through. It's like you guys didn't even follow up. Half your calls went to voicemail. So make sure all the pieces are in play for you to be successful with this. This is what winners have dialed in though. Then Google Ads is turning into a game of who can feed the machine learning the best data. And again we'll get into a lot of that weeds a bit later. But the better the data you give Google, the better quality you will get back. The more data you give Google, the easier the game becomes. You don't need to think too hard about this now, but just remember this because this will influence how you start thinking when it comes to smart bidding and everything else later on. Then there is no autopilot. I know we live in a world now with AI capabilities. Google's continuing to work on automations and their machine learning and all of it's great, but automation has come a long way. But that doesn't mean you can set up a campaign today and just forget about it. Won't happen. Competitors will change, Google will change, things will break. You must monitor this thing. You are not in there every day making changes, but you absolutely should be monitoring and then guiding and steering the ship in the direction you want it to go. But don't just build it, set it, forget it and think you're just going to mint money. Doesn't happen. So you have to keep your eyes out on the data, assess the data and make your next moves from there. Okay, that wraps it up for fundamentals. Let's get into creating an actual campaign and a real account. Okay, so account structure and Campaign types. So inside of a Google Ads account you're going to have your account. This is going to be your, you know, associated email address, your password, billing information. So that's just your account, right? Inside of a Google Ads account you're going to have campaigns. Campaigns will have budget settings, geo target settings and that's where you're going to house ad groups and keywords. So then you're going to have your ad groups. Ad groups are going to contain the ads and the keywords, hence the name ad groups. So this is what it look would look like from an image as a hierarchy. You have the account, you have your campaigns, inside of the campaigns will live your ad group. And inside your ad groups lives your ads and keywords. This I will have the support doc to Google for that is sourced here. Then we have campaign types. So you have search, you have performance max. You have demand gen display, shopping, video app smart. Okay, you don't need to worry about all of this. Today we will be talking about search. That is usually the easiest to get started for most beginners. Now if you are an E commerce business, I will have a complete separate video specific to E commerce because there's nuances. I actually don't recommend starting with search. I recommend starting with shopping and then eventually leading into performance max. I have all, I have videos on shopping and performance max already. But I will have a complete beginner's guide course for e commerce companies for Google Ads. Today we will be discussing search. So all you need to worry about, you don't need to worry about any of this other stuff. All you need to be worrying about is search. So search campaign is what we'll be working on today then conversion tracking, you have to have conversion tracking set up. There's no way of knowing what's going to work then if you don't have conversion tracking set up. So it's absolutely crucial. In fact, if you don't have conversion tracking set up correctly, nothing else really matters aside from setting the right expectation and goals. But you need the conversion tracking to actually back that up, steer the campaigns and eventually steer the machine learning. So this is highly, highly important. I wouldn't even recommend running ads without proper conversion tracking. What's conversion tracking for E commerce or what's important? Conversion tracking? I should say so for E commerce it's going to be tracking purchases and it's going to be tracking phone calls. Normally for lead generation that could be you could be a carpet cleaning company servicing your city or you could be a B2B SaaS company. Okay. Usually for lead generation. So you're not selling a product but you're trying to get leads in. And then you're going to have salespeople contact those leads like I do here at Grow My Ads. We would be considered lead generation for our type of ad campaigns. What's important there? It's going to be four form fills, like get a free quote, contact us, et cetera, and phone calls. So just know conversion tracking is highly important. You must have this set up correctly. For most of you watching today, it's probably going to be form fills and phone calls for E Commerce. Again, I'll have a full video for you guys just on E Commerce for beginners, but it's going to be purchase tracking and then also phone calls. Then you're going to want to start with seed keywords. I talk a lot about that in the video on how to use Google keyword planner tool and do proper keyword research. Again, that's a full masterclass on keyword research that I have available. This will be in the description. This is in the notion doc. Unless you have a massive monthly budget, you're better off starting with a small group of seed keywords focused on your top selling products or services. Make those work first, then expand. For example, if you're a home renovation company and bathroom renovations makes up 80% of your sales, then if you were to come to me and you're like, I want to start running Google Ads and I offer all these different renovation services and you tell me bathrooms make up 80% of your revenue, I would say figure out how to make bathroom keywords and ads work first, then expand. If you come into this and you try to set up campaigns for every single service you offer, you won't get anything. Why? Because you're gonna. You're going to disperse your budget too thin across too many different things. Make one thing work first, then expand. Now if you're coming to me like, I got 100k to spend per month, we're a huge company. I can burn cash to make this thing work. And I just want to get data quickly. Different story. You can operate however you want. However, that's not most businesses. Usually you're going to come in, you're going to have to figure out, all right, if your bathroom renovations are number one for you. Let's start with bathroom innovations. If you're a carpet cleaning company and residential carpet cleaning is your number one selling service, start with residential. Forget commercial, forget upholstery, forget tile and all that other stuff, just start with the top selling service or products you have. And then with those seed keywords, get those to work first. So I have this all in the Google Ads keyword planner tool. Let's hop into a real cal. I'm just going to show you what that looks like real quick. Okay. I'm in a real account that will be building a campaign today. You're going to go to tools, you're going to go to planning, you're going to go to keyword planner. I'm going to be doing this for a carpet cleaning company. So we're going to do carpet cleaning and again this is going to be in a city of Fort Wayne. So carpet cleaning for Wayne. These would be just quick seed keywords. Right. And then let me go find. It's called Allen county, would be the county in Indiana that encompasses Fort Wayne then and here I've got some data. So here's carpet cleaning, here's carpet cleaning for Wayne. It's giving me my bids how much I need to bid to be competitive. Again. This will also help determine can you actually spend this to get 20 clicks? In the training on keyword research I talk about in that separate video, you take the mean of these numbers. So you have a top of page low range and a top of page high range. What you would do is take the mean of these numbers. So for carpet cleaning it would probably cost, I would say two to three bucks to be competitive. So I don't necessarily need to spend the top of page range. But if I know I can't spend a dollar and probably get much action to be competitive, I need to be in the middle here. And so I would, I would assume it's two to three dollars. So if this carpet cleaning company in Fort Wayne came to me and they said, hey, I only, you know, I only have a couple hundred bucks per month to spend, I would say well good luck because you're probably going to need to spend bare minimum, I would, I would say $40 a day to be on the the safe side due to how much clicks are costing. And remember, we want at least 10 clicks per day. So this is where that data is coming from. Now in this research I'm able to see what types of terms I would want to bid on. Very simple though. We have carpet cleaning Fort Wayne, we have carpet cleaning, we have carpet cleaning services, etc. So this is where I'm going to do the research with this keyword planner tool. I also show you some other ways of going about it in the keyword research video that I Have. And I am going to start then pulling out some of these terms on which seed keywords I want to start with within my first campaign. Okay, there we go. I have gone through and did some keyword research. I have now compiled a list of keywords that I would want to target. So these would be my seed keywords. So here you'll see I have general carpet cleaning companies or carpet cleaning keywords. And then I have commercial carpet cleaning terms that I have segmented. You'll notice I'm not using some crazy spreadsheet. I'm just dumping this into a Google sheet and then organizing it. So these will be my seed keywords and then we'll get to adding those a bit later as we get into the actual campaign build which we're about to hop into. Okay, so I am now inside of my account and I need to actually build a campaign. So I'm going to hit this blue button and hit create new campaign and this will actually get us into the campaign build process. Now first question, what's your objective? You can choose this. So for a carpet cleaning company, which is what I'm doing this on today, it would be leads. However, I recommend create a campaign without a goals guidance. We don't need this right now. I go into further details on a lot of this in my other videos on building a search campaign. I have a full YouTube video on building search campaigns the right way. I go in further detail on that if you want to get more advanced. But for now just hit create a campaign without goals guidance. Then here's the campaign types. We already discussed campaign types and we just want search right now. So I'm going to click search. Then we've got in this case the conversion actions and we have booked appointments and submit lead forms is what we're going after today. I also will want to add phone calls, but in this case they actually don't want to do phone calls right now. They just want some form fills. So that's what we're going to roll with. So I'm going to hit continue. It's going to say select results you want to get from this campaign. You don't have to click this. None of this matters. I'm going to hit Continue. Now it's going to ask me the campaign name. So I, I like. So for this one we're going to do a carpet cleaning and then Fort Wayne. So S stands for search. Carpet cleaning is what we're going after. And then Fort Wayne is the geo targeting. That is just a naming convention. I like to use. You can name your campaign whatever you want. Okay, so bidding. Bidding is pretty important. In the beginning your goal is to get clicks and then your goal is to start getting conversion volume. I break that down in this notion doc I have for you guys. Your aim is to get click volume in the beginning and then also start generating conversion volume. Now. Google has multiple bid strategies. I have a full masterclass on bid strategies that I recommend you check out later. That will be in the notion doc and then also in the description below. All you need to know right now starting a brand new campaign out is you want to go to usually maximize clicks. Now I'm sure people in the comment section will be like why I start campaigns off on maximize conversions. It does just fine. You can test that. However, there are many times then people are coming to me like hey, I'm not getting an impressions or clicks. It's like, well you started with max conversions and you're a brand new account. Google has no idea what your conversion action even is because there's no conversion data off of it. Machine learning smart bidding needs data. And so I still today think you should start with max clicks or manual cpc. I'll show you how to do manual CPC after we build the campaign. It's not an option in the campaign build, so for now I'm going to hit max clicks. Now you can set a maximum cost per click bid limit if you want. So remember in that case for those seed keywords I saw like $5 seemed to be about the maximum. So if I wanted to hit like just to make sure Google doesn't go too crazy, I'm saying hey, five is the max. I don't want to go way too much. I don't want you like fleecing me here per bid. So in this case you can set a maximum CPC bid limit. It depends on your risk tolerance. If you want to be more aggressive, go with no bid limit in the beginning. If you want to be more conservative, set a bid limit towards the higher average CPC top of page bids that you see within your keyword research that you did in the seed keyword research phase. So I'm going to leave this one set to $5 right now. But I'm actually going to show you how to set it to manual after I build this campaign out. So this will just be set for now. Then you've got customer acquisition bid for new customers only. You don't even need to be worried about this, so don't even worry about clicking that right now. Hit next. Now we're in the campaign settings. Okay, so few things. Search network. In the beginning I recommend not running search Network. In the beginning I recommend not running display Network. If search network is going to be a bunch of other Google websites that are in Google search network display, I never recommend ever. Display should not be mixed in with search campaigns. I hate that Google did that. Display behaves totally differently. The intent is totally different. Display campaigns should be display campaigns. Search campaigns should be search campaigns. I do. I never mix the change to now search partners. Once I dial a campaign in and it's working, then I flick search partners on. Search partners then can bring in additional volume. But I like to get the campaign dialed in first then flick on search Partner. So in the beginning I start with these two settings off locations. I'm targeting Allen county. So I need to come in here, hit advanced search and we're going to do Allen county. And again that's the Fort Wayne area that we serve. Important there's this location options target. So you see there's presence or interest. What you want to switch this to is presence. This is people in or regularly in. If you have this on, Google will show your ads to people, they think oh they're interested in Fort Wayne. It's very loose. And so I always have this, this is governing Google a little more and just saying listen, they have to be within the location, not someone who might be interested in the Fort Wayne area according to Google's algorithm. So keep this on. Do not have presence or interest. That's a very important setting in the beginning. Then languages, English for this case, audience segments here you can just add some audiences. You're not going to do anything more with it right now. So I'm going to have home cleaning services set. That's an in market audience. And then what I also would do normally if I already have some website visitor traffic, I would have my all visitors traffic in here too. This is set. You see this targeting setting for this campaign you have targeting an observation. You absolutely need to set to observation. All we're doing is applying some audiences here and we're going to observe the data over time. But you're not going to do anything with it. So don't go too crazy thinking about these audience segments. All you're doing is applying some audience segments and then it's going to as the data comes in, if they are in one of these buckets, audience buckets, you'll you'll start to see how those certain audiences perform compared to the averages of the campaign. That is insight that you can Use for other marketing channels. That's insights that you could use for potentially display campaign efforts. Performance max campaign efforts. If you get evolved the account and grow for now, you don't even need to think too much about that. Just put some audiences that make sense. Hit it. Keep it an observation and move on. Then Google. Google's going to want you to this broad match keyword thing. This is fairly new. Just make sure this is off. You do not want broad match on, so make sure broad match is off automatically. Created assets. This is giving Google control to create assets for you. Right now you want this off. I'm going to show you how to create correct ads and everything else in this of course. So we don't even need to worry about that. Keep that off. Then more settings. There's ad rotation. Make sure this is set to optimize prefer best performing ads and you do not make sure there is no end date. I've seen people add end dates and they forget the add end dates and then their campaign ends. Do not do that. Ad schedule. If you only want to show your ads during certain times, this is where you would do it. For this case we only want to show Monday through Friday 8 to 5. One thing you need to make sure when you build your account. So during the actual account build settings you are going to need to put a time zone in this ad schedule is based off what time zone your account is. I have seen companies where their account is actually in a different time zone than where they're at. So they for whatever reason the account set to eastern time zone and they're over in California. So then their ad schedule is based off eastern time zone. And even though they operate at a Pacific time zone, so make sure your account time zone, you know what that is. If you just set your account up, you obviously would have just chosen that and hopefully you set it correctly. But that is what time zone you actually operate off of. This will also show right here below. So you can see this was based off of Eastern time zone. Boom. Monday through Friday. There we go. Then you don't need to worry about any of this other stuff, campaign URL options or brand restrictions. Don't even think about it right now. Hit next. Now it's going to go to keyword and asset generation. This is an AI tool that they're starting to use. We don't need to worry about that. I'm going to show you how to build correct campaigns in this video without the need of any of this. So we're going to hit skip. Okay now we are at an ad group level of build out. So how do you want to think about ad groups? Here is a structure. Again, this will be in the notion document of how you should be thinking about ad groups. They should be themed. So this is for a plumber. And then I'll, you know, obviously the carpet cleaning I have general and then I have commercial. So our ad groups are going to be ad themes or search intent themes. And how you would look at that is we have plumbing general terms. So plumbing companies, plumbing services, plumbers. Near me we have emergency terms, plumbing emergency. So emergency plumber, 24. 7 plumber. Anything that would fit within an emergency plumber. Then there's affordable that ad group. Any affordable type keywords would go there. Why is that important? Because the keyword that fires your ad, that ad should resonate with that keyword. So if someone is searching emergency plumber and you had that keyword in your general ad group in your ad is general, you're not speaking to that searcher. Your ad should be all about your emergency plumber services, your 247 availability, etc. So that's why you want to theme it out. Think of when can I make my ad resonate more to the keywords I'm adding to that ad group. That's when you would want to start actually splitting out themed ad groups so you don't need to go crazy like plumbing companies and plumbers. Near me, it's general. My ad will serve both those searches just fine. I don't need to split near me's that used to be called skags. I talk a lot about that in the other video I have for creating search campaigns the right way. I'm not going to go too complex into that. But just know you don't need to worry about skags or any of that. Just theme. It's nice themes. And so for us today we have our carpet cleaning general and we have carpet cleaning commercial. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to plug in my keywords here. Now we're going to get a little complex, right? Keyword match types. Guess what? I have a full masterclass on keyword match types. What they are, how they behave. All you need to know right now is you want to avoid broad match. Broad match is there's nothing around the term, it's just the keyword. So right now all of these would be in broad match. In the beginning, you want to start with phrase and exact match keywords only. Then over time, once you start moving to smart bidding Once you get enough conversion volume then you would move to baking in broad keywords. That's how I go about it. Again, there might be people in the comment section debating that you can test what you want to test. I'm just telling you to save you some money right now, focus on usually phrase and exact in the beginning until you start getting click and conversion data coming in over the first few months. Okay, there we go. I have my keywords now added as phrase match and then I also have them added as exact match again if you want to learn more about match types, how they behave. I have a full masterclass on that for YouTube video on that in the description below and will be included in the notion doc if you have access to the notion doc. Okay, now we're at the ad creation step. Guess what? I have many videos on creating responsive search ads the right way, how to create ads that are going to get clicks, how to use a I to help upgrade your Google Ad Copy and then also Google Ad Assets or extensions. I have a complete masterclass on that. So right there is a full course on ad creation all available free to you. And again these will all be in the description below. But in this simply right now all you need to know is write compelling headlines and descriptions. Match your ad copy to the search query as closely as possible possible. Include compelling unique selling propositions or USPS to differentiate from competitors. Offer specific and compelling call to actions example, free consultation etc considering using AI tools like ChatGPT to help you generate headline ideas. Use the available fields as many as you can but do not add fluff. I go deep into that on how how to create a responsive search ads the right way. Set a relevant final URL and then add add extensions and add assets as many as you can. So all of that's there. Again, if you want to go crazy and learn more about, you know, ad copy and the creation process further, I have lots of videos for you to learn more on. For now we're going to keep things nice and simple because I like simple when I'm just starting out. So I'm creating this for a company called Steamworks for Wayne. That's their website. So there's their headline. Oh sorry, there's their final URL. Now I have already built ad copy in a sheet that I have so I'm going to go ahead and plug this in. Okay, I have my ad copy filled out now so I've got headlines, I've got description descriptions and again I didn't go too crazy. You don't need to go. Don't, don't try to go too crazy in the beginning. All you want good enough because you, you have to start collecting data. You're going to notice it's going to say ad strength is poor. Right now. Google's going to want to just me blast a bunch of basic. It really is suggesting a headline as Fort Wayne that's totally insane or carpet cleaning system that's not what we do. So do not worry too much about this ad strength piece right now. Create a good ad. Don't add fluff again. If you want to go further, watch some of those other YouTube videos I have on ad creation process. But just build a good enough ad. Some good, good headlines, good call to actions like get a free quote online today USPS or features and benefits of same day service availability. We have our promo. Three errors for only 115 and we're the number one carpet cleaning in Fort Wayne. Okay, that is good enough for me to start with. I don't need to worry about this stupid ad strength thing right now. It means nothing and I break that down in those other videos. So don't worry about that. Then descriptions. I'm just going to have my two. These two are fine. I don't need to go crazy. You can add up to four. If you are good at writing ad copy though and you want to spend the time doing it, go for it. Add as much as you can, but make sure it's unique. Do not say the same thing over and over again. That's fluffy and it's a waste. Okay then we have ad assets. Ad assets are just additional ad assets to your text ad. So this is going to be images, site links, promotions, prices, calls, structured snippets, lead forms, call outs, etc. Guess what? I have a full masterclass on every single ad asset. That will be in the description below. That's also in the Notion doc. We also have a blog post the Ultimate Guide to Google Ads assets in 2024. This shows you what these examples are. So these would be like sitelink extensions. Here, here's a call. Then we've got location extensions. If you're a local business connecting your Google My business profile that can show your address. Then you've got call outs which would just be like features and benefits. Call extensions would be showing your phone number, site links or just other links to your website site. Make sure. Here's what I recommend. There's a lot. Again go through the other video if you want to learn more about it. Just add as many as you can that are relevant to your campaign and ad. That is the only advice you need right now in that. So go through these ad assets. Go through my ad asset video that breaks everything down on, on each ad asset and what I recommend. But just add as many as you can that are relevant to your campaign and ad. Okay, now I'm at the budget setting of the campaign build out. Google is going to recommend a budget for you. They're just kind of making this up. Again, I recommend a budget that's high enough to get at least 10 clicks per day. So actually their recommendations not too far off. I am going to set our budget at $50. That's a little more than what I think we'll be able to generate more than 10 clicks per day. Again I think we'll probably be more in the three to four dollars per click range. But this current client has more budget than that. So 50 per day is going to be a good start for us. Okay, the campaign is now ready to publish. So I'm going to go ahead and publish this campaign. And there we go. The campaign is now in the account budget is set and I'm going to hop in here. I've got my ad group. So I have a commercial ad group that was built and general. I know in this video I just showed you the general but I did the same process for commercial obviously just different keywords and ads. Then there's some post settings that I recommend doing. So number one and I have this in the sheet, exclude tablets. I like to not run tablets in the beginning. I like to dial in my campaigns first without any tablet traffic. Why? Tablets usually are the least volume in regards to traffic and conversions and they normally do perform the worst. So I'm trying to take out as many variables as possible in the beginning to give me my best shot at fast success. And so normally I run desktop and mobile only in the beginning and then I cut tablets. Then once I dial the campaign in I start hitting like good conversion volume at my goal. Then I start testing tablet traffic. But I go in here and I hit minus 100%. That will exclude tablet traffic completely. Do what you want with that. But I usually recommend on a brand new campaign or account just exclude it in the beginning. Okay. Also add negative keywords in the beginning. That way you are not spending money on irrelevant traffic. You might think what the heck is a negative keyword? Guess what, I have a full video on negative keywords, how to find them, tools to use, how to add them efficiently. So I'm not going to go fully into that. That's a, that's an entire course in itself that I have available to you. It's in the notion doc, it's going to be in the description below. But just know when you were doing your keyword research process for your seed keywords, you probably found some terms Google is recommending. Like wait, that does not, I do not want to bid on that. I don't want my ad showing for that. That would be a negative keyword. So in this case I am going to be adding a couple negative keywords from the get go. That way I don't waste any money or prevent wasting money right away. So usually during my keyword process I'm also going to be looking for some negative keywords. So I'm going to go ahead and add those now. So where you go to find negative keywords, you hit search keywords and then you hit this tab. Negative keywords. Now I'm going to go in here and I'm actually going to to add a list that I've created. Some of those negative keywords are going to be jobs, careers, maps, school, salary, etc. So these are some terms that I have already found within there. Like I don't want people looking for carpet cleaning, like jobs to actually go work for a carpet cleaning company or a career in it or any of that. Right. So those were some terms that I found just through some negative keyword research while I was doing my keyword research process. So this is inside of a keyword list or a negative keyword list. You can also add them individually at the campaign level or ad group level. Again, I give you full details and breakdown on that in the negative keyword video. I don't normally recommend that, but let's say in this case we're going to do carpet cleaning machine. Well, like rental. Actually here's what we'll do. We'll do rental. Well, we don't rent carpet cleaning equipment. We are a carpet cleaning company. So we don't want the term rental. So you could just add that and boom. Now if the someone searches and it has the term rental in it, our ad would not fire. So negative keywords are highly important. Please go check out that other video on negative keywords. I did to get way more information and details about negative keywords. Okay. Then during the stage of bidding I said I'm going to show you how to actually set manual CPC bids if you want. So you actually have to build the campaign first. They don't give you the option. But then once the Campaign's built. You can go to campaign settings here and now I have the option. So remember we were on max clicks at $5 max click bid limit. But I'm going to hit change bid strategy and then it won't be here. But if you go to this bottom or select a bid strategy directly, of course Google is going to say not recommended. Now I can hit manual CPC bidding. There's this piece here called Enhanced cpc. I talk about all of this in my bidding video by the way, but just know you actually don't. You can run this with no enhanced right now because you don't have any conversion data right now. So we're going to run that off. You can have it on now if you want. Just know it gives Google the ability to kind of bid more if it thinks the searcher has a higher intent of converting. Again, in the beginning you have no conversion data. So a lot of times I'll run it without it. If it's an existing advertiser account with just a new campaign I'm launching, then a lot of times I will use that. So in this case I'm just going to hit no and hit save. Then you would actually go in and hit your bids manually. You would go in and add the $5 bids to them. Okay, you just went through all of that. You have a campaign, you have keywords, you have ads, you're ready to roll, you're ready to get things going. But now what? And this is where a lot of people screw up. They, they want to go in every day and start clicking buttons. That is not what you want to be doing. So there is a flow and process to the month one, two and three that I recommend, especially on a brand new account. I have that completely broken out for you, by the way. I have the full video. The first 90 days of a new, new Google Ad search campaign that is available to you. That will be in the notion doc, that will be in the description below. But months one after you launch your new campaign, what you should be looking for is am I getting 10 clicks per day? Do I have good click through rate? Am I starting to get conversions optimizations? You should be making monitor conversion tracking, make sure you're actually seeing conversions come through. Add negative keywords. I just talked about negative keywords. That's all you really should be doing here. You don't need to be doing too much. You don't have to go too crazy. Month one, this is all you need to worry about. Month two, now you're trying to hopefully start getting more conversion volume. Your goal is to start optimizing towards 30 plus conversions. Your KPIs are going to be the same as month one and your optimizations continue to add negative keywords. Now you have some more volume, so you're going to be adding converting keywords, you're going to be pausing low performing keywords, you're going to review budget allocation and you might consider adjusting your bid strategy so you're probably on max click or manual cpc. Well, if you got some conversion volume now and you have enough volume, you could be looking at flicking over to a max conversion bid strategy now. Depends on the volume you're at. Again, I go in more detail in my other video the first 90 days of a new Google search ad campaign. Month three. This is where you're at a point where you should be getting a more volume. You're potentially on a smart bid strategy, whether It's CPA or ROAS. And here there's some other KPIs you want to be looking at, like impression share metrics, which I go in further detail in that other video. But optimizations are they're going to be the same as month 2. Negative keywords, adding and pausing keywords out budget allocation and then reviewing your bid strategies at month three. This is the point you should start feeling confident. Can I now get this thing profitable over the next 90 days? Remember, realistic expectations were set in the beginning. You're probably not going to be profitable month one, two or three. This new carpet cleaning campaign is not more than likely going to be producing profitable leads to them right away. However, my goal is to build them to that moment within 90 days and then the next 90 day period. If I did my job right and the data and the math workout in favor for our goals, then I'll have the confidence level to make this hopefully a very profitable money printing machine for that carpet cleaning company. Key points Remember, focus on getting enough data before making any major optimizations. Don't worry about too much ad testing in the first few months, especially if your ads are well created. I have given you so many resources on creating ads in this Notion doc And in this YouTube video and all those other videos in the description below. You're going to make killer ads. They'll be just fine. You don't have to worry too much about ad testing right now and you know, be prepared to reassess the campaign's viability if the goals aren't met by month three. That's the realistic expectations I've been hammering throughout this entire course. Now flexibility. 90 day timeline is ideal, but it may vary. It could take longer. It's going to depend on performance. It's going to depend on budget of the account of your business or your client's business. If you're a freelancer and agency now, there's ongoing optimizations that get more advanced and more technical. I have a full video on how to optimize your search campaign. That video goes in the weeds on optimizing search campaigns. This is what you would want to be reviewing and doing when you're several months in to your new campaign that you just built. All right. Congratulations on making it this far. I hope you now have a campaign that is built the right way and primed to hopefully start making you some money in the future. I hope you got great value from this. Again, if you want the notion doc, it's very easy to follow follow from beginning to end versus just watching this YouTube channel video and then seeing all the other videos in the description below. I have all those videos that correspond with the sections depending on where you're at embedded in the notion doc so it's super easy to follow beginning to end. That will be in our free school group, so just go in, sign up for free. You'll have access to that notion doc makes it super easy to follow along. If you don't, then you've got this video and hopefully this provided enough value to you. Do me a huge favor. If you did get value from this, please just hit the like button. It goes a long way in getting more visibility on this video and I really do hope to help as many beginner Google Ads accounts and businesses and freelancers and clients as possible. I know I get asked a lot and it's such a big topic. I really wanted to build something that would be easy to follow but also technical enough where you're not missing out and wasting money and giving Google more money out of your pocket. Also setting realistic expectations. So certain businesses who shouldn't even be doing Google Ads because they're not ready yet should be avoiding it. And I do hope some of you maybe have found that like hey, I'm just not ready for Google Ads and I hope I saved you some money just by not even starting Google Ads then. Either way, I hope you got great value. I will see you on the next video.