The RIGHT Way to Set Up Google Search Ads Campaigns | Step-by-Step Tutorial

In this video, I'm going to share with you how to build a brand new Google Ad search campaign. Step by step, the exact structure and settings that I recommend for managing millions of dollars per month in Google Ads. How we set up our brand new search campaigns here at Grow My Ads. And if you stick with me till the end, I'm going to share a few bonus settings that I always, always recommend when setting up a new search ads campaign. You're welcome. So let's go ahead and dive in. All right, so I'm inside a Google Ads account right now and I am simply going to click this blue plus button. This is Create Campaign and I am going to hit New Campaign. Now this is going to ask what's your campaign objective? So I want to emphasize this because I've heard a lot of misinformation over the years about this. Clicking one of these doesn't actually do anything to the performance of your campaign. Clicking one of these just limits some of the settings that Google will show you. So if you click Sales in your E Commerce, it's going to limit some of the other settings that you might see inside of Awareness or Consideration or Local store visits and promotions. So this really is for you to click and give Google an idea of what you're looking for so they can better give the settings that make the most sense for you. However, I'm going to teach you all the settings you need to know. So you don't even need any of this. So when we create campaigns, whether it's search or shopping doesn't matter, we hit Create a Campaign without Goals Guidance. Again, I'm giving you everything you need today, so we don't need to limit ourselves here. So go ahead, hit Create Campaign without Goal Guidance. Then select Campaign Type. Obviously they're giving you all of the different campaign types, by the way, watch. So if I hit sales, you see how that change. You don't even get that. If I hit Aware and Consideration now it's only giving me these campaign types. That is what I mean by it filters the settings for you. So again we're going to hit this. Then I am going to hit search. And now we're at use the conversion goals from your campaign performance. So in this case it's going to be a submit lead form. Because what we're doing is going to be building out an ad for a carpet cleaning company. So select the results you want from this campaign. I don't need to click any of this. And again, this won't do anything in regards to the performance so we don't need this now. Campaign name make sure naming conventions are huge. I can't tell you how many times I do audits and then they've got like 20 campaigns in there and it is, it looks like getting in someone's car that they don't clean and there's bottles everywhere and trash everywhere and just a total mess. Right? Do not do that. You want organization so you want a nice clean naming convention. So in this case I, I usually do so. S stands for search. That way I just kind of know it's a search campaign. Sometimes if I'm looking at just raw data in an Excel sheet or maybe even Looker Studio reports, so S. And then we're going to do carpet cleaning and then I also like to a lot of times do the location. This is going to be in Fort Wayne and so I'm going to have it set like this and then we'll hit continue. Okay, so bidding. And by the way, I have an entire video on bidding and all the different bidding options. You can find that link in the description below. Make sure to watch that video after you complete this video. But just know bidding can get pretty complex. And I give you a complete breakdown of what bid strategies you should use. When. Now when you're starting a brand new campaign, many people have suggested, well, just start with maximized conversions. This account is brand new. So this carpet cleaning company has never ran ads before. I personally still find and recommend in most cases using either a max clicks bid strategy. And a lot of times I'll set like a maximum bid. So if you did keyword research, you know, you'll know kind of what your your bids are going to be. So I can set a maximum CPC bid limit. When you get further into the campaign, you can go back. So once you've completed the campaign build out, you can actually go back to your bid strategies and choose a manual cpc. So you're telling Google this is what I'm willing to pay per click. I recommend when you're first starting out, use a max clicks or manual CPC bid strategy. The goal is then to get enough conversion volume over a period of time, whether that takes you a month or two. But the goal is to get about 30 conversions in a month. You don't have to absolutely hit 30, but we have found that 30 seems to be the sweet spot in regards to being able to flick over then to conversion based bid strategy. But when you're building your campaign out and if you've never bidded on any of the keywords that are going to be inside of this campaign, then start with max clicks or manual cpc. I'll show you how to flick over to manual CPC after we build this campaign. But just know that I still recommend using Max clicks or manual CPC in the beginning. Now, if you are building a campaign in an account that you've already been running ads for a long period of time, whether that's a year or five years, or even three or six months, and you've got a set of keywords that you've already have been bidding on, or there's some data inside of the account history and you're simply for a restructure purpose or organizational purpose, you're building out a brand new campaign, but the keywords that you're going to be adding and the conversions that it's going after, whether it's a form fill, a sale, a phone call, whatever it may be, have already been accumulated inside of this account and Google has some historical data, then you can start successfully with a maximized conversion bid strategy or a target CPA or a conversion value bid strategy with TROAs. That's if you have historical data on those conversions and on those keywords. I'm absolutely okay with that. However, I still find it's best to start with max clicks or manual CPC if you don't have any of that historical data yet. So in this case I have to go with max clicks and then I am going to set actual CPC bid limit on this to $10. So basically what I'm saying is to Google, hey, don't bid more than $10 but try to generate some clicks here. Then we have this customer acquisition setting. This is somewhat newish that Google puts in the campaign build out. So build bid for new customers only. This option limits your ads to only new customers regardless of your bid strategy. Listen, in this case for a carpet cleaning company and for this campaign strategy, I don't need to add this or, or, or limit this. Most the people who are searching carpet cleaning terms that I'm I'll be going after are not going to be repeat buyers. So in this case I don't even need to worry about this. Customer acquisition settings I'm going to hit next. Now some further campaign settings you have to choose from. Okay so we have in Google Auto puts you into these. So you don't necessarily want this. You've got search network ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for terms that are relevant to your keywords. So search partners can include, you know, a bunch of Google's other sort of websites that they're networked with. This also can include Google Maps which I do like for local service based businesses. However, when I am building out a brand new campaign I normally will flick this off and the other setting here, Display Network. They want to be able to show your ads on the display network. This is like one of the most horrendous settings I hated when they when they did this many, many years ago. Display in search are totally different. The behavior is totally different. I never run Display Network mixed in with my search campaign. If I do a display ad it's in a display ad only campaign. So I never absolutely never run this Display network setting and the search network partner. I did turn this off again for a brand new account or brand new campaign in time. If I have a campaign and starts to get dialed in and I feel really good about the conversions and the performance is there then I flick it on to increase my ad impressions and I'll monitor what the performance is on the search partners. But when I'm first starting out all I'm trying to do is give myself the best shot of hitting success in the shortest period of time. So a lot of these settings I do not want on in the beginning. All right, location. So in this case I am going to be targeting Fort Wayne. Now you can do, you can add locations in bulk. You can do radius targeting around a certain place. So let's just do Fort Wayne Indiana. So I can do a radius targeting. There's 20, I could do 50 et. You could really change this up if you want. Now you can also do zip codes. So like 46825 this is a zip. So if I just wanted to target certain zip codes in this case we are going to do about a 30 mile radius around Fort Wayne. Boom. That's a good radius targeting for this local carpet cleaning company. They do travel within these other smaller areas outside of the city of Fort Wayne. So I'm going to hit save now important setting and sometimes it gets hidden. So this location options here we've got target right? So you have and it auto sets you to this presence or interest people in regularly in or have shown interest in your targeted location. And you'll notice Google hits recommended then you've got presence people in or regularly in your targeted locations. So the key difference here is these terms or who have shown interest in your targeted locations. I do not like this setting in most cases. So for this campaign I am flicking it over to people in or regularly in your targeted locations. This setting basically Saying hey Google, show my ads to anyone you think is interested in the area of Fort Wayne, Indiana or who has shown interest or maybe has even been to Fort Wayne. The problem with that is a lot of times then you'll find your ads are firing for other countries or other obscure locations where absolutely someone's not actually going to be looking for carpet cleaning in, in the city of Fort Wayne. So we want to limit our ad or ads showing only two people who are in the 30 mile radius that we set for Fort Wayne, Indiana. So if I'm in Miami and I type carpet cleaning Fort Wayne, I do not want their ad showing. I don't want that. I don't want it to show to anyone who's outside of that radius. Targeting this makes sure I have laser targeting set. And again Google gets very broad sometimes with this. I've seen some like I've seen in the placement reports, you got to dig deep into the reporting. But I've seen countries like India show up, countries in the Middle east, obscure islands. It makes absolutely no sense. So in the beginning always tighten that control and make sure it's only set to people in the the targeted location you set then languages. I only want English for this since all of our ads and ad copy and their employees only speak English. So I have it set to English. Now you've got this audience segment. This you can get some observations from two things. One, you don't want to set this to targeting. Targeting means you're going to only show your ads to people who fit inside of your audience group. Observation is there for hey, we're going to layer some audiences to your campaigns and you'll get some data at that sort of audience layer. So in this case what we're going to do is basically go through. There's some in markets, sometimes you can just do a quick search too. So here I'm going to do a carpet cleaning. I don't actually think there's much but Google will give you the best in regards to that. So in market home cleaning services. In market household cleaning supplies. I'll probably just keep it at home cleaning services for now. In market for vacuums, we don't really probably want that either. Rugs and carpet. A lot of times this is always good data to figure out. We'll have renters, we'll also have homeowners and that's good for now. Listen, you can go in and add sort of as many as you want. I have found other than getting data insights, this is not a needle mover. A lot of times some people have like at least on a search ad campaign have gone crazy into like audience segments in time. When you're on, when you're getting conversion data and you're. You're set up on like a smart bidding bid strategy, whether it's conversion based, like max conversions or max conversion value. Google does a really good job of finding people who fit your data points who look like your converters. So the audience stuff to me is good insight to bring back for further campaign tests whether I'm going to do something like on the display Network or YouTube ads. But a lot of times I don't see it as this campaign would have performed better if I would have layered more audiences in there and maybe added some bid adjustments to it. It's very rare, I never see that. So I like to look at it more from data analysis on different segments. And a lot of these people will actually overlap a lot of times into these different segments. So you don't need to go overkill on adding audience segments. And again make sure you have it set to observation. Then keywords. So it has this broad match. It kind of wants it to force you into broad match keywords. I'll explain keywords here in a second. Here. To use broad match keywords, switch to a conversion or conversion value based bidding strategy. So it's actually set to off. Listen, you can use broad match keywords whenever you want. I could use them now even with this setting off. So don't even really worry about this setting right now. You can just completely ignore it. Then we have automatically created assets. So you can allow Google to help you generate headlines and description assets for your ads using your content from landing page, domain and ads. Basically you're giving Google control to essentially add different headlines, descriptions and ad copy to the ad. Now we're going to be building an ad in this step by step tutorial. However, if I have this set on, Google can actually just go ahead and create ads for me. I'm going to keep it off. I don't really like using that right away. Instead of some cases over time I'll test it and Google is getting better at including some good ad copy. However, I want to control the messaging right now for this ad. So I want to have this turned off. Then you have this more settings. We have ad rotation. You do not need to do anything here. Just keep this set to optimize prefer best performing ads. Don't. You don't need to worry about that at all. Then we have storage start and end dates. I am doing this video as of March 10, 2024. So today this campaign will start. Do not end an end date. I don't know why, unless you're creating a campaign that is only specific to like a sale or, or an event or something that only lasts for a certain period of time. I never usually use the end date though in those cases I'll use auto rules. So here, just keep, make sure you have end date set to none. Believe it or not, I've done audits before where they're like our campaign, our ad stop showing. And then I found like, well, you guys set an end date. Why did you do that? So they just didn't even know now ad schedule. This is important. So if you don't do anything here, your ads will fire 24 7. Well in this case for this carpet cleaning company, we actually only only want to run Monday through Friday and we want to run 6am until so there's 2, 3, 4, there we go. And make sure you check your the time zone. I've seen accounts think they were on a certain time zone when they weren't. So based on the account time zone we would be eastern time zone, which is exactly what I want. So I'm going to hit, go ahead and hit. Have that set up so Monday through Friday 6 to 5 and then URL options. If you're utilizing any third party tracking that would would need some sort of tracking template set up. You can add that at the campaign level here. We don't have any of that. We don't need to worry about it. Then there's brand restrictions. In this case I don't need to add any brand restrictions either. Brand restrictions is essentially making sure your brand terms don't fire inside of a campaign if you, you don't want them to. I don't need that right now. So we'll go ahead and keep that not applied. So then I'm gonna hit next. Okay, so now we are going to be adding keywords. So now Google's trying to force me as you've seen this pop up, get suggestions for your ads, answer a few questions about your business to get suggestions for your ads, headlines and descriptions. So Google, if you hit help create you can actually. So if I go steamworksfw.com Google will actually use their AI now to help give you ad suggestions. So here they kind of took context from our website and then I'm going to hit help create ad. And so this is always kind of interesting. This is fairly new. You'll notice this is in beta here they're trying to give you some keyword ideas. You'll see which some of these aren't good. And I'll we'll work on keywords here in a second. And then also they went ahead and actually created an ad right away for me. Now some of these aren't too bad. Less air pollutants, odor reduction. Some of these are not great either. And so I'm going to change a lot of that. But I did just want to show you that that tool that can be used now. So you have to be very, very cautious of this. But let's talk about keywords real quick. So for this campaign you've got different keyword match types. Now I have an entire YouTube video just on match types. So I do recommend going and checking that out. I will have the link in the description below. On a brand new campaign, especially a brand new account like this, I do not recommend starting with broad keywords. I hear a lot of gurus out there saying just blast a bunch of broad keywords in the beginning. It still does not perform well from our tests. And again we're testing millions of dollars per month. So some of these cases of people saying just start with broad. I always do wonder how much they're actually testing that. Not saying it can't work. I'm just saying from all our millions of dollars per month of testing across a large portfolio of clients, we still see better results starting with tight matched keywords, exact in phrase. Normally then as we get the conversion data we move to broad. Once we dial the campaign in, it's performing at the metrics we want it to perform at and we're utilizing max conversion or max conversion value bid strategy and that has to have a goal. So technically a target CPART roas. I still don't even run broad if there's no goal set or cap set on a max conversion max conversion value bid strategy. However, I am in no camp. There's a lot of people in Google Ads where they, they all seem to be in these like different camps and it's like this is the only way you should be doing it. I don't care about a certain way. I just care about making money. Right. So you could test a brand new campaign and ignore all of my advice and only and go straight from max conversions with broad keywords and it might work for you. We still find it's best to start with tight themed keyword match types. And by that I mean exact and phrase. So an exact match in this case would be. Boom with the brackets with quotations you've got phrase match and then broad would be this. Now I want to share one thing with you on keyword match types just so you have a better understanding of what these mean. If you've never used these match types before. All right, this is a Google support page on keyword match types. So here, here just a quick explanation again go watch my YouTube video after this video on match types to have a better understanding. But exact match ads may show on searches that are the same meaning as your keyword. So in this case they use furniture store. It could also mean it could also show for home furnishing shop. But those two mean the same, right? Then phrase match ads may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. So here searches that are the same this could be include the meaning. So here you have cheap furniture stores, living room furniture deals. What store is best to find a bedroom dresser. So phrase operates almost in my opinion how broad match used to operate years ago. So it's they call it moderate matching. I even think phrase is pretty broad. And so just know though these are like the definitions of it. Exact is going to be your tightest match type. Then you have broad and ads may show on searches that relate to your keyword. So here they have home decor cream colored leather sectional. Do you see how these two are like totally different? Home decor is different from someone looking for a cream colored leather sectional. It is super broad. However, broad match works beautifully with smart bidding. So if your campaign over time is dialed in, you're getting conversion volume, you're hitting your goal and you're on a TCPA or TROAS bid strategy and you bake in a broad match keyword. It will scale your campaign. You still have to be cautious of the search terms it's showing. But broad match is like the nitrous boost to a campaign once it's already dialed in. Again, as of today, March 24th or wherever I'm at March 10th, 2024, I do not recommend using broad match in the beginning until your campaign's dialed in and using the T ROAS or TCPA bid strategy. Okay? And I want to show you a real life example, so let's hop in there. Here is a real example of a broad match carpet cleaning services term. And I just want to show you everything that it's showing. It's showing for carpet shampoo, it's show for competitors Stanley Steamer promo code. It's showing for what cleans blood out of a carpet. Scary rug cleaners near me that gets a bit iffy Again, more. More broad or more competitive terms. Stanley steamer coupon $99 best way cleaners Best Bissell Carpet clean Bissell is a actual vacuum cleaner that you would be buying. So Google's not that smart in this case, right when you go broad. So this is why I do not like using it until you have that conversion data to feed the machine learning. Otherwise Google just goes still so broad in my opinion. And here they're firing for branded carpet cleaning or vacuum cleaners. That is someone who's looking to buy a vacuum cleaner, not hire a carpet cleaning company. All right, back to the campaign setup. All right, so now I've got my keywords in here. We have carpet cleaning Fort Wayne Carpet cleaning Fort Wayne phrase and then I'm also going to do carpet cleaning near me and then we'll do carpet cleaning near me and phrase you do not need to run skags anymore. That would be called single keyword ad groups. So back in the day people would run like carpet cleaning Fort Wayne would be an ad group. Carpet cleaning near me would be an ad group. You don't need that. This all means the same thing. These keywords will work for the ad that we have set for it. Now if I wanted to target commercial carpet cleaning Fort Wayne, this has a different intent versus this. This is going to be mainly residential. So commercial specific would go into its own ad group. Then I would have a specific ad copy built around our commercial cleaning services. So I would not want to mix this inside the same ad group. However, near me and then also the city. These can live in the same ad group because they're the same thing and the ad will relate to both of those search keywords. So just a heads up on that. You don't need to go over crazy with your ad groups. Consolidation is key today, so consolidate as much as possible. But do segment when you can create a better experience at the ad level and then the landing page page level for the keywords you're targeting. So we're going to just keep it at carpet cleaning for it when carpet cleaning near me right now. Then the ad again, the AI created an ad. I don't really like most of this and I already have ad copy built out here so I'm just going to go ahead and plug that in. All right, so I have my ad built out now. Final URL. This is where you're going to be sending traffic that clicks your ad. So in this case it's just going to their homepage for right now display path. This is not actually where they'll end up, you'll see here in the example it shows, like carpet cleaning. This is just an easy, nice way to bake in. Some more keywords that get highlighted in the ad usually, but this does not mean the display path is not actually where they'll, they'll go. Then we've got headlines, you can add up to 15. And then we've got descriptions, you can add up to four. I'm just doing a quick ad in this case, so I just ran two. But add as many as you can. That makes sense. And as long as it's not fluff. By the way, we've got several videos on how to create irresistible search ads for these search campaigns. So I'm gonna have that in the description below. Lots and lots of YouTube videos to reference and go back to. So you can expand on almost all of these areas I'm talking about in the campaign build out. There's so much more to expand on. We already have video, video content on a lot of it. So I will have the ad copy videos in the description for you to check out. Then you can add images. These are ad assets. Guess what? We have an entire video on everything you need to know about creating ad assets for your campaigns. That will be in the description below. Here we have images already loaded up, ready to go boom. Then business name and logos. That's very simple. Site links we already have at the account level set up, so we don't need to worry about those. Same with several of our other ad assets. Again, go watch the YouTube video on ad assets. I give you a complete breakdown on every one of these. But you can add promotions, prices, calls, structured snippets, lead forms, call outs, apps. There's a lot to talk about there. You want to add as many as you can as they're relevant to your ad. And again, I have most of these already built, built out at the account level, so I don't need to go through those in this particular tutorial. So now I'm going to hit done and then I'm going to hit next. Okay, so now we have the budget that we need to be setting. My recommendation is usually you need to have enough set at the campaign budget level in order for you to at least generate 10 plus clicks a day. That's because if you go less than that, you're just not going to generate enough clicks in order to really even optimize the campaign in time. And you'll be left with at the end of the month not enough data and you won't know how to make any decisions based off of it. And a lot of times I see people just kind of burn out after that after a while because they don't know what to do. So you need to have enough money to spend for at least 10 clicks a day in this case in carpet cleaning. Clicks can get kind of expensive, but we've got a nice $50 per day budget to work with. So I'm going to put 50 bucks and then next. All right, now Google's going to check for errors. Thankfully, it does usually save this as a draft in case something breaks. But then once this is over, we'll be able to double check everything and move forward. All right, so Google's done checking. Everything looks good. Says your campaign is ready to publish. So all I have to simply do now is hit publish campaign. All right, so my campaign is now live. Now there are a few additional settings that I want to put in place that you can't quite do during the standard campaign creation process. So I'm going to click back in here. First one is I don't like running tablet traffic in the beginning. Not saying I'll never run tablet traffic, it's just I want to get the fastest results to success. And tablets is normally even on successful campaigns that I spend lots of money on for other clients. Tablets is usually a small percent of that. So I just want to remove the variable of if this campaign after a month isn't really quite working, I'm like, well, at that point then I'd be looking at tablets and things like that. I just like to remove it right away, get it to work on your top devices which are going to be desktop and mobile first. Then once you've got the campaign dialed in, go back to things like tablets and you can turn them back on and get some additional volume there and see how tablets does. But for now, I don't want to run it. So I'm just going to minus 100%, which means I'm essentially excluding it out. Okay, then I wanted to show you the bid strategies. Remember, it wouldn't allow me to do manual CPC during the campaign creation process. What you can do though is go back into bidding and if I wanted to, I can now hit into the bid strategies and I can go or select a bid strategy directly and I can now see manual CPC here so they hide it from you. And so in this case I could just go and find flick over to manual CPC and then hit save. So now this campaign's on manual CPC bidding again. I only recommend manual CPC or Max Click bidding when you're just starting out. Not that's not the ultimate goal of bidding, but only when you're starting out. So that's why it is set to this manual CPC bid strategy. Then I also want to start adding some negative keywords right away. So this as you can remember is not available during that standard campaign creation build out. So here I want to add some negative keywords. Like we don't want to show up for Bissell, which was a brand. Hoover which is a carpet cleaning brand. We don't want anything like used Craigslist, etc. We could go all day on negative keywords. I recommend doing some negative keyword research before launching your campaign. I'm just giving you an example here. A lot of good negative keywords though for like a local based business like this, that's a carpet cleaning business in Fort Wayne out of area cities and states. Sometimes you'll see those come through Creating a competitor list. In the beginning it's usually not smart to show for your competitor names, but later on you could test that as a separate strategy. Carpet cleaning company, they clean carpets, they don't sell vacuum cleaners. So every vacuum cleaner brand I would go in and add that as a negative keyword. So I'm not going to go through all of that. But here, always just make sure save yourself some money before you would actually pay for some of these and go ahead and add negative keywords. There you go. You now know how to create a Google Ad search campaign the right way. I hope you got great value from this. Make sure to check out our free Google Ads community. It's called PPC Launchpad. I will have a link to that in the description below. There's a free Performance Max course in that community. You can ask any question you want on Google Ads. Whether it's search ads or Performance Max or display doesn't matter. I'm very active in there answering questions so I would love for you to join. If not, no worries. I'll see you on the next video Sat.