Starting Google Ads For New Businesses

If you are a new business owner looking to increase your online presence, or a well established business looking to increase the amount of sales/leads you are generating then google ads might be the right channel for you. We’ve provided some tips and tricks to help you hit the ground running.

You can also watch the Podcast version of this blog 👇🏻

Google Ads Skillshop 🛠

If you are looking to start driving traffic to your website and don’t know where to start, & don’t have the budget to pay an agency for google ads management, then we would recommend going through the Google Skillshop.

This will give you insights into how google ads works, how to structure your campaigns and help you to remove as much wasted budget as possible by making sure all your settings and targeting is accurate.

Even if you have the budget to pay an agency to manage the account for you & would rather focus your efforts in other aspects of the business, we still recommend running through the skillshop to teach you the basics which will allow you to ask your agency the right questions, help you to understand what the time you pay for is being used on and help you to understand what your agency is explaining within the reports you should be receiving from them.

Before Starting Your Google Ads Campaigns 🚶🏻‍♂️

Before running your campaigns you need to make sure you have covered the below.

1. CORE KPI Identify what your KPI’s are by working out the max amount you can pay per lead or per sale and use this as the benchmark to hit, helping you to understand whether your ads are performing or not.
2. Website Ready? Make sure your site is ready to handle the traffic you want. Does it load quickly? Do you explain your services and USP’s clearly? Does your website allow customers to contact you easily/ purchase easily? Check out our blog on why your websites UX is so important for paid marketing.
3. Competition Make sure to review your competitors/larger companies and how they operate online to give you food for thought.
4. Identify Your Audience: Sit down and work out where your customers are, and what they are searching for. Where can you find them? This will help you to identify the correct campaign for you, google has an explanation of each campaign and when to use it here 
5. Google Analytics & Tracking: before you begin running ads, make sure your Google Analytics account is setup correctly, that you are tracking conversions & that this information is being pulled back into your google ads account. This will help you to identify the winning parts of your campaigns that you can double down on and the parts that aren’t working for you.

Once you have completed the above, you should be ready to get your account up & running.

Google Search Ads Setup 🌱

Quite often google search will be the ‘go to’ channel for most businesses, due to its high intent traffic and the ability to show your ads to people looking for your product or service.

Here’s a quick step by step to follow:

1. Map out the keywords you wish to target and view the potential performance by using the keyword planner within the Google Ads Platform, to find this log into your account and go to > Tools & Settings > Planning > Keyword Planner.
2. Campaign Groups: Combine your keywords by product/service into a single campaign i.e Shoe Campaign > Black shoes - Red Shoes - Brown Shoes etc or Accountancy Locations > Accountancy in Bolton > Accountancy in Manchester etc.
3. SKAG (single keyword ad groups): list out your keywords into individual ad groups, which will help to increase the relevancy of your ads and improve the traffic volumes you receive.
4. Keyword Match Types: pick the right match type for you, you can find the options here
5. Ads - Make sure you set up a minimum of 3 Ads per Ad Group, and use as many character spaces as possible to increase the real estate your ads take within the SERP, to give you the greatest chance of catching the searchers eye. Ensure you tailor the ad copy to the keyword within that ad group by including the keyword in the ad copy.
6. Campaign Settings: Make sure you have reviewed all of the settings and have changed the options available to give you the greatest chance of finding prospective customers, the main settings are:

• Ad Schedule - Set the time of day your ads show.
• Location Settings - Set the locations your ads will appear in.
• Language - Set the language that your customers may speak.
• Budget - Set how much you are prepared to spend a day.

Bidding - Set which bidding strategy you want to use, usually you will begin by using ‘maximise clicks’ and then change to a ROAS or CPA based bid campaign once you have enough conversion data in the account.

Google Ads optimisations Task List (for beginners) 🗓

Once you have completed the above and your campaigns are up and running, you'll then need to set up daily, weekly and monthly tasks so that you can keep a track of performance, and make amendments to the campaign to keep your budget working hard for you.

These tasks differ depending on the campaign type, the budget, and the traffic volumes being generated. The below is set out for beginners who have a relatively low budget or traffic volumes.

There are 100’s of potential tasks that could be done in any given month, but an in depth knowledge of google would be needed to action these. We have highlighted the primary tasks to focus on, as these should be relatively easy to complete.

Daily Tasks

Negative Keywords:

Click into the search terms report and exclude keywords that fall into the below bullet points.

1. Check on any overspending terms that aren’t converting.
2. Check on any Converting terms that may not necessarily be high quality from a lead generation perspective.
3. Low CTR (click through rate) terms, the term itself may be a low CTR term which will bring the overall CTR down resulting in higher CPC.
4. All unproductive or unrelated terms.

When reviewing these terms, look over a period of 7, 14 & 30 days. These tasks will help to remove any unwanted traffic and wasted budget.

Weekly Tasks 

Ad rotation:

Keeping your ads fresh is very important, not only to make sure you are giving the most up to date information on your ads. Ad fatigue can set in and if you have frequent returning customers, they can subconsciously begin to ignore your ads.

Check on the Click Through Rates and the landing page conversion rates of your ads. The lowest performing from both of those metrics should be paused, and a fresh ad generated to fill the void left.

*quick tip: Duplicate your best performing ad and look for opportunities to improve that ad, this could be maximising the character count, rewording the headlines/descriptions to be more appealing & also test out different types of ads i.e:

• DKS (Dynamic Keyword insertion) ads
• DSA (Dynamic Search Ads)
• Geo Location Ads
• Countdown Ads
• Promotion Ads

You can also test out different types of call to actions on those ads, which can either be a harder or softer approach e.g. Shop Now instead of Buy now, or even Shop Today.

There is no right or wrong way, but testing each option will eventually lead you towards finding the sweet spot

Budget:

Is the full budget being used? If it's capped (by traffic volumes) then there isn’t anything you can do, but if there is room to grow and the current campaigns bidding isn’t restricting the budget, there are other types of campaigns that can be brought in to test or can you reduce the bid restrictions to increase the reach of the ads?

Are we spending too quickly throughout the day? (i.e running out of budget by 1pm)? Set bids more restrictively to allow for the budget to be spread evenly over the ad schedule that you have set.

Bid adjustments:

Review the bids set out weekly, to make sure you aren’t overspending on the sale of products or leads generated and adjust the below accordingly, by either increasing the bid on the better performing area of the account, or reducing the bid on the lower performing aspect of the campaign, pretty simple!

1. Keywords
2. Devices
3. Locations
4. Demographics
5. Audiences

As a standard rule of thumb (unless underperforming significantly) We reduce the bid on underperforming areas by 10/20% depending on how low the performance is, i.e is it converting but a little too expensive? or has it not converted at all? Has it spent enough to warrant bringing the bid down?

Monthly Tasks

Keywords expansion/review:

Look for high converting terms with decent traffic volumes and then bring them into an ad group/ negative them from the other ad groups (negativing them will stop there being a crossover on search terms between your ad groups)

Also make sure the terms that are converting are accurate and something you would want to appear for. Once again, check over multiple timeframes to make sure you aren’t missing metrics to make this decision on, i usually use 14/30/60 day period.

If you follow the above steps as a new user on google ads, you can’t go far wrong.

Quick Wins / Golden Nuggets 😎

Googling Your Own Ads 🔎

Do not try to find your own ads. You are only wasting your own money & time.

Google won’t always show them to you and it could increase the amount you are paying because you will be affecting the performance of the ads, use the ‘Ad Preview & Diagnosis’ tab to see when/if your ads are appearing and why they may not be at that time.

DKI Ads 👀

This will allow you to generate highly relevant google ads because the search terms are pulled into the ads, but be careful on the keywords you are targeting and the match types used, as DKI doesn’t know which term is/isn’t relevant and can pull in irrelevant terms into your ads.

Tracking Goals 📈

It seems obvious to us, but most of the accounts we come across haven’t tracking implemented and all the data they have generated from either organic or paid traffic is semi redundant because you can’t see what the traffic has generated, or how well the channel has performed.

Track your goals via analytics, by writing down the aims/actions you wish customers to make and then setting analytics to record the action as/when it happens.

Campaign Culling ☠️

Just because a previous campaign hasn’t worked doesn’t mean it won’t work ever, it could have been the time of year/season that you were running it, the competition at the time, the state of play in the economy.

If you apply this model to the whole account you will end up writing off 90% of the google ads platform before you have managed to get it running correctly and potentially cut off a huge amount of potential traffic/sales/leads.

Keep the campaign & reintroduce it at different times through the year, or review the campaign settings, ads, landing pages, keywords and look for opportunities to improve the campaign, as your experience grows - so will your eye for finding solutions/spotting mistakes and this could results in a new route to market that you had previously given up hope on.

Follow a Daily, Weekly and Monthly Schedule for checks 🗓

By following a structured daily, weekly & monthly checklist, this ensures you keep your account fresh and as optimised as possible; which means that you should end up removing any wasted spend and reducing the overall cost per click that you pay.

If you don't feel confident in setting up and running your own campaigns, get in touch with us.