Guide: Google Ads for Beginners
This post was written by Björn, who is our Google Ads specialist at Qred. Björn has several years of experience with Google Ads, and in this blog post he shares his best tips and tricks on how to best build an account.
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads, which until this summer was called Google Adwords, are, among other things, the text ads that appear at the top of the search results. Your ad is free, but you'll pay a fee when a user chooses to click on your ad.
How to organise a Google Ads campaign
Building a good and profitable Google Ads campaign can be quite complicated, especially if you have limited or no previous experience. In this blog post, I will try to review how to build a good structure for a Google Ads campaign, as well as what elements you should consider when putting together a campaign for the first time.
First, you need to decide what type of campaign you want to make. Most often, businesses start with a classic search campaign, i.e. the ads appear at the top of the search result, as described above, when searching for something specific in Google. And the type of Google Ads campaign I will review this blog post.
How ad groups work
As part of your campaign, you need to create one or more so-called ad groups. An ad group is defined by Google as "An ad group contains one or more ads that target a shared set of keywords." You can create as many ad groups as you want.
I recommend organizing your ad groups based on the keywords you plan to use. In other words: Each keyword you intend to use should have its own ad group and set of ads, which will be tailored to each keyword.
Let me illustrate this with an example:
A business will make use of the following three keywords:
Keyword 1
Keyword 2
Keyword 3
This means that for each keyword, an ad group must be created that contains one of these keywords, which in turn will have personalized ads that are only available when someone searches for one of those keywords. The whole thing can be illustrated as follows:
Now that we have an overview of how the structure will work, we can start creating the first ad group. I recommend that the ad group name be identical to the keyword you want it to contain. This gives you a better idea of which ad group is associated with which keyword.
Keywords
The next step is to add your keywords to this particular ad group. However, they must be added in three different formats; exact match, phrase match, and broad match mod.
Exact match means that your ads can appear on searches where people have searched exactly on your keyword or similar variations of it. Thus, the search must exactly match the keyword you enter - however, with forbearance for spelling mistakes, typos and other deviations that do not affect the intention of the search.
Special characters: [keyword 1]
Example keywords: [buy flowers]
Example searches: buy flowers, buy flowers, buy flower, cup flower, buy flower
Phrase matching means that your ads can appear on searches where people have searched for a phrase or similar variations of the phrase. Thus, the search may contain your chosen keyword along with another word that is either before or after your keyword. However, ads won't show if the search includes an extra word in the middle, or if the words in the sentence have a different order.
Special signs: "keyword 1"
Example keywords: "buy flowers"
Sample flowers: buy flowers now, buy flowers home delivery, buy flowers online, shop buy flowers, buy flowers Copenhagen
Broad matching means that your ads can appear on misspellings, related searches, or other relevant variations of your keyword, but not in synonyms, unlike a regular, broad-matched keyword. The search can also include your chosen keywords in different orders.
Special characters: +keywords +1
Example keywords: +buy +flowers
Example searches: Buy red flowers, buy cheap flowers online, buy white flower
Together, your ad group keyword list should look like this:
[keyword 1]
"Keyword 1"
+Keywords+1
Quality Score
Google's Quality Score is one of the most essential things to understand - and focus on if you wanted to succeed with your Google Ads strategy. Google itself defines Quality Score as an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages.
Quality Score is set on a scale of 1-10, and high-quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.
Quality Score is judged by the following factors:
- Expected click-through rate
- Ad relevance
- Landing page experience
Expected click-through rate defines Google itself as follows:
A keyword status that indicates how likely your ad is to be clicked when it appears for that keyword, regardless of your ad's position, extensions, and other ad formats that may affect your ad's exposure and visibility.
Keep in mind that it's Google's own judgement how relevant your ads and keywords are, and from the advertiser's perspective, that rating is unfortunately difficult to influence. But if you build your ads wisely, you should also be able to achieve a high Quality Score.
Ad relevance is an assessment of how relevant your ad is to your keyword. As an advertiser, on the other hand, you have a better opportunity to influence this rating, because you can simply edit your ads and then achieve a better quality rating.
Landing page experience is an estimate of how relevant and useful your website's landing page is to the people who click on the ad.
Landing pages that are well-structured and contain relevant and useful information for the user. Relevance to the visitor is alpha omega, as otherwise you will experience a high bounce rate (bounce rate), which covers the fact that the visitor only sees one page on the website and then quickly leaves the website again. Here, too, you have the opportunity to influence this factor by simply making sure that your landing pages create so much added value for the visitor that they stay on your website and even click around.
If you want to test Quality Score, you can use Google's help tool for just that.
Ads
Now we've finally gotten to the actual creation of your ads. As we've previously discussed, you have a great opportunity to influence Quality Score through the ad relevance factor. And that's why we should try to include the selected keyword as much as possible in the ad without it appearing unnatural or spoiling good language.
The first thing to fill in is your final URL. Consider whether you want a specific ad to direct the user to a specific page on your website. In this case, fill in this website address in this field. It's critical that the URL matches the final address and that the page works, otherwise your ads will fail.
Then fill in heading 1. My advice is that you simply use your chosen keyword in your headline. The reason for this is that the user who has done a search must find exactly what they are looking for.
For example, if a user searches for "buy flowers" and finds an ad that says "buy flowers" in the headline, then the user is simply more likely to have found exactly what they were looking for.
NOTE: Be careful when using trademarks in Google Ads. You can read more about this in the Danish Marketing Practices Act and Google's own guidelines for the use of trademarks can be found here.
Then fill in heading 2. This will appear to the right of Box 1 of the ad. Remember, you only have 30 characters available. My advice is therefore that you formulate yourself briefly but well - and use a wording that already exists on your website. This will cause Google to assess that your ad has a lot in common with your website, which is good for Quality Score.
The next step is now to fill in the "path", which is the part of the text ad that appears in green text below the headline. The path gives your user an idea of where they will land on your website. Based on the previous example, for example, it would look like this:
It is also my advice that you include the selected keyword here.
Last but not least, you need to make a description. You have 90 characters available, which gives you the opportunity to be more detailed and creative in your text, just as you can advantageously report more about your text. Finally, it is my clear recommendation that you make use of wordings that already exist on the website to increase ad relevance.
Remember: The ad must have a clear message and in eloquent language. You may want to design multiple ads to see which ones perform best.
Now your ad group is pretty much done. You'll continue to create multiple ad groups for each keyword that's most relevant to your product or service.
Tips! Read our post on how to SEO optimize your website here
Negative keywords
After your Google Ads campaign has been running for a while, you may want to check the keyword report periodically. The Keyword Report is a list of the keywords that people searched for when choosing to click on your particular ad. It's an excellent way to check if the clicks you've purchased are relevant to your business.
You can't always interpret exactly what the visitor intended when they clicked on your ad, but by reading the keyword report, you can get a reasonably reasonable sense of whether it's the right traffic you're buying into their website.
For example, if you have a flower shop and you see in the search report that users searched for 'buy flowers', 'order flowers', or 'where to buy beautiful flowers'. The likelihood is so high that your ad has been shown to people who intend to buy flowers. However, if you see that users have searched for 'pictures of beautiful flowers', 'video use flowers' or 'buy flower shops', the likelihood that you are buying the right traffic is not great and thus you have wasted money on those clicks.
To avoid this, you can use what we call negative keywords to exclude keywords that have nothing to do with your business.
You can read more about how negative keywords work here.
The above is of course only a fraction of the work that is actually required to create and not least maintain a Google Ads campaign. But it is a beginning that everything has.
Björn's 10 quick
- Daily Budget - Read more about how it works
- Understand the rules of bidding - Learn more about the different bidding strategies
- Ad extensions - Shows additional business information with your ad
- Cost per click - Keep track of your costs and understand how prices are calculated
- Click-through rate (CTR-) - Click - Through - Rate. Read more about what it actually means
- Check where your ad appears in Google search results - Don't Google for your own ads. It will ruin your CTR and affect the Quality Score.
- Low search volume - No one clicks on your ad? Maybe your keyword isn't doing as many searches
- Remarketing - Customize your search campaign for people who have previously visited your website
- Google Analytics - Read more about how to get started with Google Analytics
- AdWords Editor - Learn how to get started with the free AdWords Editor tool, which makes it easy to structure larger campaigns
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