How to set up your very first branded search campaign in Google Ads
If you have never used Google Ads before, here is a quick overview of what to expect. When you set up a campaign in Google Ads you will always have to start by selecting your Campaign Objectives.
A. Setting Campaign Objectives
For your first campaign select “Website Traffic” from the menu options because we want to focus on measurable results and learnings – then choose “Search” to begin to create a Branded Paid Search Campaign and add in your website address and next.
Name your Campaign (e.g. Brand Search Website Traffic) and we recommend starting with the “Search” option only – if you include “Display Network” that will include advertising on apps, websites etc. and you want to focus your learning on search results.
B. Choose your “bid” strategy – There are some quick selection options for your bid strategy.
- Clicks= Someone clicks on your ad / Helpful if you want to drive website traffic
If you select “Clicks for example – you can also click a box to “set a maximum cost per click bid limit”
- Conversions = You have defined a specific action you want people to take that you feel is valuable to your business goals. This is best practice. To begin you can start with an easy conversion, such as an event that equals a new prospective donor or customer “lead” on your website. This could be a subscription to a donor newsletter (e.g. they reach the thank you for subscribing page) or a new customer registration form.
So if you choose these quick select options, Google Ads will automate your bidding strategy. The system will automatically manage your bids to bring you the most possible “clicks” or “conversions” within your budget parameters.
C. Select your Network
Search – will utilize Google’s Search Network for text advertising (All Google Grant advertising will be done here)
- Display – will utilize Google’s Display Network. This option provides expanded ad format options (e.g. images, YouTube ads, Gmail ads, Blogger ads, etc.)
- Shopping – will enable those with multiple products to easily manage product / eCommerce shopping ads
Next…
You can expand out more settings to set
- start and end dates – VERY Important as the end date is not enabled
- time of day (e.g. business hours)
D. Set your geographic location – you can select a country (Canada) but narrow in your campaign by entering your postal code to select a City / Region.
E. Confirm languages
F. Audience – Now we need to connect to our custom audience if we want to “remarket” to people who visited our website. In the “Audiences” section, click on “Browse” and you will see the custom list you created for website visitors in our last lesson.
e.g. Select website visitors and “all visitors” to capture everyone who has visited your website.
G. Select your Keywords and Write your ads
We cover developing your Ad Groupings, writing ads and testing what works best in our next lessons. Note when you set up a campaign you can just enter your website in to have the system identify what keywords are set up for that specific webpage – or as your keyword strategy may have outlined different keyword phrases for SEO vs. SEM – you can always manually enter the keywords you wish to trial.
As you enter in your advertising copy – note as well you can automatically see how it will appear in either mobile or desktop formats.
H. Set your Maximum Daily Budget
Click Next and Save to go to the next steps of setting up your multiple ad groups (groupings of one or more ads with keywords). We cover this in our next lesson.
Images: Google Ads, Accessed July 28, 2023