Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising service offered by the popular search engine. It offers advertisers the opportunity to give visibility to their product or service and to attract the attention of a targeted audience on the research network, on partner sites, or even on YouTube.
The particularity of this advertising format is that it allows you to target prospects who are looking for what you offer or are interested in related topics. This is what makes it particularly effective in increasing your traffic or even speeding up your lead generation.
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Understand the structure of an AdWords campaign
An AdWords account has four levels: campaign, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Here is what each of these strata is used for:
The campaign, which generally corresponds to an offer, a product, or a service, allows you to have an overview of the performance and to manage the general parameters. The ad groups divide your campaign sub-topics or subcategories that can be associated with a semantic universe or product lines or offers such. The ads are the essence of your advertising campaign. These are the messages that will be disseminated to the target audience on the research network and partners. The keywords associate your ads to queries made by users to reach them when they are looking for a product or service like yours or a related subject
Each of its elements has its importance in the organization and management of campaigns. You can set up variations at each level to test themes, arguments, keywords, and create targeted campaigns depending on the offer you want to promote and the audience you are targeting.
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Define the elements of your Ads campaign upstream
Before even launching headlong into AdWords, we advise you to prepare your campaign upstream in a separate document in order to facilitate the integration and configuration work afterward.
First of all, think carefully about your goal. Depending on whether you want to boost your online notoriety, attract traffic to your website, or speed up your lead generation, you will need to configure and monitor your campaign in a different way.
Next, and we can’t repeat it enough, you need to define your target audience. This preparatory work corresponds to the definition of a Buyer Persona. This is the profile of your ideal prospect describing their socio-demographic characteristics, their communication, and information-seeking habits, as well as their purchasing behavior and decision-making process.
With this information, you will be able to more easily identify the requests made by Internet users when they are looking for a product or service like yours. The second step, therefore, consists of identifying and listing the most relevant keywords to target. Depending on your offer or your industry, it is recommended to select between 80 to 100 keywords. Once you have your list, you can segment it according to the semantic universe or the range of offers to which they belong for example. This will match your ad groups.
You can now tackle the development of your ads. There are two main types of ads on Google Ads. The text ads formats for which you can write 3 titles (30 characters max.) And two descriptions (90 characters max.). The ads Search Responsive that can write up to 15 different titles and descriptions 4 so that AdWords automatically generates the most relevant ads to present to potential customers. So prepare a set of titles and descriptions by ad groups in order to test several variations of the sales pitch.
Finally, set your monthly and daily budget (monthly budget / 30.4) and the number of your maximum bids according to the capacities of your budget and the statistics revealed by the AdWords keyword planner.
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6 steps to set up your first Google Ads campaign
Once this preparatory work is completed and validated, you can start integrating the elements into your AdWords account and set up your first campaign. Here is how to do it in 6 steps:
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Configure your campaign
During this step, you can define the global parameters of your campaign (name, languages, etc.), but also and above all, manage your daily budget and your bidding strategy. Fill in your daily budget and choose the bidding strategy that best suits your goal.
For example, to work on your brand awareness, select “maximize impression rate”, to generate traffic to your website, the “maximize clicks” option, and to increase your conversions, the “maximize impressions” strategy. conversions”. Remember to enter a maximum CPC (Cost per Click) bid (bid limit for the campaign’s keywords to compete with competing ads) so as not to risk spending your daily budget too quickly.
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Create your ad groups and integrate your ads
In the “Ad groups” tab, you can create the different ad groups that you have defined upstream and include the corresponding ads (in the “Ads and Extensions” tab). In order to set up a really relevant test, we recommend that you write a Search Responsive ad and at least three variations of large-format text ads. This will allow you to collect as much data as possible to identify the most effective arguments for your audience and those that generate the best results according to your objective.
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Integrate your keywords
Once you’ve set up the backbone of your campaign, you can integrate your keywords by associating them with the corresponding ad groups. It is generally recommended to have around 20 keywords per ad group. Be careful to choose relevant keywords that are consistent with the proposition of your ad, as well as the semantic universe and the offer of your landing page.
Google Ads calculates a quality score for each keyword based on three criteria: the expected click-through rate, the relevance of the ads, and the usability of the page. This is therefore a particularly important element to take into account if you want the chosen keywords to trigger the impression of your ads.
There are several types of keyword matches that affect the display of your ads. We recommend that you use broad phrase keywords (“keyword” format) coupled with modified broad match keywords (“+ word + keyword” format) in order to test two approaches and reach a large audience. but sufficiently targeted to collect data and detect optimization opportunities over time.
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Add ad extensions
The ad extensions allow you to enhance your ad with other elements such as site links to suggest other pages of your site to the internet, a telephone number for direct outreach (only on devices to call), hooks to give more precision to your offer, etc. In addition to increasing your click-through opportunities, extensions take up more space in search results and therefore provide better visibility for your ad. So do not neglect this option when creating a Google Ads campaign.
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Define precise audiences
To maximize your chances of reaching your target audience, AdWords offers you the possibility to define more precisely the type of Internet users you want to reach. You can therefore specify:
The age groups are most likely to research or be interested in your product or service. Gender, if your product or service targets women or men, areas of interest in order to target an audience that is interested in topics corresponding to your product, service, or industry. The geographic area to reach your audience where they are, especially if you want to reach different countries or people nearby. Delivery times allow you to define time slots during which your prospects are most likely to seek out a product or service like yours.
Devices, finally, give you the opportunity to favor one or more devices according to the habits of your potential customers You also have the possibility of adjusting the bids (increase or decrease) on most of its criteria in order to favor or not the diffusion of your advertisements according to the opportunities which you will have to detect.
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Launch your campaign and regularly monitor metrics to optimize your campaign
So you are ready to launch your campaign! But before activating it, remember to configure conversion tracking (if that matches your goal) by installing the Google Ads tracking code on your entire site. You can also configure more precise conversion tracking by landing page in the “conversions” tab of “tools and settings”. Setup is pretty straightforward, but you can also hire a developer if you don’t feel comfortable with the exercise.
Finally, Google Ads offers many statistical reports that you can customize according to your objective and the KPIs that interest you. For example, monitoring the impression rate for a brand awareness goal or CTR (click-through rate) for a traffic generation goal.
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