Beginners Guide to Google AdWords

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads (earlier knowns as Google AdWords) is a quick and simple way to purchase highly targeted visitors to your site with little budget. AdWords ads are displayed along with search results on Google and content sites. You can also target to show your ads on videos and inside mobile apps. With more than 3 billion daily Google searches, your AdWords ads will reach vast audience group.

Benefits of Google Ads

• Reach millions of users with Google Search and huge AdSense Publisher’s base.
• Delete or pause your ad anytime, there is no contract or obligation with Google.
• Pay only for the clicks and spend as little as you want.
• Target location, language and devices you want to display your ads.
• Get the latest reports on clicks and track your conversion effectively.
• Use free coupons from Google and other partners to maximize your ad reachability.

How to Get Start With Google Ads?

It is as simple as a sales man trying to sell something to you. Here you are the sales man and trying to sell your advertisement online. Google Ads offers platform for advertisers to create and bid ads for particular keyword. The highest bid ads for a particular keyword are displayed in Google search result pages and AdSense publisher’s websites as desired by the advertisers. When someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser pays AdWords the agreed bid and Google earns handsome revenue. Google pays part of this revenue to its publishers if the clicked ads are displayed on AdSense publisher’s websites.

Go to Google Ads and signup for an account using your Gmail credentials. You can skip the guided setup option and fill the required details. Enter your country, time zone and currency details. Set this carefully since all the account settings like billing will be based on this settings.

Basic Steps in AdWords:

Once the account is created, click on the “Help (?)” icon and choose “Guided setup” option.

You will see the step by step guide on how to setup your campaign. Below are the basic steps you should do for starting your campaign:

• Create your advertisement campaign
• Enter Ad Group
• Create Your Ads
• Review settings

Related: Beginners guide to Microsoft Advertising.

Creating Ad Campaign

Go to the “Campaign” section and click on the “+” button to create your first ad campaign. There are many campaign types available and choose the one best fitting your need.

Further settings and options will change based on the selected campaign type.

Select Your Network

Ad Network is the place exactly where your ads will be shown to the users. Be sure to select appropriate ad network when you create a campaign. AdWords offers three type of ad networks:

• Search Networks Only – Shows your ads only in Google search results pages
• Display Network Only –  Shows your ads only in publisher’s website, for example AdSense sites 
• Search and Display Networks – Shows your ads both in publisher’s sites as well as Google search results pages.

Display network puts your ads in the AdSense sites which may not match with the specific content of your site. Select only Search Network if you wanted to show your ads to be displayed only in the relevant Google Search result pages.

Google AdWords Bidding Options

AdWords offers variety of bidding options to cater advertiser’s specific needs. You need to understand each of the bidding options and select the one which suits your advertising requirements. If one bidding option does not satisfy your requirement, you also have an option to create multiple ads and use different  bidding options for different ads.

Google will automatically select the strategy based on the bidding options you choose. Otherwise you can also choose the strategy you like to use for your campaign.

The right sidebar will show the estimated targeting reach for your campaign based on the bidding amount and strategy. If you are not selecting proper keywords and budget, you will see warning messages like no traffic expected.

Check Ad Preview

After filling out other details like ad group, budget, audience, demographics, etc. the last section is for creating ad for your campaign. Previewing your ads before going live with your campaign really helps to see how your ads will be shown to the users.

After completing all settings, click on the “Create Campaign” button to create ad campaign.

Accessing Menus

The new AdWords interface has all the menus items grouped under the “Tool” icon on the top bar.

Click on the menu item and then navigate through the left sidebar section to go to the required option.

Create Your Own Rules

AdWords provides an option to create your own set of rules to control the behavior of your ad campaign. The rules can be set under the “Bulk Actions > Rules” menu. For example, you can setup an automated rule to pause the campaign if the budget exceeds your limit.

Conversion Tracking

For an advertiser it is not important how many clicks the ad receives, but how many clicks are converted to an action is very important. An Action can be a signing up for newsletter, a purchase or a download. You can create different types of conversion tracking in AdWords under “Measurement > Conversions” menu to know which clicks lead to an action on your site.

In order to setup a conversion tracking you need to paste the HTML code in the page such as “Download Complete” page that users see after a download.

Google AdWords Tools

AdWords offers two tools to analyze and monitor your keywords and ad campaign – Keyword Planner Tool and Ad Preview and Diagnostics Tool. These tools are available under “Planning” menu section.

Keyword Planner Tool

Keyword Planner tool provides you the effective use of any particular keyword as a Phrase, as a Broad search or as an exact match. This is an excellent way to find the searching trends of a keyword globally and locally with the competition. Competition shows how effectively the advertisers are bidding for that keyword to help you to decide whether to use that keyword or not. You can access the AdWords keyword tool without having an AdWords account.

Ad Preview and diagnostics Tool

Using Ad Preview and Diagnostics Tool you can search and preview your ad in Google search result pages for a particular keyword associated with your ad campaign. This will not accrue any impressions on your ads. You can access the AdWords Ad Preview tool without having an AdWords account. But you should login to view the diagnostics information.