Create a Google Ads Campaign in 6 Steps

1. What is Google Ads?
2. How does Google Ads work?
3. What are the benefits of Google Ads?
4. What do ads cost on Google?
5. Who are Google Ads particularly useful for?
6. 6 Step Guide for Your Google Ads (Search) Campaign
7. Conclusion

Whether you want to increase reach, boost website traffic, or maximize sales -Google Ads it can be a helpful tool for all businesses to effectively place ads via Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page, in English: search results page) and other Google networks.

In this article, our guest author Anna Uhlig shows you step by step, including tips and best practices, how to create the right campaign for your goals.

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is Google's advertising program. Retailers* can become advertisers and work with Search engine advertising by placing ads on the Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page), on partner websites or in Google's partner networks.

The ads and their associated campaigns can vary greatly. This article only deals with the Google Search Network.

If you want to quickly create a campaign without much effort, our article on Smart Google Ads Campaigns will help.

How does Google Ads work?

Put simply, Google Ads works as follows:

As an advertiser, you place a paid ad on the Google Search from Google Ads, among other things by storing keywords in Google Ads that are relevant to your business. The user, who matches your target audience and has entered the right search term, sees your ad, clicks on it and is redirected to your Landing page. If everything runs optimally, the user then places an order, i.e. a conversion, on your website.

Everything about the delivery of your ads is decided by the Google automation. Through machine learning, Google already knows many signals from users and their customer journeys and can therefore bid very effectively on the keywords you have booked.

What's important to note is that as an advertiser, you pay for every click on your ad. So Google participates in an auction for you as soon as a user enters a keyword you have booked. Competitors may also be advertising on this keyword, so you compete with them for the top ad positions. The deciding factors for the top spots are then click price and ad quality. The better both are, the better your chances of appearing “right at the top” on Google and above your competition.

What are the benefits of Google Ads?

With Google Ads, you can effectively target a key audience before they make their purchase decision. Since Google, with 81.15% via desktop and 97.39% via mobile search is the most used search engine in Germany, you thus have the chance to cover a large reach and reach a large potential customer base.

By booking keywords, the target group is already well captured without any further definition of characteristics or interests, as the match between your keyword in relation to the user's search query can often already be very high.

Users* who are looking for a product or a service can be reached by you exactly at that moment.

Plus, you only pay for the clicks on your ads and their performance is optimally scalable.

What do ads cost on Google?

The click price, found on Google Ads as CPC (Cost per Click), varies wildly from keyword to keyword.

Below in the illustration are a few examples from the Keyword Planner to show you how different the bids or click prices can be.

Keyword evaluation in the Keyword Planner in Google Ads (Source: Google)

If you spend an average click price of less than one euro, you're doing well. Advertisers can also pay double-digit amounts for this.

The wide range of the click price is mainly due to the competition - i.e. how many competitors bid on such a keyword and the specification of the keyword can also influence the click price.

Who are Google Ads particularly useful for?

Basically, Google Ads makes sense to use for all businesses. As can be seen in the illustration above for the keywords, there is enough search volume for keywords for all possible industries - which means that there is also a demand for them on Google.

What is important for you to note is that you plan a moderate budget for Google Ads. The budget level depends of course on the click price, but also on how many users you want to reach.

6 Step Guide for Your Google Ads (Search) Campaign

So, if you want to become active as an advertiser on Google Ads and want to create a search network campaign, you can follow our step-by-step guide on how you can successfully implement this.

1. Select campaign type

If you are in the Google Ads dashboard, go to the campaign level and click on the blue plus sign. Once you are in the campaign creation, you can select a goal for your campaign, but you don't necessarily have to. By specifying the goal, Google can only provide you with recommendations for the corresponding goal, but it does not affect the performance. You also select the “Search” campaign type.

Tip: For the campaigns to be active, Means of payment and other Account settings must be completed in advance. (we've already explained how to create a Google Ads account)

Selection of campaign types in Google Ads (Source: Google)

2. Choose bid strategy consciously

With the bid strategy, you can specify to Google what goal you are pursuing with the respective search campaign. You can select “Maximize clicks” or “Maximize conversion value” among others.

So be aware of where the focus should be - Reach, Traffic, Sales or Turnover?

3. Structure and build campaign

Could you already find suitable keywords in the Keyword Planner? - Then relevant responsive search ads need to be created for this. You can add up to 15 ad titles and up to four descriptions to the responsive search ads, which Google automatically combines.

Tip: Use the respective Keyword at least three times in the ad so that Google recognizes the relevance between the ad, the keyword and also the landing page. You can then group your ads and keywords into ad groups. Similar keywords can be included in one ad group.

Tip: To structure the ad groups, you can orientate yourself to your website.

4. Set budget

A daily budget can be set per campaign. Depending on the scope of the keywords, the budget can vary greatly. For the start, you can plan for €10 - €20 daily budget per campaign if you do not exceed 20 - 30 keywords per campaign (strongly dependent on the click price again here). Google will send you a message at the latest after the learning phase that the campaign is restricted by the budget if the budget is significantly too low for your keyword set.

Tip: Budget is not everything - Also pay attention to the Quality factor of your keyword, as this is also crucial in the auction and ad delivery.

5. Activate conversion tracking

The Conversion tracking of your target project is the A and O! Conversions, such as contact requests or transactions, should ideally already be activated prior to the campaigns so that the bid strategy has access to the trackable target projects for optimization from the outset.

Conversions can either be integrated automatically by your shop system as soon as you establish links between Google Analytics and Google Ads, or you have to create them manually. Google Analytics and the Google Tag Manager can be used for creation.

6. Analyze and optimize campaign

Your campaign has been created and has survived the learning phase of about one to two weeks. You should now look at the most important KPI's and optimize the campaign accordingly. For example, you can adjust search terms to exclude irrelevant search queries and thus limit scatter losses. The advertising times can also be regulated with the ad scheduler and you can fix the delivery of your ads to certain days and times.

Feel free to check out Google Ads optimize for more optimization tips.

Conclusion

If you want to create a search network campaign on Google Ads, you should already research your industry for keywords and compile a keyword set on which you want to place your ads. Because the campaign creation in Google Ads is ultimately not very demanding if you deal with it for a moment and you are guided step by step by Google through the campaign settings.

If you are still looking for the best SEA tools, then you will find them with us!