How to Build a Google Ads Search Campaign (And What to watch out for)

heledd1
Jun 10
8 min read

Updated: Jun 11

Are you ready to build your first Google Ads campaign? Before we jump into it, you should read my last blog post where I wrote about things to consider before you launch Google Ads.

If you're ready, let's go! Read my step-by-step guide below including some things to watch out for when building and launching your Google Ads campaign.

Please note I'm using screenshots from Google Ads but these are subject to change in real life, especially as they keep adding in new AI options!

Choosing the right Google Ads objective

This is the first option you have to choose and should be the most straightforward - for the majority of you it will be sales or leads.

On this first page, once you've chosen your objective you will asked about your measurement goals and conversion tracking e.g. will you track sales? lead form submissions?

This is really important to get right and probably the fiddliest, most technical bit so take your time to read the Google Ads guide to conversion tracking, and if you have a web developer in your team they might become your best friend!

Which Google Ads campaign type to choose?

Right this bit is super-important. We're starting with Search so choose Search!

You might see 'Smart' shown as an option - this is pitched as an easy option for new/small businesses but avoid it and run for the hills, but it's very limited and you get zero data back so you can't learn or optimise.

All the other options like Performance Max/PMAX, display, demand gen, shopping have their place and have their pros and cons but I'd always start with Search.

Search will help you capture demand for the product/service you're selling/promoting i.e. people are searching, their intent is relatively high so you're starting with the best chance of success.

Once you've 'nailed' Search, then move on to display and/or PMAX where you can raise awareness and drive consideration i.e. get in front of your target customers a little bit earlier in their research/buying journey.

which ppc bidding strategy should you use?

This is super-important too. If this is your first Google Ads campaign, I highly encourage you to change the bidding strategy setting from the default 'conversions' to 'clicks'.

Why? Well when you're starting from zero, you're not going to have any conversion data i.e. you won't have any data for Google's algorithm to 'work with'.

If you're lucky, you might start getting sales or leads on your first day of Google ads, but it might take you longer - it takes some advertisers weeks or months of fixing bad-set-ups and then ppc optimisation to get a sale!

So it makes sense to optimise to 'clicks' ie. Google will try to drive as many clicks to your website as possible. Your landing page/website will do the best to convert them, you'll measure those conversions and when you have enough conversion data (at least 30 within a month) THEN we can switch the bidding strategy to 'conversions' but don't opt for conversions on day 1.

This is a common problem I've seen in audits and typically costs get inflated as Google is trying to optimise for you but with no data.

At this stage you can also set a maximum cost per click (CPC), this can vary greatly by sector but putting in £0.50 or £1 is usually sensible and can easily be adjusted once live:

downwards if the 'actual cpc' is lower than the max CPC you've put in (and you have very high 'impression share' i.e. you can pay less and probably get the same amount of traffic
upwards if you're not getting traffic - perhaps you're in a very competitive auction and need to spend more on a CPC level to get seen

Watch out for these google ads default settings

This is one of the main reasons I wanted to write this blog as it's something that so many of my clients have fallen for without knowing.

Google automatically opts you in to:

Search Partners - other search engines on other websites 'powered by Google'
Display Network - display adverts on thousands of websites across the internet

Please make sure Search Partners and Display Network are SWITCHED OFF i.e. unticked!

You can revisit these in future, as you might want to test them separately but it's always recommended that you build specific campaigns for each of these are opposed to lumping all 3 into one campaign if that makes sense?

We're starting with Search so having Display lumped into campaign can:

a) make it hard to see at a glance how Search is doing

b) often Display will take a larger share of budget (Google can waste a lot of your budget here!)

I'll give you a recent example - I did a Cardiff marketing coaching session where the business owner had built his own Google ads campaign targeting businesses in Cardiff and Bristol. He couldn't work out why it wasn't converting. Within a few minutes I found that he was opted in to display network and 99% of his budget was being spent on adverts on Indonesian news sites!

Notice the other thing to watch out for? Yes Google defaults 'all countries and territories'. I suspect most of you reading this will either want to change this to:

United Kingdom only, or
Enter another location - here you can choose specific cities/postcodes/counties etc

Top Tip: if your business operates in more than one geography - let's say London and Edinburgh, I'd recommend you build a campaign for each - they keywords might be the same (or might mention the city) but by splitting them out:

You'll be able to tailor the adverts by mentioning London/Edinburgh so the ads will seem more relevant and could see higher CTR (click-through-rates)
Easier to measure success and adjust budgets

Should I use Broad Match?!

The next question might ask you about broad match (it might not show if you've switched bidding strategy to clicks). If you get asked about broad match, switch it off!

Broad match used to be a terrible option, it has got better over the last few years but only if your campaign has a lot of conversions coming through (which you won't have from day 1). So leave it switched on until you're happy with results and looking for ways to grow.

Here's Google's guide to keyword match types which we'll come back to in a sec!

How to Add your keywords to google ads

Right, we're nearly there and this is a relatively easy bit. Hopefully you took my advice and already came up with a short list of keywords.

I honestly think as few as 5-10 keywords is enough to start with. (You can always add more as part of your ongoing optimisation which we'll come on to!)

Back in the day, you needed to be granular and have hundreds of variants but the 'matching' is very sophisticated now so there's no need to add keywords that are very similar to each other.

I recommend going live with "phrase match" which means displaying the words as I have in this screenshot.

It will give you some data to learn from, you could add in exact match too but exact match only might limit your thinking and learning a bit.

Again, here's that Google guide to match types - it's worth understanding them to make sure you don't enable broad match even though Google will keep encouraging you to do so!

Writing good ads for Google ads

Probably the least attractive screenshot considering this is the 'creative bit'!

Here, add in your compelling headlines and descriptions that will encourage your target customers to click through on your ads.

I always encourage clients to use all available headlines and descriptions and using a range of messaging eg.

Urgency - get an instant quote
Social proof - thousands of happy customers
Social proof - 'Game-changing, Sophie, London'
Intrigue and questions - Want to save time? Need help...?
Benefits - Save time with our easy...
Keywords - and don't forget to use the keywords you're using too

Google will make its own suggestions too and will give you an ad strength between 'incomplete' and 'excellent'. I always aim for 'good' but there's a school of thought that the score really doesn't make a difference, I wouldn't stress out trying to get an 'excellent' score.

You can also add images and other elements of the adverts like 'site links' (links that can appear below your ad) - I'd encourage using these as they could help to improve CTR.

Final step - confirming your budget

I recommended you have an idea how much you want to spend before you go live, and a few hundred pounds is usually a reasonable amount that should give you enough learnings to work out if you can continue on the Google Ads journey and continually improve.

A £300 monthly budget would work out to a daily budget of around £10 but as seen below, Google can make some outlandish budget suggestions!

Don't be tempted to go too big - start small and you can easily build and spend more from there once you're comfortable and the leads are coming in!

Publishing your first PPC campaign

And that's it - once you hit next you'll see a 'Review campaign' page and all being well, your first Google Ads campaign will be published.....

And this is key to remember - once it's published, it's live!

If for any reason you wanted to adjust or check something (e.g. conversion tracking, messaging) before going live, then navigate back to 'campaigns' and pause it immediately.

This might also be worth doing if you've built it just before you head off on holiday or a long weekend - you want to be around to monitor it!

There we have it, well done - you've built your first Google Ads campaign which is:

tailored to your target customer and fits in with your wider business/marketing strategy
focused purely on 'Search' with the right bidding strategy
targeting the location you want to target, using a handful of keywords and attractive ads

PS If you already have a campaign live but are worried about what I cover - just navigate to campaign > settings and you'll be able to see this stuff above in there.

Google ads optimisation tips

I'll write a whole post about managing and optimising Google Ads soon but once you've published I'd say there are 2 key things to keep checking in your first week or two:

Is it meeting your aims? e.g. is it driving leads/sales? If not - is the tracking working for sure? Does the landing page need work? And/or...
Check insights - search terms. You've put in a handful of keywords and Google will match those against thousands of searches being made. Some will be highly relevant but others will be irrelevant - for the irrelevant, add them to a 'negative list' - you'll see the option in there.
You might see for example, some search terms driving clicks but no conversions, you might want to exclude those too (or even beter, think about how you could improve conversion on them)

That's all for today folks...

I've covered a lot in this blog post but I hope it gives you the confidence to either:

go for it and put a Google Ads campaign live
understand how your staff or agency have built the basics of a Google Ads campaign

This is just the start of your Google Ads journey, and I've tried to keep this as basic as possible as an entry level but I really do appreciate it can seem like another world!

I'm here to help you every step of the way - I can help you with:

a Google Ads power hour with you which is enough time to check the set-up and what's going on in your account
a collaborative ppc coaching or training session with you and your wider team where we can really try to build and plan for a ppc campaign(s) that meet your business goals
a full ppc audit and plan to figure out next steps