Getting started with Google Ads: A Comprehensive Guide for Small Business Owners & Marketers
If you’ve landed on this article, you’re no doubt interested in how to make more money for your business using Google Ads. Well, pour yourself a cuppa (or something stronger – I won’t judge!) and settle in as we walk through all the fundamental aspects of setting up and managing a campaign using one of the world’s most powerful advertising platforms.
What are Google Ads and how can they benefit my business?
Google Ads are an auction-style advertising system that allows businesses to place adverts in various places on the web, but primarily at the top of the Google Search results. Users will see your ad when their search query matches the keywords that you’ve chosen for your ad to show up on. The idea being that they see your ad before any other result, find it relevant, click through to your web page and then either make a purchase or contact your business about their enquiry.
Because of the nature of search-based advertising – in other words, because people are actively looking for something (if you’ve set your ads up correctly, your thing!) when they see your ad – Google Ads is considered one of the most “high intent” marketing channels in the world, and successful businesses have been known to 8x their money using the platform (meaning, for every $1 they spend on ads, they got $8 back in revenue).
How do I set up my first Google Ads campaign?
If you’re the DIY type, it’s easy enough to get started with Google Ads. Head over to www.ads.google.com and follow the steps – unsurprisingly, they’ve made it pretty straightforward to sign up and get your campaign live. At a bare minimum, you’ll need a Google email address and a credit or debit card, and ideally a decent-looking website or landing page to send users to once they click on your ad (we’ll cover this in much more detail in our next article).
If, like many, you find the whole process a bit overwhelming, consider making use of our PPC Agency services where you can relax knowing your campaign is in safe hands.
How do I decide how much to allocate for my initial Google Ads campaign?
This is the #1 question we get asked, and unfortunately there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Due to the high-intent nature of search marketing, Google Ads can be very expensive, since other advertisers are likely to be competing to capture your customers’ attention, meaning it can sometimes boil down to a bidding war.
There are many factors to consider when determining your Google Ads budget. To name a few:
- How much net free cash flow/marketing budget you have available
- The size and maturity of your business (do you have an established sales and fulfillment process, and does your product or services have proven market acceptance?)
- How much does a customer spend with you on average, both on their initial purchase and over their lifetime relationship with your business?
- What are your gross profit margins on the products and services you sell to them?
As you can see, these are very “you” specific questions, but these are important numbers to know so that you can assess your return on investment (ROI) with your ads.
I always hear stories of people just starting out with a new business, say in their first 1-2 years of trading, and “giving Google Ads a try”, burning a few hundred bucks for zero returns. It’s not surprising – despite the somewhat straightforward experience from the customer’s point of view (they search, they see your ad, they click) there are a number of complexities and pitfalls that amateur advertisers can easily trip over and burn their ads budget.
Moreover, with such a small budget, it’s likely that these people never got through the data collection and testing phase. One of the terrific upsides of Google Ads is the sheer amount of data that the platform can give you over the course of a campaign – any marketer worth their salt knows that data is power, since it informs and allows for better decision-making, ultimately increasing the campaign ROI.
The catch? To collect the data (i.e. how people are finding & interacting with your ads), you have to spend money.
When we work with our Google Ads clients, we recommend that they have a minimum available ads budget of $50 per day – about $1500 per month. The majority of our clients work with a budget of $1500 – $5,000 per month in ad spend. This allows us a healthy amount of budget with which to test, experiment, optimise bidding and keyword strategies, and ultimately sharpen the campaign into something highly profitable after just a couple of months.
If you have a significantly smaller budget available than $$1k – $1.5k/month, I’d honestly recommend holding off on Google Ads and looking for more organic ways to market your product or service – like referrals and partnerships, word of mouth, SEO services, social media marketing and other brand awareness channels – until the business reaches a point where it can afford to invest this amount. Spending just a few hundred dollars a month on ads will take a long time to gather meaningful data and, without positive results, business owners often get demotivated in this situation and quit the campaign, wasting what they’d spent.
Short answer: Try to have at least $1000 – $1500 per month in ad spend available, and if you plan to manage the campaign yourself, be prepared to spend 5+ hours per week managing the campaign and learning everything you can on how to improve your results.
What are the different targeting options in Google Ads, and how do I determine which ones are best for my business?
Like most ad platforms, Google Ads has a set of standard demographics targeting features that let you target your ads towards people based on their:
- Age
- Gender
- Device type (mobile, desktop, or tablet)
- Location (even specific suburbs, or a certain radius from your business)
- Their interests or habits
- As well as people who have visited your app or website.
Of course, the most powerful targeting option comes from the search keywords themselves – by specifying which search terms trigger your ads, you’re able to serve your ads to prospective customers in the very moment they are looking for your product or service. Ever Googled “emergency plumber” or “home visit doctor” in the middle of the night? There’s a good chance you clicked on an ad when you did.
How do I go about selecting the best keywords for my ads to ensure they reach the right people?
There are a number of different methods and tools you can use to come up with your keywords – Google wants to make it easy for you so you keep using their ads platform.
There are many methods you can use, but the easiest and most comprehensive way is to use Google Keyword Planner. You’ll need to set up your Ads account before they let you access this, but you can do all of that without having any campaigns live so it’s still free to do so.
Once you access Keyword Planner, click on “Discover new keywords”. Then type in the name of your product or service and click “Get results”. If you are really stuck, you can also add in the website URL of one of your main competitors, and Google will then show keywords that their ads may be showing up for.
Now Keyword Planner will show you a long list of suggested keywords for your campaign, as well as the tempting option to add them to a campaign and start running ads straight away. However, there’s an important step here – make sure you go through the list of keywords one by one and deselect any keywords that don’t have “commercial search intent”, meaning, even though they’re related to your service, they’re more like people looking for information and not looking to buy.
For example, if you enter “plumber” as your seed keyword, Google may give you the following keyword suggestions:
- “Plumber near me” = commercial search intent
- “Plumber salary” = informational search intent
You wouldn’t want to pay for people to click your ad on the second search, would you?
Exclude any non-commercial search keywords from your list before adding them to your campaign, to make sure you’re only showing your ads to people who are ready to buy.
How do I create compelling ad copy that attracts clicks?
Writing a compelling ad headline is an important step in the success of your ads campaign, and one which many people struggle with for various reasons – writer’s block, lack of confidence, or simply not knowing what to put.
Here’s a simple formula for writing great ad headlines:
[Keyword] + [Compelling Reason to Click] + [Evidence/Social Proof] = a great headline.
So continuing from our plumber example earlier, we might go with a headline like:
“#1 Rated Plumber North Brisbane | No Call-Out Fee | 5-Stars from 200 reviews”
Here’s a visual breakdown with some additional cues on how to write great ad copy:
Inside Google Ads, when you’re building your campaign, you’ll see that Google actually lets you input up to 15 headline options, which it will then automatically mix up and test on your behalf to see what performs best (gets clicked most) – so don’t be shy to populate those with as many relevant pieces of content about your business, service, or offer that you can think of.
If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a prompt you can give ChatGPT to come up with some for you: (replace the bits with [ ] with your actual business info)
ChatGPT Prompt for Google Ads headlines:
“Give me 15 headline ideas for Google Ads, each no more than 30 characters long including spaces. Each headline should focus on a unique aspect of my service or offer. The target keyword/s for this ad are [keyword-1], [keyword-2], [etc]. To help improve click-through rates and user confidence, here are some facts about my business: [Unique Value Proposition], [X] years in business, [X] rating from [X] reviews, [Special Offer or Discount], [Available 24/7, if applicable]. Some headlines should also include a Call to Action.”
These same principles apply for your Ad Description content, although there you’ve got a few more characters to work with. Always try to make sure your target keyword is present, since Google will often call it out in bold if it matches the user’s search, like this, which can improve the visibility and click-through-rate of your ad since users can see you’re offering what they’re searching for:
Protip: using your keywords in the ad description will cause Google to call them out in bold, potentially improving your CTR.
As a bonus tip, make sure you use any and all of the Ad Extensions that are relevant to your business when setting up your ads – they occupy more visual real estate on the search results page and make your ad look more enticing to viewers:
What key metrics should I monitor to gauge the success of my Google Ads campaigns?
Once your campaign is running, monitoring the performance is really important. In the early stages of the campaign, you really just want to make sure your ads are being seen (“Impressions” – the number of times your ads were shown when someone searched for your target keywords), clicked (“Clicks” – pretty self-explanatory), and those clicks turning into leads or sales (“Conversions”).
How to fix a lack of/low number of impressions: if you’ve correctly set up your keywords, ads, and bidding strategy, this is an unlikely problem to encounter. If your ads are suffering from low Impression Share (which you can also check via the Auction Insights tab, where you can measure your Impression Share against competitors), you may need to increase your budget, revise your ads to target keywords better, or adjust your ad targeting (geography) or ad schedule.
How to fix a lack of clicks: if your ads are being shown, but not clicked, go to the Search Keywords tab within your campaign and check to see if Google has alerted you to any reason why your ads may be underperforming – the most often causes we see for a lack of clicks are:
- Your bid is below the required threshold to reach the top of the page.
- Your ad headlines are not keyword-focused enough.
- Your ad headlines/copy are not compelling enough to win clicks from your competitors.
How to fix a lack of conversions: if you’ve registered more than 1-200 clicks and still haven’t gotten any conversions, there’s probably something amiss with your landing page. Check to make sure you’ve included all of the following elements:
- Content that accurately matches the ad copy and keywords you’re targeting
- Your page loads quickly and works well on mobile devices
- You’ve made it easy for people convert – above-the-fold lead forms, sticky clickable phone number/icon, clear CTAs (with distinct buttons)
- Your page features trust signals like reviews, testimonials, partner badges, client logos, awards you’ve received, and so on.
- High-quality images of your work and/or customers interacting with you/your product or service
To help you improve your website & landing page conversion rates, we’ve come up with an easy-to-follow “CATCH” formula that you can follow – see the graphic below:
^ The “CATCH” formula – follow this to maximise your website & landing page conversion rates.
If you’ve got all of these bases covered and you’re still not sure why your campaign isn’t converting, you can request a Free Website and Marketing Review and our team will take a look at your page and see what else you might be missing to improve your performance.
Now, those are just the first couple of metrics to pay attention to!
Once the campaign is underway and your visibility and Click-Through-Rate are adequate, you want to start looking at the following “money metrics” 💰:
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Conversion Rate
- Cost Per Conversion
We also use the Auction Insights to monitor our campaigns’ Top of Page Rate to see who is ruling the roost, so to speak (if our ads are regularly appearing above our competitors’ in search).
If you’re just getting started with Google Ads, all of these metrics can be a little bit arduous to try and dig out every time you want to review your performance. When we’re setting up campaigns for our clients, we actually create a high-level dashboard that pulls this information straight from the ads account so that they (and we) can view the most important campaign metrics in one place. Here’s an example:
It’s hard to give a blanket answer for what is a “good” Cost-Per-Click, Conversion Rate, and Cost Per Conversion, since it varies massively between different industries and even different companies, depending on their offer and reputation. There’s an interesting study which examines some industry averages here (Google Ads Benchmarks in Australia), but do take it with a grain of salt – the best information always comes from your own campaign.
Source: XYZ Lab
How can I track the conversions from my Google Ads campaigns to ensure I’m getting a good return on my investment?
Using Google Tag Manager/Google Analytics to set up Conversion events on your ads and web page is the standard way of tracking conversions from your campaigns. The setup can be a little technical, so if you’re not familiar with these things make sure you take some time to follow Google’s instructions (Google Ads Conversion Tracking Setup), this recommended video guide (YouTube Video Guide) or get our Google AdWords experts to help you.
Final Tips
Persistence is key. Even though your ads can be live on day 1, it doesn’t mean the phone will be ringing straight away. Especially in competitive niches, it can take time for your ads to mature, for Google to start showing them to people, for searchers to engage with your ads, and those searchers to turn into customers.
If you’re reading this and you’ve already been running ads for a while, we’ve got a Free Google Ads Account Audit service which you can take advantage of – we’ll take a look through your account and give you some honest recommendations about how to improve your ads’ performance, without spending more money on them. Click this link or send us a message to request yours.
