Google Ads Course 2024 | 5 Hours | 70 Lessons | Timestamps | Free Training

Hello, and a warm welcome to this training course! I'm really excited to get started, and I'm sure you are as well. Welcome! The reason for this video is that I want to give you an introduction to the learning materials and explain what you're going to learn by the very end of this course. As I say, this course is basically for anybody of all abilities, because at the end of the day, when you complete this training course, you will be able to use Google Ads as an advanced user. You'll be able to make use of

all the advanced features in the platform, which is fantastic. Now, the way the training course works is that there are three different types of training material and video. First of all, you're going to see videos much like this one, where I'm talking to the camera and guiding you through the step-by-steps that you'll need in order to get the most from Google Ads. Secondly, you're going to see videos where I present slides to you, showing you information, data, and some written assets. In these, I'll share with you and walk you through presentations to help you grasp

some of the more technical areas of Google Ads. Finally, of course, because this is step-by-step learning, you're going to see tutorials of me walking through the Google Ads platform, sharing my screen with you so you can see what I'm doing in real time and understand how to use the platform and where to find specific functionalities, which is really going to help you. In addition to that, there are a few downloadable resources to assist you in your day-to-day as you develop as a PPC expert. These resources are going to be distributed throughout the training as well.

We also have knowledge checks, or should I say, quizzes throughout the course to make sure that you're retaining the knowledge that I'm teaching you. So, if you don't pass the quiz, don't worry! You can retake them; it's just to ensure that everything is sinking in. Again, as a member of this training course, you have full access to me at any given point to ask me absolutely anything you like. Feel free to use the "ask the tutor" system and reach out with any questions along the way. Because after you've purchased this course, you have access to

me forever, so make use of it! I love to hear your questions, and they inspire me to build better training programs in the future. So be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions or queries. Now, let's get on with the course now that this is out of the way, and I cannot wait to get started! Hello, and welcome to this introduction to Google Ads. So, what we're going to look at today is understanding the principles of PPC itself so you can understand exactly what you're going to learn. It will basically set

the scene for the rest of the material so you know you're in the right place and understand the platform you're about to get into. So, what is PPC? PPC stands for pay-per-click; it's a self-explanatory Google marketing method, or digital marketing method, that allows you to create ads online, and you only pay when somebody clicks your ad, which makes it a very powerful method of marketing. PPC could mean, for example, targeting a business online through search ads, which is where you go to Google and people type in search terms to find what they're looking for. Display

ads are often referred to as banner ads. Or sometimes, if you go to Google, you'll find that when you type something in, you'll see a bunch of products listed as shopping ads. Basically, in this course, you're going to focus primarily on Google Ads, and the PPC platform of Google Ads is going to be the driver for this training. You're going to understand how to learn all the areas of the platform. So, in a nutshell, let's understand how this works on a step-by-step basis. You want to advertise your services on Google; you set up a search

ads campaign. Somebody searches for your products and services on Google, which triggers your advert to show to them, so they see the advert in the search results, and you don't pay until somebody actually clicks your advert. The way this works is an auction; much like you see in an auction when you look on TV, where people put their hands up and say, "I want to bid this amount" or "I want to bid that amount" in order to win the auction, it's very similar to what you do on Google Ads. When it comes to search campaigns,

you're bidding on keywords—the terms that you want to drive your campaign—the things that you want to show your ads for when people type search terms into Google. For you to show on that page, you have to bid; you have to tell Google the most you're willing to pay for a click to your website. So, every time an individual searches for keywords in your campaign, that triggers an auction between yourself and your competitors. Let’s have a look at a search results page. This is an example of a search results page; you'll see this for the search

term "plumber in London." Now, "plumber in London" is a location-based term, so what you're going to see are local ads as well. You'll see that option at the top that says "50 providers nearby," but then directly underneath that local search bar, you'll see more ads, which are the text ads that we're going to focus on during the duration of this course. And of course, all of these things are... Managed in Google Ads, this is the platform we'll be using to manage the distribution of these advertisements. So, this is your sales and marketing funnel. If you

haven't been a student of marketing, then this won't be something you've seen before. If you are into marketing, then you definitely have seen this visual before, because it's a very common visual in the marketing space. The sales and marketing funnel is essentially a way of understanding your total market and how many people are at every stage of consideration when it comes to selling your products. At the very top of the funnel, you'll have awareness, where any marketing you do in this region is going to make people more aware of your brand. People obviously don't necessarily

always know they have a problem. For example, if I want a table, I don't necessarily need a table today. Maybe in the future, I'll need a table. Why am I aware of Ikea? It's because they do a lot of awareness marketing. I know who they are. So, at the very top, you have awareness through prints, outdoor TV, banner ads, and online. This is all about generating brand recognition. It's important to do this, but ultimately, you're not going to get many sales from the recognition part straight away; you need to move people through the funnel. Once

they recognize who you are, then they move on to consideration. Maybe they're looking at content; maybe they're reading things around the subject that you're promoting. So, maybe they're on an email list and have joined from what you're doing; maybe they've downloaded some of your content. That's kind of the awareness stage. Right at the bottom, you'll see the conversion stage, and that is where PPC sits among other channels as well. For example, SEO can sit here down here as well. But essentially, with PPC, you're catching people when they're ready to buy, and that's why it's such

a powerful channel because you're catching people at the very moment they're looking to buy. This is what I mean—you're literally in front of your customers at the point they're looking for your services. It can be highly targeted. Your keywords, essentially, are looking at how people are searching for your services, so you're reverse-engineering the customer process. People are looking for your services, and you're going to show right there with the right keywords. In addition to that, it's of course measurable. You can see where every penny is going, which clicks are converting, which clicks aren't converting, and

you can optimize your campaign performance based on that data. It's got a massively high return on ad spend compared to other methods. Remember I mentioned the awareness stage? When you're promoting things like billboards and TV, you're promoting that content to thousands, if not millions, of people who aren't even necessarily in your market. So, your ad spend is going far and wide, which is good for brand recognition. But ultimately, PPC allows you to be there at the point people are looking, so you have a higher return on advertising spend. Billboards and TV cost thousands—tens of thousands—and

companies spend millions on these channels, and for good reason: to brand their products because it's a competitive market out there. But for small and medium-sized businesses, you want a return on your ad spend over a shorter duration; you don't have the money to invest in TV and branding until it starts to get you returns. Eventually, this is why PPC is so important. Now, I've been singing the praises of Google Ads, but it's very important to also consider the limitations of the platform. First of all, this might sound strange, but a limitation of Google Ads is

that you can only target people who are looking for your services. That means it's got limited reach, because think about it: if you're selling a particular product, at the given moment, somebody's looking for that product, you're going to show because of Google Ads, which is great. But what about people who have the need but aren't looking for it yet? Google Ads can't find those people. If they have a need and they haven't actually looked for it yet or serviced that need, then your ads won't show—in terms of search, anyway. There are other methods Google Ads

can potentially use to help you get visibility for those people, but generally speaking, in terms of search—which is the product Google is known for—you’re not going to reach those people. And of course, the main thing is, as well, this pretty much applies to all methods of marketing, but you need a good website. You need to invest in a good website. If you don't have a good website, then PPC isn't going to work for you; neither will most digital marketing channels, actually. So that is important, and we cover conversion rate optimization in terms of changes you

can make to your website over time to improve performance in this training. So stay tuned; you're going to get more information on that. In summary, Google Ads is a PPC product, and it's probably, it is the best PPC product on the market. It has the biggest revenues; of course, Google has a lot of money for a reason. It allows for highly targeted and measurable campaigns. It has a higher conversion rate because you're in front of your customers at the right time when they're looking specifically for your services. But it's not good for branding. People who

are going to reach on Google Ads are typically those who are looking for your services. People who don't know about your services yet but also have a need who aren't actually searching—you're not going to reach those people. So it's important to remember those. Limitations aside, you're going to learn how powerful Google Ads really is. Now that we understand what Google Ads actually is, we need to understand the auction I mentioned. When people go to Google Ads and search for your products and services, anytime that triggers your ads to show, you're entering an auction with your

competitors. So how does this all work? How does Google decide who's on top? Google shows ads from advertisers who use a particular type of location targeting that matches the user's keywords. If you're in the right location that the advertiser is targeting and the user performs a search for the keywords the advertiser is also targeting, that will trigger your ads to show. Therefore, make sure you're in the right location with the right product or service. That is the auction process, but how does Google decide who goes on top? When you go to the search results page,

you'll notice the paid results have an order. Naturally speaking, you would imagine that the very top result gets the most clicks, and the number of clicks each result gets decreases as you go down that list. This is correct. As you can imagine, people are lazy; they go to Google, type something in, see the ads that match what they like, and usually click the first one, then the second one, then the third one, and then the fourth one in that order. So it's important to understand what goes into that ranking system. You'll see there are four

ads at the top and four ads at the bottom for searches with significant competition. Sometimes there are only two ads; sometimes there are only four ads. But for searches with high competition, you'll see four at the top and four at the bottom. The ranking order of ads mostly depends on how much an advertiser is willing to pay for a click. This is known as your max CPC bid—your maximum cost-per-click bid, which is the most you're willing to pay for a click to your website. You basically set this up when you build your campaigns; you decide

how much you want to pay. Now, at this stage of the training, I will say there are some caveats within that, which we are going to learn very soon. One of those caveats is significant, and the other will be discussed in the course as well. But do remember this because this is fundamental to Google Ads: essentially, you're setting your bid, and then Google ranks your ads based on who is most willing to pay the most for a click. We'll go over the caveats to that rule as we progress through the course. Now, let's look at

an example so we can understand the implications of this ranking system. Say, for example, I have a plumbing business and I decide to bid on the keyword "boiler repairs." I decide that the most I'm willing to pay for a click is three pounds for that particular keyword—so that's the most I'm willing to pay for traffic to my website per click. A competitor running ads in the same industry as me decides the most they're willing to pay for a click to their website for the exact same keyword is two pounds fifty. What does that mean? Well,

my bid is three pounds, and my competitor's bid is two pounds fifty. This means that my ad is most likely to show in a higher position on the page than my competitor's, by virtue of winning the auction. Remember, the highest bid wins the auction—that's basically what's happening here. However, as I mentioned, there is a caveat to this, and it's an important one: there are two important caveats to this. The first one is a factor called quality score, which greatly affects the impact of your max CPC bid. Google sees things in a way that means they

don't want advertisers with the most money to win everything; they want it to be more of a level playing field that focuses on the quality of campaigns. Quality score is something that plays into that, which we will learn about in the next module. The other thing is automated bidding. I mentioned that on Google Ads, you set your bids and decide how much you're willing to pay for a click. That was the Google Ads of old, but it's important to remember that principle. Google Ads now generally wants you to use what's called smart bidding, which means

you set an objective in your campaign, and Google will set bids in your campaign to meet your given objective—whether it's how much you're willing to pay for a conversion or how much return on your ad spend you want to get back after you spend ten pounds. Maybe you want twenty pounds back; you set those kinds of rules, and Google will automate bids at the time of auction to ensure it tries to meet those criteria and goals. So that is also the direction Google is moving in at the moment, which means the idea of bidding and

winning in a straight competition in an auction is changing. You need to start thinking about these areas. Again, with automated bidding, we are covering this in the course, so don't worry if you don't understand what that is or the implications thereof; we are going to cover it. But as I say, up next, we're going to learn about quality score, which is an important factor in Google Ads because it will really help you understand how this auction actually works. So, as mentioned, we're going to move on to Quality Score now, which is basically a score that

will really help Google understand how relevant your campaign is to users searching for your keywords. So let's understand what I mean by Quality Score. Quality Score is a score in Google Ads; basically, every keyword in your account, when you build a Google Ads campaign, will be assigned a score. The score will be from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest score. Quality Score is determined by relevancy factors and user experience factors of your campaign. A higher Quality Score could mean cheaper clicks for your ads because of the higher Quality Score indicating to Google that

your ads are more relevant. Remember, Google is trying to create a product that people want to use in terms of its search. So, if people go to Google and type something in that is not in line with their search term, it's providing a poor user experience. Conversely, Google provides a good user experience by showing results that are relevant to the user. So that's why they invented Quality Score: also because it equalizes things a bit more, meaning that you don't just pay the highest amount to win the auction. They want to focus on ad quality, and

as a result, it means you can get cheaper traffic because the Quality Score is a multiplier. The factors of Quality Score that Google determines, and that means you get a score of either one, ten, or anything in between, are based on these three things: these are your expected click-through rates, often referred to as CTR in terms of the metric name of your ads. Now, your click-through rate is the rate at which people click through to your ads compared to the competition, so the number of times your ads show versus how many times they are clicked.

It's an important metric because it shows Google how relevant your ad is to the search. The other factor is how relevant your ads are to your keywords because Google wants to make sure the relevancy chain is in place all the way through. So, if your ads are relevant to your search term but your ads aren't relevant to your landing page or your keywords, then that relevancy isn't going to work. Google will understand that you're trying to promote something that isn't necessarily going to help the user, so it's important to remember that as well. The final

factor of the three factors that affect Quality Score is the expected landing page experience of the user. So, if the person goes to your website and has a very poor experience, it loads slowly, doesn't render on mobile devices properly, or gives people a poor experience in terms of content, layout, and subject matter, then that's going to be important to make sure it's relevant too. As I've mentioned, if it doesn't tick any of those boxes or it ticks fewer boxes than your competitors, you're going to struggle because you're going to get a lower Quality Score. So

remember these three factors because they're going to be important. As I mentioned, the metrics we looked at in terms of these three I just mentioned: expected click-through rate is a measure of how frequently users click your ads over the ads of your competitors. Remember, the more appealing you make your ad, the more it appeals to the user's search term, but also to their intuition in terms of looking for a deal. Maybe you're good on pricing; maybe you're a better provider than your competitors because of reviews, highlighting all those things, which we'll go on to in

the course in terms of how to write high-quality ads. All of these things play into your expected click-through rate. What will make people click your ad over your competitor? Start thinking of factors like that because Google weighs those factors into its Quality Score. So basically, Google will estimate the click-through rate because, as I said, it's called expected click-through rate, not the actual click-through rate. Google will estimate this based on historical performance and other factors at the time of auction, including your competitors as well. So throughout the duration of the campaign, they'll continue to estimate what

your click-through rate is going to be. This is one of the areas you can positively make changes to improve your Quality Score because you can write better ads. You can get a better click-through rate through optimization, so these are things to remember as well in terms of improving your ads over time. Ad relevancy is important. Now, it's not just a case of writing ads that are compelling, that make people want to click; you also want to write ads that are relevant to what the user is searching. Because Google, again, rewards relevancy. If you're bidding on

a keyword like "boiler repair London," there's no point in writing "gas engineer Bristol" or something like that. There's no point because it's not as relevant to the user's search term. Your ads need to be relevant. If they're not relevant to the search, then you're going to get a lower Quality Score, which will hurt your campaign performance for reasons that will become clear very shortly. You also need to make sure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and ads as well. Your landing page experience is crucial. Google will go through your website as though

it is a human; it's called crawling. It will go through all of your pages and all of your content, so Google will completely understand what you have on your website. There is no tricking them; they will know exactly what your content is. As a result of that, the website landing page experience becomes really important because they want to ensure that users are getting a positive experience when they go. to your website because essentially, Google's product is sending people to your website, and it's affecting how Google makes their money. So, they want it to be a

good experience. Ensure your website works on all devices; sometimes, this is colloquially known as "mobile-friendly." If your website isn't performing well on mobile devices, you've got no chance because the web now—well, since 2015 and even before then—is mobile-first. There are more people browsing on their phones than on desktop devices, so remember that. If a website doesn't look good on mobile, then you're not going to get a good quality score. It needs to have easily navigable pages so people can understand, and Google can understand, the hierarchy of the pages. Your navigation needs to be clear and

thorough to make sure that people can find what they're looking for. It shouldn't crash or take too long to load. There are things you can do to ensure it's loading very quickly; we won't cover it in this course specifically—it's more of a developer/SEO task to look at. Of course, it affects PPC, but it's something to look into with your developers, and if you don't have a developer, you really need to hire one. If your website is slow, you also need to present information in a clear way that's highly relevant to users because, as I say,

if it's not relevant, it's not going to help your users, it's not going to help Google, and it's not going to help you because you'll be wasting money on clicks. So, in summary, those three factors of expected click-through rates, relevancy, and landing page experience are going to be your defining factors for your quality score. You can improve all of these factors yourself in terms of making sure your ads are relevant, making sure your content—in terms of your ad copy—is relevant, and improving your click-through rates by writing compelling and powerful ads. That's going to help you,

and Google will reward you with a higher quality score if you tick these three boxes and tick them well. So, what does all this mean? It means Google's algorithm for ranking ads, known as ad rank, takes your quality score into consideration as well as the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a click. So, let's look at the exact formula Google uses to determine this at the time of the auction. Okay, up next, we're going to take a look at ad rank, which is essentially what happens whenever somebody goes to Google and types something in.

Ad rank becomes a very important factor, so let's understand how it impacts your search results. So, what is ad rank? Ad rank is the formula Google uses to determine the ranking order of ads when you go to Google and perform a search. When you see the search results, the order of ads in terms of positioning on the page—from the top down to position four—when you look at the top half of the page, there's a rule that determines who shows where in that kind of search result, and that is what ad rank is. It is the

formula or the rule that means that Google can rank your ads. There are two factors that go into ad rank: they are your keyword quality score and your maximum CPC bid. So those two factors are what Google uses to calculate your ad rank. And how does Google do this? Well, they use a simple formula. Here is the ad rank formula: it is your max CPC bid—the most you're willing to pay for a click—times your quality score, which is the score given between 1 and 10 based on the quality factors of your keyword that we've discussed.

Those two things equal your ad rank: your max CPC bid times your quality score. So let's understand this a bit more. As I say, your max CPC bid is the most you're willing to pay for a click to your website for a specific keyword. You set your bids if you're running a campaign with manual bidding. Obviously, there are other factors involved, which we'll cover in the training, that Google can also automate in your bidding. But that max CPC bid, at the time of the auction, whether you're doing it manually or not, still matters in your

ad rank. Then secondly is your quality score. Now, this is the score, as I mentioned, of 1 to 10 that is basically given to you based on the relevancy and experience of your landing page to all of your keywords. So this is a very important score, and you're about to see why. So, the ad rank formula in action: let's walk through an example. Say, for example, you are a plumber in London and you're bidding on the keyword "plumber in London." Your business sets a max CPC bid of £3 for this keyword. Now, for argument's sake,

one of the competitors sets a max CPC of £4 for the keyword. Now, I know what you're thinking: all things being equal, my competitor has outbid me with their £4 bid compared to my £3 bid, meaning that I will probably be in a lower position on the page than them. However, that's only taking one of the two factors into consideration; quality score also makes a huge difference. So let's take that example and run with it. For that keyword, "plumber in London," my quality score is 10 out of 10. My ad is really optimized, my content

is highly relevant, my landing page experience is awesome, and I have a 10 out of 10 quality score. Say, for example, my competitor's quality score is 5 out of 10—half of what mine is. Now let's run this example through in real time, based on the quality scores and keyword bids we mentioned. So, to plummet in London: my quality score is 10 out of 10. Remember, my bid was three pounds. My competitor's quality score is only 5 out of 10, and remember my competitor set their bids at four pounds, so they outbid me, but they have

a lower quality score. Let's follow this through in terms of how Google will potentially rank these ads. Remember the formula: Ad Rank = Max CPC Bid times Quality Score, which equals your Ad Rank. So, my campaign has an Ad Rank of 30—being my Max CPC bid times 10, which is my quality score. My competitor, who bid more than me, has an Ad Rank of 20. Despite paying more for their click, my competitor's Ad Rank is 20 because of their four-pound bid times their five quality score. So, that’s important: despite my competitor's bid, my higher quality

score means I would outrank my competitor in that given auction on the search results page. This means I effectively pay less for my click, but have a higher average position. My cost per click has reduced because of my optimization of quality score. The quality score is a multiplying factor; it's really important. So, that is why it's crucial to optimize quality score. It’s one of the biggest things you will be looking at as a PPC professional to improve your quality score. Now, one thing I will say is you will never see the Ad Rank number given

anywhere. That formula is essentially the Ad Rank formula Google mentions for how they rank their ads. However, the outputs that we used in this example of 30 compared to 20—you won't see that number anywhere in Google Ads reporting. Basically, this was for illustrative purposes, but the formula still stands, though you won’t see that number reflected anywhere in your reporting. That is how Google, however, calculates the auction when somebody goes to Google and performs a search. That formula is what's used to rank your ads. So, it's an important factor: a high Ad Rank means a better

quality score, which means a better Ad Rank. So, the higher your quality score, the more optimized your ads are, the higher your Ad Rank is. Improving your quality score is going to be one of the most important parts of running a successful PPC campaign. I know you guys want to jump in and start building campaigns, understanding how to do that, but before we even get going with Google Ads and building campaigns, we need to know how to set objectives for your PPC campaign. Because if you can’t measure success, then how on Earth will you know

if your campaigns are going to be successful? So, let’s understand this in a bit more detail. The first thing is, and I talk to clients about this all the time, the first objective is to understand the business you're working in. If you're in-house or working as an agency or freelancer, you need to understand specifically how you want to benchmark current performance. You need to know exactly how the business is currently performing; maybe they're not using Google Ads at all at the moment, or maybe they're using other marketing channels. Either way, the business is functional; you're

obviously a bit hired as a consultant, freelancer, agency, or in-house. They're getting leads and sales right now, so you have to benchmark where the performance is. In order to know how well Google Ads can perform, you need to benchmark where the current performance is, and you need to know some very specific metrics to understand what performance is within a business. So, ask yourself the following questions: How much traffic does your website currently generate? How many leads and sales does your website generate? What is your conversion rate of traffic to sale? What is the conversion rate

of lead to sale? If you're dealing with offline sales, where you're generating leads and a salesperson has to call the lead on the phone or follow up with an email campaign, what's the conversion rate of lead to sale? What is your current cost per sale (your CPA)? What does that look like? And what is your average order value? How does that tie into your Google campaign? If your order value is £200 on average and your campaign budget is £200 per month, then it's not going to work, is it? So, you need to understand specifically what

these metrics are. The important part is, if you don't have these numbers to hand, you need to get hold of them; it is really, really important. So, why do you need to ask these questions? It allows you to benchmark your current business performance, and PPC should be measured against your current business performance. If you're currently generating leads successfully and sales successfully, PPC is a channel that should also be delivering success. Therefore, understanding what success looks like means you can benchmark your performance against that success. You can see where the break-even line is—where the line is,

whether this campaign works or it doesn’t work. That break-even line is going to be really important. All factors are considered in terms of operational costs, cost of sales, and the cost of goods. Understand where that break-even point is for your campaigns because ultimately, that's going to determine whether or not it's a success. So, how to use these questions? We need to look at the minimum viable cost per lead for PPC. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you need to find them. So, what I want to do right now is walk you through

some scenarios or examples as to how you can use these metrics once you've understood them to paint a picture of whether or not PPC will be successful for the business you're working with. So, let's take a look and understand a little bit more. Okay, so now we're going to look at this tool I've created, and it will help you understand how to illustrate your website performance to stakeholders in the business and also for you to make a business case for PPC. We're going to discuss a lot of internal business metrics here, so if the business

you're working with doesn't have these metrics to hand, you're going to need to find them. So, let's start from the very beginning. What we need to do is fill in all of the yellow highlighted cells. And by the way, you can download this very sheet from this section of the course, so you can find the link to download below. We need to fill in the yellow highlighted sections as the instructions I've written here say, and what we need to do is start off with a very basic metric: how much website traffic per month are we

generating as a business? Your business will usually have an analytics package where you can see how many sessions are happening per month. If the business you're working with doesn't have this data, you will need to be a leader and find out how to get that data. Get analytics put onto the website in order to get your important metrics because even if you do or don't do Google Ads, you're going to need that anyway. So, it's an important step for a business to take. Say for argument's sake this website we work with generates 1,500 visits per

month. So, the next cell over that needs to be completed is in yellow, and that is the number of leads per month. In this example sheet, we're looking at businesses that generate leads. Now, the reason I've put a star next to where it says "number of leads per month" is that some businesses don't generate leads; they generate online sales, like e-commerce businesses or indeed the SEM Academy, where we obviously sell courses online. So, in a business like that, you would skip this section and move straight onto the other two yellow highlighted cells and leave this

one blank. But for argument's sake, I'm going to show you the whole functionality of this sheet. So, let's populate the number of leads. Say we speak to the business owner or we look at the CRM system in terms of the lead-to-sale system, and we can see within that system the number of leads to sales is set at, say for example, let's say the business generates 90 leads per month from that traffic. So, you can see here the website conversion rate currently says six percent because we've generated 90 leads from the 1,500 visits per month. So,

that's the lead ratio: the website conversion rate of leads to traffic. So, that's a six percent conversion rate. Up next, in the next column, we have the number of sales per month. So, for argument's sake, of those 90 leads, this business generates 45 sales; that's a 50% conversion rate of lead to sale. Again, you'll need to speak to the people within your business who have this key information. Hopefully, they have a CRM system, which is a single point of truth because you can see the leads coming in and the status of the sales at the

end of the month. If they don't have that, get an understanding from the people who make the sales or even the business owner, though I will say they will probably be optimistic. So, it's important to get a CRM in place where possible. And then finally, the total sales revenue per month. So, at the end of the month, when all is said and done, what did you turn over as a business in terms of the sales you made? Now, it gets more complicated when you take into consideration sales made maybe off-site or something like that that

don't actually involve the website. But a good place to start is just to put in the revenue generated per month, especially if the website is your primary way of transacting or finding business, which to most businesses it is. So, let's say, for example, this business generated, from all of this activity, £50,000 of sales. So, that means the average sale value in this case is £1,111. The average transaction that goes through is about that value. So, now, with all this data, you can start to see what a good PPC campaign will look like. If your average

order value is £111, then you can start to reverse engineer this and start to think, "Okay, if I spend money on PPC... if I spend £5,000, what am I going to expect back based on our current website performance in terms of that current conversion rate of lead to sale?" Because ultimately, on Google Ads, you are going to be generating leads for your business. So, the website conversion rate is six percent. If you start to look at this metric and understand that a six percent conversion rate is where you're currently converting when you go onto Google

Ads and you look at planning your campaign—which we'll go on to in terms of click costs and potential budgets—then we can start to paint a picture. We can say that of the traffic we generate and that the cost is coming in, in order for us to... Break even based on a £1,111 average sale value; the line for profitability is in a specific place. This sheet gives you that baseline information and starts to help you form part of the case, and again, you can play around with these numbers. If it's less optimistic, you can say maybe

the business converts 70 leads and the number of sales is 30, or something like that, or 32030. And then, yeah, you can start to paint a picture like that. So the average total revenue then maybe drops to like, maybe £25,000, and then your average order value is £833. So you have these conversations with stakeholders in the business and start painting this picture because this is going to form the basis for your Google Ads planning. When we've done the keyword research and understand what a click is going to cost us and the conversion rate of the

website, then we know whether or not PPC is going to work. In this section, we're going to look at conversion rate optimization. In the last module, you would have seen on that sheet we looked through; the conversion rate was one of the metrics involved in that, and the conversion rate is a key metric in Google Ads. Your whole campaign hinges on the rate your website can convert users into customers, so we need to look at how to make sure the website is ready to be optimized and ready for Google. This way, when we start generating

traffic, we can get good results. So let's understand a bit more about this really important metric. Your conversion rate optimization is important because before you start to market on Google Ads, your website needs to be able to convert users. If your website isn't able to do that based on your current performance—so say, for example, you have Google Ads installed and your website is generating traffic, but you're not getting any conversions—then there would be no point in running a campaign on Google Ads because you're not going to be successful. So it's important to take that into

consideration. The definition of conversion rate is the rate at which your website converts traffic into leads and sales; this is called your conversion rate. So if we apply this to Google Ads, say for example, your website conversions divided by your clicks times 100 will give you your conversion rate percentage. We looked at this in the last module when we started looking at conversion rates when adding those metrics, and we can see that the conversion rate formula is very straightforward and gives us an idea of how well our website can convert visitors into actual sales or

leads. So say for example, let's do an illustrative example: say my website gets 120 clicks and two conversions on a given day. Using the formula of conversions divided by clicks, we can work out what the conversion rate actually is. So you can see below, you have 2 divided by 120, which equals 0.016. Multiply that by 100 to give us the percentage, which is a 1.6% conversion rate. So that is how you would calculate your conversion rate. Luckily, Google Ads will do this for us in the conversion rate column when we start reporting on our ad

performance when we set the campaigns up, but ultimately this is what is going to be an important metric. So, what is conversion rate optimization? Now that we know what conversion rate actually is, how do you improve it? Well, conversion rate optimization is making changes to your website to improve the conversion rate. You need to optimize your site before running ads on Google, even if you're getting conversions already. So when I say optimize, what do I actually mean? Well, there are tons of areas you could potentially optimize. You can make sure you have strong call-to-action buttons

and instructions for the next steps. What do you want the user to do when they hit your website? Do you want them to fill in a form? Do you want them to buy something? Do you want them to download something? Do you want them to phone your business? What is it you want the person to do? You need to make sure that there's clear guidance and a clear call to action on your website to get the person to the next step. Is the contact information even visible? So if you do want people to phone you

but the phone number is only in small text on the contact page, that's not going to be very useful. You need to optimize your website to surface that key information. Have you segmented your services into very specific groups and pages? Going back to the example of a plumber, I'm not going to have my boiler servicing on the same page as my tap and water pipe installations; it just doesn't make sense. Is the information segmented correctly? Am I using bullet points and lists to surface information that's absolutely key? All of these different things—my use of images,

the visual appeal, how easy the website is to navigate, and much, much more—this is not an exhaustive list. All of these areas are things you could potentially optimize. So take this into consideration when you're looking at setting up your campaigns; your website needs to be able to positively showcase all of these areas, and if it doesn’t at the moment, you have some work to do in order to optimize your website. Just about that section already, we are going to conversion optimize our website. So we're going to look at an example website and we're going to

walk through what's wrong with it. Then, after we've walked through what's wrong with it, we're... Going to go away and make some changes to positively impact the conversion rate in this example website. Okay, so let's do a conversion rate optimization audit on this website: this is Bob'sPlumbers.co.uk, the website we're going to create a PPC campaign for. It's an important thing to do before creating any campaign to audit the website you're going to send traffic to with Google Ads in order to make sure that it's going to actually convert. Taking a quick look at this website,

as you go through, you can see there’s some kind of navigation here at the top. You can go to a contact page; this will go back to the home page. You've got a big title at the top, which is great, and then as you go down into the content, you have a lot of text. You have a phone number, so there’s a call to action there in terms of a phone number. They are using images on the website as well, which is good, and there’s also a link here I can see for getting a quote.

So if I click this link, that takes me through to the contacts page, where I can email, make a phone call, or even, suppose, write a letter because the address is here as well. So it’s a very simple website, and if you go to the home page again, you can see exactly what I mean when I say this website is not going to convert well on Google Ads. There’s not nearly enough call to action; there’s not nearly enough prompts for the user. There’s not much segmentation of services; it’s essentially a one-page landing page. So there’s

not much opportunity to segment your services with this kind of format. From a conversion rate optimization point of view, this is not going to perform very well. As I say, blocks of text are hard to read. At least they’re using images; there’s a lot of white space here, but ultimately this website is not geared up for conversions. What does Bob's Plumbers need to do? They need to go ahead and create more calls to action, make the content easier to read and digest, and also segment their services more effectively so people can find what they’re looking

for. When we start sending traffic to terms like "boiler servicing," we actually have a page to send that user to, and a page, nonetheless, that is more likely to convert than the current layout they’ve got here. So I’m going to go away and I’m going to make changes to this website, pretend that I’m consulting with Bob's Plumbers, and I ask them to make a bunch of changes to their website. We’re going to come back after those changes, and I’m going to walk you through what we’ve done, and then we can see what I mean when

I talk about conversion rate optimization because it's going to really help get more conversions and means your campaigns don’t have to work as hard in order to get results. And we are back! Now, as you can probably see, there are a lot of changes that have happened to this website. Let's start at the very top. First of all, the main navigation has been expanded. There are more services at the top here, kind of highlighting exactly which kinds of services Bob's Plumbers provides. So a user coming to the website will easily be able to see which

services relate to what their needs are. In addition to that, when you look above the main navigation here on the right-hand side, you also have this—this is really powerful. It shows the phone number at the top of the website. When the person hits the page, they can see exactly what to do and phone Bob's Plumbers. Very visible phone number, which is great. In addition to that, when you click this, I won't do it from a computer, but it initiates the phone call should you use a mobile device. So that, again, is a massive benefit if

you're trying to promote a service and have a click-to-call functionality; it's going to increase your conversion rates. As we come further down, we mentioned the big title is great and introduces people to the website, but now, in addition to that, we have a "Get a Quote" button, which is fantastic. When you click that button, you go through to the contact page where you can actually get a quote. There’s a form on the contact page; instead of just the email and the phone number, you’ve also got a quote form on the page too, which is great.

If we go back, we've also got more services highlighted here. So we’ve got the services in the main navigation, but also, if you skip through that and you get to the main body content, you still have all of these service options here. This additional functionality is really powerful; it really stands out and highlights exactly what the services are that the customer could potentially want. There’s still an issue with block text here, and I’ve left that in there deliberately because I’m trying to highlight to you that a lot of people you work with, if you are

working internally in a business or whether you’re working as a freelancer or an agency with clients, there will be some struggles getting things over the line when it comes to making these kinds of adjustments for conversion rate optimization. So this could be an example of one where the text is still here and quite blocky, but in addition to that blocky text, we also have a contact form on the page, which is really crucial. The contact form... On the page, it is going to be very, very helpful in getting more conversions from this web page. As

you go down, again, there's better uses of images than previously. We've got more use of images and more content on the page as well. We still have the "Get a Quote" link here, which is the legacy from the previous page layout that I shared with you. But the most important thing about all of these changes is that, both in the main navigation and in these services, you have the service that we want to promote as a separate page. So, the campaign we're going to build is about boiler servicing. Here we are; we have a page

dedicated to boiler servicing. We have a lot of content, and we have a form on the side here as well, so it's very easy to see where people can get in touch. You have a phone number, content, a highlighted list of points and USPs, and you have use of images. This page is much more likely to convert for the terms around boiler servicing when we build the campaign than the previous page we had in its place. So, this is the principle of conversion rate optimization. Now it's down to you to use this lesson to go

through your own website or your clients' websites and understand what you need to do to improve your conversion rate when it comes to sending traffic via Google Ads. Because it's going to make your campaigns so much more effective, it provides a great way to get cheaper conversions because your website's working a lot harder than it potentially could have done if you didn't have conversion rate optimization in place. In this section, we are going to set up our first Google Ads account. Now, I'm going to assume you might not have a Google account at the moment,

so I'm going to walk you through the steps you need to take. There is one thing you need to avoid when building an account for the first time, and I'll explain that in a moment. But if you indeed have a Google account already, in terms of a Google Ads account, then you can skip this video. If you have to go through to the next part, that is absolutely fine because we're going to walk through how to set up a Google Ads account. Now, the reason I said there's something we need to talk about when creating

an account for the first time is that Google, if you went to set up a new Google Ads account, forces you to build a campaign before doing any keyword research, understanding your audience, or even planning your campaign, which are the things we're going to go through in the course in terms of keyword research. Now, obviously, when you set up a campaign for the first time, you have to plan; you have to do your keyword research, and you don't want to pay for a campaign to go live when you haven't actually done any investigation or research.

That is the pitfall of going through the normal method of creating a Google Ads account. What I'm going to show you is something called a manager account, which is an account you create to manage other Google accounts. So, if you have a business with multiple areas of business—maybe you're a group of companies—you could have a manager account to manage multiple Google Ads accounts. Or if you're an agency or a freelancer, you can have a manager account and manage multiple client Google accounts. I'm going to show you how to set up a manager account because what

that allows you to do is set up a Google Ads account without having to give Google your credit card details, and also setting up a campaign on the fly as well. So, it's a better way to set campaigns up. It might be a bit more long-winded than building a campaign in real time, but it's a method that's going to help you set a campaign up in the future after we've done all of the research required to set up a successful campaign. I hope that makes sense, but we're going to move on to how to set

up a Google Ads account for the first time, particularly in this instance, a manager account. Let's take a look. Okay, so we're going to set up a Google Ads manager account, and in order to do that, the first thing you need to do is to go to Google and type in "Google Ads manager account." Straightforward, of course—excuse my terrible spelling. Now, when you scroll down, you will see the results here: "Manage multiple Google Ads client accounts." Click on that, and that will take you through to this landing page. All you need to do at this

stage is click on "Create a manager account," and when you do that, it will load, and you need to start entering your information. So, I'm going to start entering my information. Of course, enter the information that pertains to you. I'm going to type in the SEM Academy because that's my business; you will type in yours. Choose your billing country, of course, and choose your time zone and your currency. It should know automatically where you are and which currency you're going to use, so that should be quite easy. Click submit, and then that's it; you explore

your accounts, and you're all done. So, click on "Explore your account." Now you have your manager account. It's important to remember that at this stage, you still don't have a Google Ads account. All you need to do is click on this button here where it says "Accounts," and what you need to do is create a... New Google Ads account. In order to do that, let's just close down this tutorial. All you need to do is click on this blue plus button and click on "Create new account." If you have existing accounts and you're an agency,

you can link them here. If you're a freelancer, you can link existing accounts here. If you want to create a new manager account instead of logging into your clients' accounts individually, you can do that. But for the purposes of this, we're going to create a new account. Of course, you give your account a name. I'm going to give it the same name as the manager account, which is the SEM Academy. And then, of course, it's a Google Ads account. You have a drop-down here where you can choose a Smart Campaign account. Now, there's an important

thing to remember: A Smart Campaign account is Google's entry-level product. It allows you to set up a campaign with very few clicks, very few options, and gives Google your budget to play with to try to get results. However, it's not nearly as sophisticated as the proper full Google Ads system we're going to learn about in this training. So do not click on that option—always click on "Google Ads account." Again, your country, time zone, and currency should all be reflected instantaneously. You can invite users to the account if you need to; on this occasion, I'm not

going to do that, so I will hit "Save and continue." Once that loads, it goes through to billing. It gives you information about billing; it tells you whether or not you want to use your tax information. Of course, if you're paying for your rent, you need to add your payment details. For the purposes of this, I'm not going to add payment details. One thing I will say is that it tricks you a little bit because I want to use the tools to show you guys how to set campaigns up, like with the Keyword Tool, which

I'll go on to show you as well. I don't want to enter my billing details, but it looks like you have to enter them. Actually, if you just click "Cancel," then go to "No" and click on "Yes," the account is still there. So, in actual fact, you've created a new account and you've not given Google any billing information. If you just click on that, it will take you through to your Google Ads account. Now we have full access to Google Ads; we have a live Google Ads account where we can use many of the Google

proprietary tools, like the Keyword Planner, that we're going to use as part of the setup of the campaigns we're going to run in this training. So now that you have a Google Ads account, I hope that was helpful. You don't have to give Google your payment details before setting a campaign up; you can do all of your research first and then go into Google Ads to build your campaign and pay for it when you're comfortable with the setup. Now that we have our first Google Ads account created, it's important to understand the structure of a

typical Google Ads campaign to understand the elements of it. So, now that we've set up our first Google Ads account, it’s important to understand the hierarchy and elements that make up a Google Ads account and indeed your campaigns, to understand when we start talking about some of the areas of focus. That way, you know what we're talking about, and understand the hierarchy of an account. Let's understand a little bit more. Google Ads accounts have a structure that contains all the elements of a PPC campaign. Remember, when you go to Google and you perform a search

and it generates ads on the search results page, you see the ads—that's only one part of it. But of course, for that person's ad to show, you need keywords; and for those keywords to show, you need to put them into structures as well. And of course, you have your account and your campaign. So let’s understand what the hierarchy of a Google Ads account actually is. These are the elements of a Google Ads account: At the very top level, you have your actual account. We obviously created an account in the previous section. Within that account, you

would build your campaigns; within your campaigns, you group your keywords into ad groups. Each ad group contains keywords, and each of those keywords and ad groups are directed to ads. So that is the hierarchy of a campaign from the top to the bottom. But let's visualize it so you understand a bit more about what I'm talking about. This is a visual structure of an account. At the very top level, as I mentioned, you have your Google Ads account—which is what we created in the previous section. You have your billing information, currency, reporting tools, and preferences.

Some of the tools I mentioned, like the Keyword Planner that we're going to use, are all managed from your Google Ads account. When you go down one level within that account, you can, of course, run multiple campaigns. Now in the illustrations I have here, I'm only showing a couple of examples, but a lot of these things have many more options available. For example, in your Google Ads account, you don't just have one campaign; you can have as many campaigns as your business requires. Within a campaign, you set up your location targeting in terms of where

you want to focus your ads to show—whether it's the UK, just London, or what area it's going. To be clear, you set that up at the campaign level. You set your budgets, your bids, your languages, and, of course, your ad extensions, which we'll go on to discuss. Ad extensions allow you to show additional information to users who are seeing your ads on Google; we'll cover those as well. Next, you have your ad extensions managed at the ad group level, so you can have both campaign-level and ad group-level ad extensions, which we will also talk about.

Regarding default Max CPC bids, when you set your campaign bids, you can set default bids at the ad group level. Thus, if you create new keywords in your ad group, the default bid will be set. However, if you choose your default bid within the ad group, you can override your ad group-level bids by setting a Max CPC per keyword, as well as your keyword match types. Remember, we covered this earlier with how searches perform, whether it's broad match, phrase match, exact match, or similar options. This is also something we will look at. In terms of

how Google's keywords match a user's query, that is something you can manage at the keyword level. Finally, you have your ad copy—the content that people actually see when they use Google. This is where users click the blue clickable link and go through to your website, hopefully taking action. You manage your ads underneath this as well. Your final ad copy and your final URL will go into the ads of your account. This gives you the top-to-bottom hierarchy of a Google Ads account. So, when we start building the campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads, you will understand

at what level each of these components fits. I hope that’s helpful, as it will come in handy when we start building our first campaign later in the course. Now that we understand a bit more about the structure of a PPC campaign, let’s look at the specifics. In Google Ads, you create a campaign to target keywords for a specific product or service within your niche. You're targeting people looking for your services; that goes without saying. But let’s go into a bit more detail. For example, in the case of a plumbing business, you must promote the following

services. Referring back to our example website where we did the conversion rate optimization audit, we will maintain a consistent theme throughout the course: washing machine installation, boiler repair, leak detection, and bathroom installation. These are all services that plumbers can provide. With that in mind, you should have keywords in your account that can account for all of these different types of searches you want to show for. So, how do you actually build this in Google Ads? These services should be promoted in their own campaigns. You have to be niche; putting all of these services into one

campaign would not be effective because they have so many different focuses. The type of services someone is looking for when wanting washing machines installed is very different from the keywords someone would use if they want a boiler installation. They are very distinct services, and because of that, we need to ensure our campaigns are niche. The reason for this ties back to quality score, which we discussed earlier. The more niche your campaign, the better your quality score is likely to be, as it allows you to focus your ads, keywords, and landing page content in a tightly-knit

and focused way, making you highly relevant to what the user is typing in. Can you imagine if you typed in "washing machine repair," and you were in a campaign that also targets boiler repair? If the person's landing page or ads mentioned both services, you wouldn’t be as relevant if you were advertising multiple services compared to a competitor who only mentions the service the individual is looking for. So, it's important to really make your campaigns niche. Within those niche campaigns, you must use very targeted ad groups. For instance, washing machine repair can be searched through various

routes and different types of keywords. Therefore, being niche in your keyword selection and setting up your ad groups accordingly will be very helpful. For example, in your Google Ads account, you create campaigns for washing machine repair, boiler repair, leak detection, and bathroom installation. Now that you have these niche focuses, you need to go through and create campaigns. Let’s walk through the structure of an account. If you created a campaign for, say, boiler repair as a service, you have your ad groups under the hierarchy—your campaign level sits within your account, and within your campaign, you have

multiple ad groups. Each of those ad groups will contain your niche keywords. Ad groups allow you to break your campaign into more focused niche categories. They also enable you to serve customers more targeted ads based on those categories, as you can create ads for each of your ad groups. Again, keep in mind the hierarchy: you have your campaign, and within that campaign, you have your ad groups, which consist of focused groupings of keywords. This structure allows you to run ads more effectively because the ads within those ad groups are specifically targeting those keywords. Can be

niche and very specific to the user's search, so they can also help you further improve your relevancy. It's a very important thing to do: niching your campaign down and niching your ad groups as well. So, following the boiler repair example, here are some examples of boiler repair ad groups you could have. Again, having a separate campaign for boiler repair compared to washing machine installation or something like that—that's step one. The second part is to make sure each of the keywords and ways people can discover the service of boiler repair are in their own niche ad

groups too. Because, as you can see here, you have boiler repair as a generic term, you can have boiler breakdown, commercial boiler repair, emergency boiler repair, 24-hour boiler repair, and oil burner repair. So, all of these different keywords, if you put them into the same ad group, there’s no way you could write an ad that can cover all of those areas. Meaning, if somebody typed in emergency boiler repair and you didn't mention the word "emergency" in your ad, you're not going to be as relevant, meaning Google will punish you in terms of having a lower

quality score, meaning your click costs are going to be higher. So, that is what I mean by saying you have to group things effectively at campaign level and at ad group level. We're going to go on to keyword research later in the course, but just to get your mind in the right frame of grouping keywords, this is a perfect example. All of these different types of service are essentially the same service; all of these are about installing and repairing boilers. So, this is the same thing, but the routes people search for these different types of

services have to be covered when you niche your ad groups. I hope that makes sense. So, in summary, PPC campaigns should have a single focus—don't have multiple focuses in the same campaign. Again, it dilutes your relevancy, meaning lower quality scores, and ad groups allow you to break down the focus into themed groups of keywords within that particular subject area, as we've just covered with that boiler repair example. The more segmented your ad groups, the better. Don't be afraid of having multiple ad groups in your campaign. It does take more work to set up, but the

results are going to be worth it because it means your campaigns are more niche; you pay less for your traffic because you have strong quality scores. So, that is why it's important to make your campaigns and your ad groups niche and groups perfectly covering the user's search and making sure you're highly relevant. Something we've talked about a lot already on the course is keywords. Now, of course, Google Ads used to be called Google AdWords, so keywords are, of course, a massive part of this, and we're going to take a look at the main element of

PPC, which is your target keywords. So, first of all, what is a keyword? A keyword is a shortened extraction of words that trigger results on Google based on potential search terms. So, an example of a keyword, again keeping with the plumbing theme, is "leak detection London" as a keyword. So, that is a keyword. As I mentioned, a keyword is a shortened extraction. A lot of the time, people often use the word "keyword" and "search term" interchangeably, but this is wrong because they are not the same thing. Technically speaking, they are very different things that serve

different purposes. So, let's understand what I mean by that. What is a search term? A search term is the real-world query that somebody actually types into Google word for word. A search term is often a longer query than the keyword you'd put into your account, and it's something that somebody would type in because they've been very specific with their searches. Now, search terms and keywords can often look the same, but remember they're very different things. So, here's an example to help you understand why they're so different. Imagine somebody goes to Google and types in "best

leak detection company in South West London." That is a search term; you would never have that as a keyword in your account. It's way too long-form and way too niche. As a keyword, you want your keywords to be less niche than this to pick up more traffic. So, this is a user search term. However, if we go back to that keyword "leak detection in London," that search term could trigger your ads to show for your keyword in your account, "leak detection London," because that shortened extraction of the search term—essentially the keyword "leak detection in London"—is

going to trigger your ads for a majority of different types of keywords. So, bear that in mind that the keyword is very different from the search term. As I mentioned, it may or may not show for that particular search, and that's because of something called keyword match types in Google Ads. All keywords can have a match type, and you can add a match type to a keyword by adding special characters around the keyword to make it behave differently based on the user's search terms. So, match types allow you to more closely control when your ads

show or when they don't show, and it's the best way to improve your traffic quality and eliminate the risk of clicks from searches that are irrelevant. The way match types work is they expose or reduce your frequency of visibility on different user search terms based on how niche or broad the user's search is, whether they're in line with your niche or whether they're a bit broader. Server utility: they're both pretty useful factors to have—going broad or going niche—but it's important to remember that keyword match types can change how people see your ads, and we're going

to cover this in the course. These are the core keyword match types in Google Ads: you have broad match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match. All of these different match types, which I'll go on to show you when you create your keyword lists, are going to change the way keywords behave and interact with the user's search term. It's important to remember that because this is really going to help you get better quality traffic. So firstly, we're going to start off with broad match keywords, which is kind of the default keyword match type. It gives

you a high search volume in terms of clicks to your website, but it can often bring lower traffic quality. So, we're going to understand a bit more about this keyword match type. Broad match is the default setting for all keywords in Google Ads. As I mentioned, when you change the keyword match type, you need to add special characters to your keyword. If you add no special characters to your keyword, broad match is the match type that you will have. It means you had no special characters, and it's the default setting for keywords in your account.

What it means is Google will essentially match your keywords to any search term that they deem relevant. Now, that's an important thing to remember because, as I've got written down there, even if it isn't relevant, quite often what happens with broad match is Google looks at your keyword and decides that you want to go broad, which, of course, is insinuated in the name. It means that sometimes—and quite often, actually—you get clicks for searches that are not relevant to your campaign, but you get a high volume of traffic to your website, which can be a double-edged

sword. So let's look at an example of a broad match campaign. If you had an example of a broad match keyword, like "car repairs," in your campaign, Google could potentially match it to the following searches: "how to fix your car," "car service garage," and "fix my car." Now, all of these different search terms that somebody types in to trigger your ads for your keyword "car repairs" are all very different types of searches. Quite often, what you'll find is if, for example, the keyword "car repairs" means you're a car service garage and you want to get

people to book a service or repair with you, some of these searches, as you can see below, are not going to be relevant. "Car service garage" is perfect; "fix my car" is a bit more generic and a bit further up the funnel in terms of relevancy to what you're doing. It could be slightly relevant, but most definitely, "how to fix your car" is not relevant. That keyword, that search term, is somebody looking for help on how to fix their own car. They're not looking to book a service or book a repair—they're looking for self-help. So

it could be a YouTube video; it could be any tutorials based on their model of car. It's not relevant to your campaign, but if you did have the keyword "car repairs" in your campaign, Google could see that as relevant and match your search to that. That person who searches "how to fix your car," if they were to click your ad, would click on your landing page, realize you're a service garage, and be in the wrong place—and you would have wasted the cash spent on that click. So, as I say, this is not good for your

campaigns because you can get clicks from irrelevant searches, as I demonstrated, and it can cause your campaigns to waste budget. Even if half the traffic is relevant and the other half isn't, you've wasted half of your budget generating clicks for irrelevant searches. Of course, it can also lower your quality score because that user search term isn't necessarily going to be as relevant to your ads, your keywords, or your landing page because of how broad it could be. As I mentioned in the previous example, that search was not relevant to what that keyword was trying to

entail, meaning that that person searching is going to be in the wrong place, waste your budget, but more than that, that click they used to waste your budget is going to potentially be more expensive because the quality score won't be as good. So this is a difficult part to say in the course because Google has recently been playing with their automation and bidding, which I'm going to go on to in the course in terms of how you can automatically bid towards a return on investment goal or a CPA—going in terms of cost per lead. That

automation, Google thinks, can play an important part in that. Google announced recently that they want advertisers to use broad match because they have faith in their automation, and as I say down there in bullet point number two, this should be treated with skepticism. I've experimented with broad match keywords and automated smart bidding, and I can see from the search term reports what people are typing into Google, and it's irrelevant. A lot of the searches that broad match generates are irrelevant. If you want to try broad match in the future, after setting up a campaign with

more tightly grouped match types like phrase match and exact match, which we're going to explore next, that's the best way to start. Do not start with broad match if you're looking for more volume. Potentially, you can look... Up broad match, but just to let you know, Google wants advertisers to use broad match. However, I go against their advice to save money and to make my campaigns more efficient, and I suggest you guys do the same. Only move to broad match if you really want to trial getting additional volume to an already performing campaign, and you

want to try to get more sales. Over time, Google has made keyword match types more open, so this is another thing to remember. When I mention that broad match means your keywords match to many more types of search, the phrase and exact match, which we're going to go on to as well, are now more open than they used to be. They don't necessarily block irrelevant searches as well as they used to, and I will go on to explain how that becomes the case in the next couple of modules of this course. Now, the way smart

bidding works: Google sees broad match as getting more data to optimize performance because the more searches Google's AI and algorithms see going through your campaign, the more they can determine what relevancy they have to your ads. The more relevant they are to your offering, service, or products, hopefully, Google will adjust bids in the right way to make sure your campaigns come in on target in terms of a target cost per lead or a target return on advertising spend. However, relying on automation is a difficult one because their system has gotten a lot better, but it's

not as good as it potentially could be or will be in the future. You never know. In the future, when I update this course, I may say to you to add broad match to your campaigns, but I would say, as my advice, not necessarily to do it starting off. You should test; if you want to test it, you should test broad match keywords, but don't be afraid to remove them. Don't worry if a Google Ads representative calls you and says you should add broad match keywords; ignore them. Don't do it unless you really want to

get more volume. Just remember that broad match brings you a lot of irrelevant traffic, and personally, as someone with a lot of experience in Google Ads, I do not add broad match keywords to my campaigns. So, what should you do? As I say, broad match is something that provides a higher volume of traffic because there are not many restrictions, but the quality of traffic just isn't that strong. I would say this is something to be aware of. One of the things we're going to cover in the course is negative keywords, which are types of keywords

that will act in the opposite way to normal keywords and block your ads from showing for particular searches. If you are going to go down the broad match route, you will need to add a lot of negative keywords to your account in order to ensure your traffic is more targeted. It's going to be a lot of work to do; it could be something you might look at in the future. But, as I say again, I would probably not set up a campaign with broad match, and in fact, in the example setup I'm going to go

through in the course, building a campaign from start to finish, I will not be using broad match keywords, and again, I suggest you do the same. So, up next, we have exact match, which is one of the most restrictive match types. It's not quite exact, which we'll go on to in a second, but it's the most highly targeted method of match type on Google Ads. So, let's understand this match type in a bit more detail. Exact match keywords: adding a square bracket around your keyword makes it an exact match keyword. Remember, I said that adding

special characters to keywords changes their match type. This is the first example of adding a special character that we're covering, and adding square brackets around a keyword makes it an exact match keyword. So, an exact match keyword, by rule and by definition, means that the user's search term that triggers your keyword must contain the keyword exactly as typed, so within square brackets. For example, the keyword "car repair" is shown in an exact match below; this is exactly what the keyword would look like for car repair, as you can see there are square brackets around the

keyword. Let's take a look at an example of how this keyword should match to users' search terms. If you have the exact match keyword "car repairs" with the square brackets around it, then you could expect this keyword to match the following search terms: "car repairs" and "car repair." These are the kinds of terms that this type of match will potentially show for. Remember when we looked at broad match how many different types of variations could be shown for the keyword? This is very different; it makes the keyword a lot more niche, and it makes the

type of traffic you receive a lot more niche as well, meaning higher quality traffic. However, you may have noticed that exact match isn't just exact. I mentioned when explaining this match type that the user's search term must perfectly match what's in the square brackets, but in that example, if we go back one slide, you'll see that "car repairs" and "car repair" are included. Despite the fact that "car repairs" is the exact match term, what's the reason for this? Well, the reason for this is because back in 2015, Google changed the way that exact match works.

They didn't want people to miss out. On potential relevant traffic when using exact match extensively, they added what's known as close variants, meaning slight variations on how people would type for the thing that's within your squared brackets. Your ads can still show, meaning the match type is a bit less restrictive than what it used to be. Remember this when using exact match because it means that the user's term doesn't need to match your search to your keyword exactly anymore; it can have close variants. Close variants matching isn't as open as it is with phrase match,

of course. With phrase match, which we will go on to as a different match type from exact match, it's a bit more open than exact match. But remember that exact match matching of keywords to close variants is still the most niche that you're going to get. It is the most targeted type of match type you can use in a campaign, and I think when you build any campaign, you should include exact match variants because it basically guarantees very highly targeted traffic—traffic that's going to be as close to your keyword as you can get. So all

of the search terms that it could potentially match to is going to be a smaller pool. You'll get less volume, but the quality is going to be incredibly high, and it's going to be really relevant to your keywords. So it's the most restrictive and accurate match type. With exact match, the advantages, as I say, are that you get much higher quality than standard broad match and phrase match as well, and it also keeps traffic highly relevant. Really, really relevant traffic is what you're going to get from exact match. Of course, the disadvantage is you can

limit your traffic and reduce the amount of relevant searches, so you wouldn't use exact match in isolation. You'd have to also use phrase match in your campaigns as well, which we'll go on to next. So I would always again say I would always use exact match in any campaign I build. All of my keywords will have an exact match variation because it's going to capture highly relevant and highly targeted traffic, which can also potentially lead to higher quality scores as well, meaning your ad is relevant to the search term, your keyword is relevant to the

search term, and it's very targeted and very structured. So exact match is a great match type; you should use it in all of your campaigns, and it's very, very targeted. But the disadvantage, as you can see here, is you don't get as high a volume of traffic as you would from other match types in Google Ads. But that's why you cover both bases by looking at phrase match as well, which we're going to go on to next. So let's move on to phrase match, and as you can see by the title, I think this is

the best match type available in Google Ads because it's the perfect balance of volume and accuracy. So let's understand a bit more about what phrase match keywords do and how they can work. To make a keyword phrase match, you add double quotes around the keywords to make it phrase match. What does it mean by phrase match? It means that the user search term must contain the words within that keyword in the order as written. So here is an example of a keyword written as phrase match: "car repair." As you can see, this keyword has double

quotes around it, and that makes the keyword phrase match. It's a very useful match type. So let's run through an example to understand why it's so useful. If you have the keyword in phrase match, "car repairs," Google could potentially match it to the following search terms: "car repairs near me," "cheap car repairs," "local car repairs." So as you can see, the words in order—"car repairs"—are showing for all of these potential search terms, and that is a very, very good thing. Now, as I mentioned, close variants are still a thing on phrase match. We covered close

variants on exact match, and they're also on phrase match keywords as well. So Google, again, because they don't want people to miss out on potential relevant traffic, they use what are called close variants, meaning that slight variations on the phrase match keyword can also trigger your ads to show. That can be a good thing for phrase match because it gives you additional volume, and it's not as restrictive as exact match either. So sometimes this also means the user search doesn't necessarily have to contain the keyword in order. Again, back in 2015, or around that time,

Google made this change where phrase match isn't exactly in order either. So exact match and phrase match are both restrictive match types or more restrictive than obvious open broad match, but they still have close variants, meaning you get a good balance between getting exact keywords and getting the accuracy of traffic you require while also keeping keywords very targeted and getting high-quality traffic. Google will still match your keyword in phrase match to terms that it thinks are relevant, but again, this is not as open as pure broad match keywords. So going back to our example, if

you had the phrase match keyword "car repairs," Google could match it to the following search terms: "car repair or repairs," "car car repairs near me," "repairs for my car." So these are not exact phrases; these keywords aren't exactly in the same order, and also sometimes there's a lot of additional characters between them as well. So again, going back to what I said, it used to be the case that the user search term had to contain your phrase match keyword in exactly the order it was. Written within their search term, this is no longer the case;

so it's something to be aware of when setting up your campaigns. So, what do you do when the order of terms matters? Here’s an example: This is actually with a real client as well. Ensure that you have phrase match negative keywords for the terms you don't want to appear. We're going to cover negative keywords next, which are keywords you add to your account to stop your ads from showing. Adding a negative means if the user’s search term triggers your negative keyword, then your ads don't show, meaning you save budget if you're blocking irrelevant searches. It's

a very handy thing to do that we're going to cover in the next section. But going back to this example of phrase match—if the order of words matters. For example, I provide in-home care, and I want to appear for the term "home care." However, I don't have a physical care home; I want the words to be in the right order to make sure my traffic is relevant to what I'm promoting. So, the negative keyword term I would need to add to my campaign would be "care home" because I don't want to show for the word

"care home" if I don't have a care home. My company provides in-home care, so it’s two different variations on the same potential keyword, and Google could match your keyword to both, meaning one is relevant and one is irrelevant. Therefore, in order to stop the irrelevant search, I'm going to add "care home" as a phrase match negative. You can use match type for negative keywords as well, and that's important. It's important to remember that because phrase match is no longer requiring advertisers' keywords to be in the order of the user's search term. So, what are the

benefits of phrase match? This is a very good thing for your campaigns because you can get clicks from relevant searches. The traffic is highly targeted, but it also allows you to expand your horizons a bit more. Instead of going purely to terms that are in the order of your keyword—which is a good thing, of course—it can also go beyond that and find further potential relevant searches within your niche, but it doesn't go as far as broad match. Broad match brings you loads of traffic that might not be relevant; phrase match gives you some traffic that's

going to be relevant. Some of it might not be, but it's very easy to control with negative keywords. It allows you to get the volume and the quality of traffic at the same time. So, in a way, this keyword is the best of both worlds, and that's why I think it is the best match type for keywords. As I said, with the exact match, the same goes for phrase match; you should have phrase match keywords in your campaign. All of your campaigns need a phrase match and an exact match variant in order to ensure you're

covering all bases: niche but expansive, like phrase match, but also niche and highly targeted, like exact match. Thus, both bases are covered, and phrase match keywords should always be added to your campaign. Now, we're going to talk about negative keywords, which can really help you control the quality of your traffic, as I've mentioned and alluded to a couple of times already. Negative keywords can stop your ads from showing for particular searches. So, let's understand a bit more about how this can help you with your campaign setup. What happens when a user searches for something that

could trigger your ads but isn't relevant to your business? For example, going back to boiler repair: A user searches for "boiler repair videos," and your keyword "boiler repair" in phrase match is triggered. If somebody clicks your ad at that moment, you've just wasted your budget because the person looking for "boiler repair videos" is, of course, looking for potentially a tutorial video showing them how they can repair their own boiler as opposed to hiring you for your boiler repair service. That's going to waste your clicks and waste your budget. So, what do you do in this

instance if you're getting clicks for potential terms like this? You use negative keywords. A negative keyword will stop your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. Using the example before, as we said, "boiler repair videos" is a search term. If we were to add the term "videos" as a negative keyword—as a broad negative keyword—to our PPC campaign, our ads won't show for that search term. This means we've protected our budget and stopped it from being wasted on that potential term. Thus, they become a very valuable resource when setting up a campaign and optimizing performance as you

start gaining data on the types of search terms that are triggering your keywords and ads because that's going to be a really important part of optimization. Negative keywords improve the quality of traffic by blocking irrelevant searches. There are a couple of ways you can add negative keywords, which I've alluded to already. That is using the search terms reports—this is a report that Google has that shows you what people are searching for—and during keyword research. In the next module of this course, we're going to do keyword research. You can find a bunch of terms that Google

thinks are relevant to your ads. When doing keyword research, when using their tools to discover new keywords, and when you find the ones that are irrelevant, but Google obviously thinks are relevant because they come up during your keyword research process, you can add those keywords as... Negatives to your account protect your budget, so that becomes very important. So, when researching keywords, look at all the irrelevant terms Google suggests because many of them could trigger your adverts, and you should be adding elements of these keywords that aren't relevant to your negative keyword list. It's really important.

As I've mentioned, and we're going to go on to this when we look at optimizing PPC campaign performance, we've got a lot to go through before then in terms of keyword research, actually building the campaign, and writing ads, and things like that. We're going to go on to that a bit later, but first of all, in your PPC campaign, you'll see a report called a Search Terms Report. So, if you're running ads already, you can jump in and find this report in your account, and this will show you the real-world queries that trigger your ads.

You can find irrelevant searches in there that are wasting your budget and then add those irrelevant terms as negative keywords to stop your ads from triggering for those terms. It's a really important part of optimization. As I say, up next, we are going to look at keyword research and understand the process of building a keyword list and finding out what people are typing into Google to find your products and services. So now, we understand all of the keyword match types available within Google Ads, and it's time to actually start doing keyword research to understand how

to find the keywords people are typing into Google to find products and services just like yours. So, what is keyword research? Keyword research is the process of determining which keywords your business should target through PPC on Google. It will show you how many people are searching for those terms as well as the expected costs involved in terms of bidding for those keywords. Because on Google, although it's an auction, and essentially, as I mentioned, the highest bidder plus quality score wins in terms of the ad rank, ultimately, it's important to understand how much that click is

potentially going to cost. What is the cost of the higher end or the lower end of that auction? Keyword research helps us determine these numbers, which again, as I mentioned with the campaign planning tool, helps us understand where the line of profitability is. Your cost per click is going to be one of those key elements in terms of determining whether or not your campaign could be profitable, and that is what keyword research helps you determine: which words to target and how much they're estimated to cost. So, if we introduce keyword research into the equation, first

of all, you'll need to understand how people could potentially search for your business. The first starting point is, what would you type into Google to find your products and services yourself through the eyes of a customer? If you went to Google looking for what you do, what would you type in? That is the starting point for keyword research, which is an interesting exercise—a lot of businesses don't actually do very often, and it can ensure that you are in the right place at the right time for the user once you understand how they search for your

potential keywords for your business. Now, there's a caveat to this. Although it is the starting point for keyword research, and I'll explain in a moment when I demonstrate a full keyword research activity to you why that's the starting point; however, what you think people type into Google may often be different from what people actually search for—they're sometimes worlds apart. There's also the variation of how people search to consider as well: the way people phrase things, the way people use certain structures of sentences to look for particular products and services—things you may not have thought of.

Even though you're doing this exercise of going through Google through the eyes of a customer, ultimately, how you think they're going to find your business is just a starting point. Google actually holds the data in terms of how people look for services just like yours, so that's why you need a tool to determine this and get that data. So now, we introduce the Keyword Planner, which is a tool I mentioned at the beginning when we were talking about creating a Google Ads account without having to put your card details in to get access to this

very tool. The Google Keyword Planner is going to be incredibly crucial. The Keyword Planner is the tool you would use for keyword research; it compiles all of Google's keyword data based on historical keyword performance from different advertisers. It allows you to see search volumes, costs, and importantly, competition levels to see how effective it would be to bid for a particular keyword. If the competition levels are high and the costs are going to be high as well, it allows you to see all that data and also research potential options for keywords to target within your campaigns

as well. So you can discover new keywords when you go into the Keyword Planner, which we're about to do in a moment. There are two options in the planner: you can either discover new keywords by giving Google a list of things to target and seeing what they come up with, or you can get existing forecasts and volumes from an existing keyword list. Both options are very useful for keyword research because they take two different approaches. To elaborate, to discover new keywords, you need to enter your potential list of keywords. Remember, I mentioned that you need

to think about how customers could potentially find your business? This is why, because that's the list of keywords you're going to need. To give Google a sample of ways customers may find your business is going to allow Google to extrapolate that list massively and return dozens and dozens of potential keywords to target. That's why you need to go through that exercise. You give Google a sample of the keywords you thought of, your website URL, or even both, and Google will use that data to find relevant keywords you could potentially target. Now, one of the things

to be aware of when you do this is that a lot of these keywords may not be relevant, and you have to go through an exercise of deciding which ones you want to include and which ones you want to omit from your keyword strategy. That's part of keyword research, which is why it's such an important aspect of Google advertising. The second option is to get search volume. This is for when you have a seed list of keywords already and you want to understand how they would perform on Google in terms of costings, volumes, and competition

as well. You will get all of the data you would normally receive when asking Google to discover new keywords. So you'll need to generate a list of keywords yourself. There are two approaches, as I said: give Google a sample of keywords, they create an extrapolated list, and you filter through that sample of keywords; or you can build a keyword list yourself based on what you think people are typing in and extrapolate that list by using a tool. I’ll also show you how to concatenate keywords together to make mixes and variations of the different ways people

search for your products and services. Both methods have their merit, and we are going to look at both methods in order to determine our potential keyword list. So up next, we're going to work through both methodologies and build a keyword list for a business. When I go through this activity, you're going to do it for your business, and I'm going to do it for the plumbing business for which we did the conversion rate optimization. So we're going to understand how to build a keyword list for that business, and through doing that, you'll learn how to

do it for your business as well. Okay, so here I am in our newly created Google Ads account, and the first part of keyword research is, first of all, understanding how Google pulls out keywords from potential queries. For this example, we are going to build a campaign around boiler servicing. As a service for our plumbing website, we're going to create a campaign for boiler servicing, and every campaign creation starts with keyword research. So let's get started. The first thing you're going to want to do is go over to Tools and Settings and then go into

the Keyword Planner. Now, this has two options when it loads, as I mentioned in the previous section. I'll just click on this, and there we go, we're in. So now this has two options, as I mentioned in the previous section. The first option is to discover new keywords to give Google a sample of example keywords you want to create a campaign for, and the other option is to get search volume and forecasts based on a predetermined list of keywords. I'm going to show you methodologies of how to use both of these methods to build a

keyword list, and ultimately, I tend to use a mixture of both to gauge, in terms of volumes overall, and also simplicity of building the list. So the first thing I'm going to click on is Discover New Keywords. As I mentioned, we're going to start off with boiler servicing. So let's get started first of all by typing that in as an example keyword. First of all, you can see here your location is set to your account location. This campaign will be for the United Kingdom, so that's correct. Before you start your keyword research, ensure that this

is correct and do a language check as well because that's going to affect the data you're going to get back from Google. So let's get started. If I type in "boiler service"—all I'm doing is adding the comma and pressing space, and that creates a new keyword in this list—so that gives me two example keywords I can potentially use. That's all I need. You can also input your URL here as well to filter out keywords that are potentially unrelated. I don't tend to do this because Google isn't very good at doing this, so I just tend

to get all of Google's data and comb through it to see what kind of keywords we can bid on. So if I click on Get Results, that is going to pull out Google's dataset that they have on keywords in this kind of niche. You'll see, first of all, the first row shows the keyword you provided, which is "boiler service." So that's the first keyword I provided, and it shows the metrics. Now, average monthly searches is an estimation based on Google's search data that they hold on people's behavior on Google. Now, this data is usually very,

very underrepresented; it's generally underestimated. Speaking, the volume will be much higher than this because this usually uses exact match data. People are typing in the query you're seeing below here exactly, as opposed to variations or close variants of that keyword. So generally speaking, when you run a campaign, the data will be higher than the average monthly searches. You can see here the three-month change in terms of how much the volume of the keywords has increased or decreased over time. This particular campaign doesn't really see much variance; you can see that some, for example... Electric boiler

installation is in a plus 900% increase, so if you were in that industry, you might be seeing some growth there in terms of people looking for this particular service. Then, boiler care— that particular keyword has seen a 90% decrease in three-month change in terms of volume. The same goes for year-on-year change; instead of three months, it's just over a 12-month period. Competition is an important factor because it gives you an indication of how many competitors are aggressively bidding on these keywords: medium, high, and low rates represent the levels of competition. With a certain keyword like

"boiler repair," for example, you can expect a lower CPC generally; however, that's not always the case, which I'll explain in a moment. But this gives you an indication in terms of competition. Some people use this as an indication for SEO as well. Personally, I don't do that, but I think it's a good metric to understand the volume of keywords. Next, you're going to have your impression share. If you're running a campaign already and these keywords are in your campaign, you'll get a population of the impression share received in your campaign. We'll go on to impression

share as a metric going forward in the course, but just to make you aware, this column won't populate unless you're running ads with the keyword already in it, where it will show the impression share you're currently getting. The next two columns are going to be really important; that's going to determine your potential cost of traffic. So, you have your top-of-page bid low range, which indicates how much it would cost you for a click to show in the top four positions on the Google search results in the low range. You'll see here the estimations of click

costs from "boiler service near me" are £2.06, and you'll see things as high as £4.97 for "boiler replacement," because, of course, that's a more premium service—advertisers are more likely to spend more money on getting clicks for that service. The high-end range is basically from auctions that have gone through historically, reflecting how the high-end bids have affected four positions. Generally speaking, advertisers can pay anywhere between £3.07 and £10.41 for the particular keyword "boiler repair" I'm hovering over now, but that varies depending on auction and the number of other factors. This is Google's variance in the data;

it shows the low end and the high end to set expectations correctly. So, here's our potential keyword list for this campaign: you can see "boiler service near me," "boiler repair near me," "British Gas boiler repair." If you scroll further down, you can see things like "SSE boiler repair," "emergency boiler repair," "boiler inspection," "gas heating engineer." So, you can see it doesn't just cover the exact terms I put in; in terms of boiler service, it covers all types of terms. In fact, what I'm going to do now is download the list and take a look at

it in more detail to really understand this data. So, I'm going to click on this option to download keyword ideas into a CSV file, which will give me a way to view the data more effectively and potentially sort the data as well, and basically prepare it for use to make my keyword list. We're going to go through a couple of options back in the Keyword Planner after we've done this to show you how you can refine your keywords as well. The report is currently downloading, and once that's downloaded, we'll be able to open that up

in Excel and go through the data. So, that's now downloaded; I'm going to open that up now, and we're going to look at the data. I'm going to drag that over from my other screen, and here's the data—it reflects what we've just seen already. I'm going to tidy this up a bit, removing the first two rows by highlighting cell one and rows one and two, right-clicking, clicking delete, and removing those two rows. We know our currency already, so I'll delete that because it's irrelevant; you will know the currency you're using as well, and then delete

all of these other areas because you've got organic impression share and all these other metrics that are based on your exact accounts if you're running these keywords, but we're not doing that now—we're looking at researching before starting an account. So, I will delete these as well, making it easier to see. If I double-click between cell A and B, I'll expand so I can see the keyword list. As we go down, we can actually, I think the first thing we'll do is sort by volume, so if I click on data and then click on filter, I'll

sort by average monthly searches to see what the most popular keywords are compared to others, going largest to smallest. Now, we can understand where all the volume in the campaign potentially can come from, but as you can probably see, there are many keywords in here that I would not bid on in my campaign. Here are some examples: I would not bid on anything to do with British Gas home care, because that is a pay monthly service from British Gas. Of course, if you're not in the UK, you won't know who British Gas are, but they're

the biggest energy provider for boilers in the UK. They have service packages, and this relates to their service package, so that is a branded term that people are potentially looking for directly. For British Gas to fulfill that need, now there are other things as well, potentially like SSE, which is another energy provider. Um, they do their own services as well. I might not necessarily want that. There are a ton of other brands in here, like smaller brands, like DNG, who I've never really heard of, but you can assume they are a brand as well. So

if I keep going down through the keywords, as the volume starts to decrease, you'll see things like "free central heating." I definitely don't want that keyword; they don't want to provide free heating in my campaign, so this just presents a bit of a problem. As you can see here in this data set, there are a ton of keywords that are not relevant to the campaign, so we need to refine this list. What we're going to do next is actually go ahead and refine this list down to a seed list of keywords we can potentially bid

on in this arena. Okay, so I'm going to jump back into the Google Ads Keyword Planner, because there are a couple of things we need to do to refine this list that will help us get our seed keyword list. So now I'm in here; I'm back in the Keyword Planner. There's an option on the right-hand side panel here called "Refine Keywords," which will allow us to filter the keywords to find the ones that we want to use. The first one is going to be one of the most important ones in this particular campaign, because, as

I mentioned, there are a ton of branded keywords in here that are not relevant to our campaign. You might want to bid on branded keywords in terms of competing brands to your business to help you get more clicks and sales, which is great. But in this particular niche, if I bid on British Gas terms, I'm going to burn through my budget pretty quickly, because they're the biggest provider in the UK, and they offer bespoke services in terms of coverage and monthly payments. So again, it goes back to understanding your industry, and you will understand your

industry very well, so you will know exactly whether or not you should or shouldn't be bidding on particular competitors. If I click this drop-down option for "brand or non-brand," I’m going to be met with a ton of filters. Now, these filters will allow me to refine the keyword list. Now, the first one is for everything in the list; we wouldn't untick this, because if I untick this option, we're basically left with nothing, as I've removed all branded and non-branded keywords from this list. Now, I'll re-tick that so you can see that it will reappear. As

you go down this list, you'll see all of the big brands, like Bosch, Vaillant, and all the other kind of bigger names in the boiler industry. I know you probably don't know who these people are if you're not in the UK, or even if you are in the UK, you might not necessarily know who these people are, but they are the biggest brands in the industry. As you go down, you can see more companies like British Gas, SSE, and EDF. So you've got brands of boilers in terms of who makes the boilers, then you've got

companies who install the boilers, and then you've got contractors who are smaller businesses who fit boilers. So they've identified these brands as smaller contractors, and then other brands of boilers as well. You can see there's plenty of other smaller brands that do boiler installation as well. So what you can do with this option is you can actually untick all non-branded keywords. If I tick "brand," that means all of these potential boiler manufacturers are no longer in our keyword list. Now, you might want to bid on keywords like "install Bosch boiler" or "install Baxi boiler" because

people know which boiler they actually want. So you might want to include those. In that case, you would tick this option. For the purposes of this, I'm going to include the boiler manufacturers because that's going to help us identify more customers who are willing to install these particular types of boilers. If I didn't provide these boilers in my service, then I would untick the ones that are not applicable, but for the purposes of this, I'm going to leave these brands of boilers ticked. The next one is company. I've mentioned before that a lot of these

companies are huge and would eat up all of my budget, not allowing me to spend effectively on more buyer keywords as opposed to competitor keywords. You might want to bid on competitors; that's okay, you can leave these options ticked, but for the purposes of this, I'm going to untick this box now. This one is for smaller competitors—really small contractors. Um, so I will happily untick this as well, because these are small competitors who might not be in the same space as me. They might not have boiler service as their main service, so they might have

things like gas engineering, or maybe they install bathrooms, or maybe they do other kinds of plumbing—that's their main service. I don't actually know, so I'm going to take a—I'm not going to take the risk and advertise against their keywords until I start checking them out in a bit more detail. So I'm going to untick contractors as well, and as we untick, you can see the keyword list refreshes, and then it shows fewer results because of this filter. Now, as you go down, you're going to see other brands as well, so these are other brands of

potential boilers and contractors as well. For example, Checker Trade is a price comparison service website here in the UK that compares different companies providing home services like boiler installation, as we're doing now. Therefore, all of these types of keywords are not going to be added to my campaign because many of them are not relevant; they will be things that are not quite in line with what I want for my campaign. This is because they are service providers who might be quite large, and they are also governing bodies as well. Corgi, for example, is a gas

safety registration body—or at least they were. So, a lot of these aren't going to be necessarily relevant. As a result, I’m going to untick this, which refines our keyword list even further. Now, I am comfortably happy that I've got non-branded keywords in my account apart from the manufacturer of boilers, which I'll review as we go down and go through the list. Now that I've completed that section on brand versus non-brand keywords, I can collapse this. You can also go into services as well; boiler repair, boiler installation, maintenance, replacement, fault finding, and inspection are all things

I'm happy with in my campaign, so I'll keep those checked. When it comes to system, boiler, Combi boiler, and back boiler, these are all different types of boilers. You want to keep "boiler" in there, but if you don't provide services for all of these different types of boilers, you want to remove those particular keywords. I’ll keep them in because we provide services for all types. Then, you've got energy sources; ours is gas engineering, so I'm going to untick oil and electric as well, which further refines the keyword list. Finally, you've got others: prices, water, plumbing—

we don’t do commercial work, so I’ll untick "commercial" for this particular campaign. You’ve got "industrial," which I'll untick as well. This will really help you refine your list down based on the services you do or don’t provide, making it a good way to start. Then you've got air, MATT, month, valve, and all these other different types of subcategories. I'm going to keep most of them in; in fact, I'll remove "water." Actually, I’ll keep "water" in there because it might be quite relevant to what we’re doing in this example. So, I’ll keep that. You can now

see that I've refined the keyword list down to 712 keywords. Now, all I need to do is download this keyword list in order to see what my final keyword selection could look like. This may still need refining, but I’ve used Google’s filters to help me refine it even better. I'm going to download these keyword ideas now, and we’ll take a look at them to see if further refinement is needed. Okay, so I’ve downloaded that keyword list. Let’s take a look at it now. I’m going to open this, and it will open in Excel as it

did last time. I’ll click on the top two rows, highlight them, then delete them. Next, I’ll delete the currency column and eliminate the blank columns based on data I would use if I were running the campaign. After that, I’ll double-click between columns A and B, which will give us our list. If I click on cell A2 and hold down control and shift simultaneously while pressing down, that will highlight all the keywords in the list. Looking at the bottom corner of Excel, you can see there are 712 keywords in the list, which is fantastic because that

is exactly what we wanted. However, let me go through a few examples of why we still need to refine this list. There are going to be tons of keywords in here that we do not want to bid on. For instance, you can see here that there are keywords like "Patel Boiler Services." Now we removed brands and smaller contractors from this list, but evidently, Google didn't capture all of them, as you can see with another example called "Draw More Boilers." They aren’t high volume, but ultimately these are terms that we do not want to appear for

in our campaign. All of these potentially irrelevant terms are things we don't want to bid on. The refinement process when you build your keyword list is to review your seed list—so all 712 keywords that we have in this list—and comb through it very carefully to determine which ones are relevant and which aren't, omitting the irrelevant ones. This process is really important as part of your research because you want to bid only on keywords that you believe will yield returns and sales. For example, "Worcester Bosch boiler service" is excellent; it includes the brand of the boiler

that we mentioned before, and we want to bid on terms like this. As you go down the list, you will find keywords that aren’t necessarily needed or that you might want to remove. For instance, "cheap boiler installation" is a perfect example of a keyword you might want to remove. If you provide cheap boiler installation and don’t mind customers who are after a deal, this could be a great keyword for you. However, if you know your service is premium, you do not want to bid on this keyword. So, it’s a bit of a nuanced decision. A

thought process you need to take when going through your keyword list: it’s really important to go through and understand that even if a keyword might be relevant to the industry or to maybe one of your competitors, it may not be relevant to you. So, you need to actually go through and check some of these keywords. The second activity you need to do is look at keywords that aren’t necessarily wrong, but could not be right for your business. There are tons of keywords to go through, and it’s a process you’re going to have to get used

to as a Google Ads expert. You don’t just want to do your keyword research on Google, take all the keywords, and drop them in, even though that’s something Google would probably like you to do, because you end up spending more money and potentially wasting your budget. That’s not necessarily something you’d want to do. So, with that said, I'm going to go ahead and comb through this keyword list and cut out all of the keywords that do not make sense for my business, including smaller brands, services that aren’t necessarily relevant, and other things like that. That

is going to help us with our keyword research, and the next part of this would be to group the keywords. That will come later, but let’s first of all get involved and start removing keywords that are not relevant to this campaign. Here I am back in the spreadsheet, and I’ve not shown you the refinement list yet. I want to show you exactly what I mean by refining. As I mentioned, we refine the keywords down using the filters in Google's Keyword Planner, and since then we've downloaded it and gone on to this spreadsheet. My job to

show you was to refine this keyword list even further. Remember, the focus of this campaign is boiler servicing, or boiler service, so that means any keyword that isn’t relevant to that specific service that this campaign is going to be for needs to be removed. I’ve gone through the process first of all with a filter, and I’ve done a filter for "service," which gave me a very good benchmark of what to do. Once I did that, it was a case of taking this list and refining it further, making sure everything in there was highly relevant to

boiler servicing without including any small contractors or smaller brands because we don’t want to target that in this campaign. If we wanted to, I would set up a separate competitor campaign to more effectively manage the budget. With that said, I’ve done the refinement process and put it onto this sheet here. Now we’ve gone from about 650 keywords in the previous sheet down to, if I hold Ctrl and Shift on cell A2 and then press down, down to, as we can see here on the count, 154 keywords. This is our final keyword list—everything in here is

relevant to the campaign. You can see now how we’ve gone from putting a few keywords into the Google Keyword Planner and then it comes back with over a thousand keywords. Using Google's filters, it comes back with 700 or so keywords, refining that further in terms of making sure the focus of the campaign is covered, and now we’re down to this keyword list. It’s important to remember you may hear from Google representatives that you should be bidding on all of the keywords that you saw in that 1,000 list or even the 700 list. Now, many of

those weren’t relevant, meaning you would waste your budget. This list is going to be everything focused around your campaign, your focus, and your goals. This is your main keyword list. You need to go through this process with your business as well. If you’re finding your keyword list for a specific campaign is getting into the 700s or the thousands in terms of keyword count, then it’s probably likely you haven’t refined your keyword list enough. So, here we are—this is our seed keyword list for the campaign. The next step is to refine this even further because we

need to group these keywords into effective ad groups. Remember, ad groups allow us to effectively group our keywords into themed groups, meaning our ad copy can be more targeted. What I mean by that is we have generic keywords like "boiler service," we have keywords that contain things like "annual," and we have keywords that contain things like brands like Glowworm or Baxi. We need to refine this further to make sure we're covering the right kinds of keywords. With that in mind, let’s go ahead and do that next. Now we have our themed keyword list. It’s important

for us now to group them into effective ad groups. Remember, ad groups group keywords into more effectively relevant subgroups and subcategories from your main seed keyword list, meaning we can write ad copy that’s more relevant to the keywords themselves. The way to do this is to first start looking through the keyword list and finding themes. The first theme I’m seeing here is “Valiant boiler service.” Now, “Valiant” is one of the branded keywords that came out of our research. It’s a brand of boiler, and it’s a popular brand here in the UK. So, it makes sense

to have an ad group so that when people go and type in “Valiant boiler service,” considering that we do service those boilers as our example business, it makes sense for us to have an ad targeted specifically to that keyword to make us more relevant, to make people click us more, to improve our quality scores, and to get cheaper traffic. So, let’s start off. By creating a secondary sheet, we're going to start grouping these keywords. So, if I click into this button here, I'm going to type in "valence" as a heading. In fact, we're going to

have a grouping for each keyword type underneath each of these headings. We're going to start with valence, but I'm going to make all of these a heading, so I'm going to change this to black and change the text color to white. This will be the heading for each of our ad groups, and within here, we'll list all the relevant keywords from our keyword research underneath each column, grouping everything very nicely into ad groups. Starting off with valence, we will do a search in this filter for "valence." If we start typing that in and hit OK,

it filters all the keywords with the word "valence," which is perfect because that is exactly what we need. These are our valence keywords, so I'm going to copy those and paste them into here. That is our valence ad group keywords; these will be the keywords in our valence ad group. Now, if we go back here and then remove this filter, those keywords are still in this area, in this list. We don't want to target them again, so what I'm going to do is click on the dropdown here where it says "keyword," type "valence" in again,

and this time, what I'm going to do is select all of them and change the color to red. The default name is "bad," but that doesn't mean these are bad keywords; it's just a way for us to know that we've already added these keywords into our plan. So, that's number one: we've got valence. Let's remove this filter. What have we got next? Let's go through "service cost" and "service near me." Cost could be one of them, potentially. Now, you don't want to go too refined because what can happen is Google uses close variants, as we've

discussed in terms of keywords. Close variants mean that Google can match your search term to other relevant terms, meaning you don't have to be as tightly knit with your ad groups. There are statistics and strategies called single keyword ad groups where some advertisers will literally create an ad group for every single keyword. This is no longer an effective strategy; Google's AI is too smart. They know how to match keywords effectively. The main thing that matters is your ad copy, as long as that matches your keyword targeting and the user's search—that's an important thing. Next, what

I'm seeing here let's start with the very top. We have what I would call generic keywords, which are ones that don't really have any kind of modifier on them in terms of types of words we are targeting. "Boiler servicing" and here's the keyword "boiler service." So, this is an obvious area for us to add a generic keyword grouping to. I'm going to add a tab here, typing in "generic." So, first of all, these ones are definitely generic: boiler service, boiler service near me, gas boiler service. Now, one of them contains gas, which is fine; you

could potentially create an ad group for gas, but for the instance of this, it's a boiler service keyword. So, I'm going to add these into our boiler service generic keyword list. Oops! Let me remove that and type "generic" up here as a heading, then drop that in. Nope, go back, copy, and we will drop that in here with a paste. So, there's some generics. Again, going back to what we did before, we're going to do some conditional formatting and make these red. Now we're starting to get through some of these keywords in a bit more

detail. We can see that "Worcester Bosch" and "Bosch" are going to be very important keywords in this list as well. So, we've got Bosch. What I'm going to do again—same principle applies—go in here, type in "Bosch." That'll bring up all of our Bosch keywords, and then we'll just simply copy them in and add them here, pasting them in and typing in "Bosch" at the top. Now, we're starting to group these keywords, and then we'll make these red as well. Then, remove the filter and keep going through this process—there's a lot of keywords in here that

we need to group. This is a very, I suppose, painstaking part of Google Ads—grouping your keywords. As I said before, Google's Keyword Planner already groups keywords, but it brings in everything. It's not a very refined list; it means you're going to be bidding on keywords that are not relevant, whereas we know this list right here is highly relevant. That is the difference: making sure we work with a relevant list and group them effectively, which is why this process is a much more manual effort. But what happens is you come out with a much better campaign,

a much more accurate campaign, and a campaign that's going to get great results. Next, we can see "Baxi" is a term here as well. So, Baxi is another boiler brand. If I click that dropdown and go to a filter, I'm going to do a text filter—I’m just going to type in here "Baxi" and then click OK. Again, these are the Baxi keywords; I'll copy them in and paste them into the next cell over here and type "Baxi" in here. So, if I go back again, make those red, and say that we've... Done! Now we're starting

to get through quite a good number of keywords here. If our seed list of keywords, we've got through quite a few, and there's much more to do. However, let's go back in, let's do one more, and then what I'm going to do after I show you one more is I'm going to go away, complete this task, and come back and show you what that looks like once it's completed and what to expect. So let’s do one more. Let's do "emergency." So, emergency boiler keywords I know for sure are going to be higher cost in terms

of clicks because they’re generally... and as you can see here, £10 a click in terms of top of the page bids. It’s very rare to find that in this list; £10 is a very high number. It’s because emergencies generally insinuate somebody needs the service now, meaning they’re more likely to buy, which makes it more of a buyer keyword. So that's important to remember as well when you’re going through your business and you’re trying to understand which keywords are going to be effective. So again, let’s go and do "emergency." If I go into here, “emergency,” you’ll

see there are a couple in here—not many, but that’s all we need: emergency boiler service, emergency boiler services, service near me. Click, copy, paste them in. Emergency! There we go. So that’s one, two, three, four, five ad groups done. I'm going to go back in and make these two red and remove the filter, and we’re going to keep going through the same process. What will happen is you will typically find a couple of words of warning. Number one is that you will find keywords that could fit into multiple ad group categories. For example, we've looked

at different brands, and we could also look at emergency. So say, for example, we had a keyword in the campaign that came up from our research of "Bosch emergency boiler service." That covers both Bosch as a keyword in terms of the brand of the boiler, and it also covers the emergency side as well. In that instance, you have to decide which one is more relevant because there can't be one keyword in multiple ad groups. You have to choose which one is the most relevant. Now, we know that Bosch has more search volume than emergency, but

we also know emergency keywords can potentially have a higher conversion rate because the person is looking for the service now. So it’s a balancing act. You know your industry better than most; you know your industry better than Google, in fact. So you need to use your industry insider knowledge when you’re doing this to decide which keyword goes into which ad group. When they cross over with multiple, which one is more important? Which one is more effective? Which one is going to give you the most revenue when you look at the way people search for your

products and services? So for me, in that instance, because of the volume involved with Bosch, you could potentially go into Bosch and say, “Okay, what does this keyword sit under?” The Bosch area. But then, in this example in particular, I would say it goes under emergency because, based on industry knowledge of this area, emergency services are going to be higher converting. So the more keywords with "emergency" in them I can get into that area, into the ad group, the better. That’s what I would do in that instance. Of course, this is hypothetical; there is no

"emergency Bosch" keyword in this list. Anyway, I hope that clarifies it. I’m going to go away and go through this process, update all the keywords in this campaign into separate ad groups, and then we’ll come back and have a look at the work when it’s complete. Okay, so all of the keywords are currently in red. If you saw the previous video, you’ll know what that means: it means that all of our keywords have been successfully grouped into ad groups. If I hop over to the next tab, you will see how I’ve grouped them. As you

can see here, we have groups for all of these keywords, and they've all been segmented by their main kind of type or activator, as I like to call it. Starting from the left, you have “valence,” which is a brand generic and kind of a catch-all for very top-level boiler kind of terms—so, boiler service, boiler service technician, my boiler service, or get my boiler serviced—are all very basic, very obvious keywords which are going to be the majority of them. So you can see that’s the longest keyword list we have in the campaign in terms of ad

groups: you have Bosch, which is a brand; Baxi, which is a brand; emergency, which is a premium service and something that converts better, so that needs segmenting; Combi, which is a type of boiler; annual or yearly, which is for people looking for a service plan where they pay monthly; and then you’ve got “cost,” “quote,” and “price,” which are for people who are price-sensitive—so “cheap,” “cost,” “how much it will cost,” kind of those things. Then you've got "local" and "near" for anything else that’s near me or local, or local boiler service near me, and you've got

repairs—so servicing and repairs are slightly different; they’ve got plans as well for people who want to pay monthly for a service. Finally, you've got this one, which is a brand called Glowworm. Another popular boiler brand here in the UK, for argument's sake, you could potentially segment this even more and create even more ad groups. But then you have to remember this is one service for this business. There could be multiple services, so I've got boiler services in here for this particular plumbing business. You might have bathroom installation; you might have plumbing. So, all of these

different types of campaigns, and there's going to be a point of diminishing returns in terms of time to results if you segment more and more. So, this would be cast as a very highly segmented campaign because, if you remember back on the brief, all the services that Bob's Plumbers, which is our example website, has, then you start looking at all the campaigns that we've segmented. Potentially, we've created one campaign for a single service they provide, and within that campaign, we've created one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve ad groups, which

is a lot of ad groups for this particular type of campaign without going down the single keyword ad group route. Remember, as I said, Google is smart; their AI is smart. They understand the intent of the person searching, and they can effectively match it to keywords and use close variants as well to make sure you don't miss out on any potential searches. So, this segmentation is highly effective, and it would be classed as a very segmented keyword list. Again, as I say, you could potentially segment it even further, but the results you'd get as a

result of that might not necessarily be in line, particularly when it comes to the fact that when I say you segment into ad groups, the reason you do that is so your ad copy can better reflect the keywords in your ad group. You can make them highly relevant, but with the type of adverts Google now has, where you have multiple headlines and multiple description opportunities, you can cover a lot more ground to make the ads more relevant. Google will serve the relevant content of your ad depending on the headline or description that best meets the

needs of the user and is most likely to convert, meaning that this segmentation is highly effective. So, even though there are things in an ad group that could cross over, for example, "hot water boiler service" and "generic boiler service," they're two different, distinct keywords. You could potentially, for argument's sake, have a hot water ad group and then target the hot water keywords there. A better way to do this would be, as I've done it now, where we cover off the subject matter of these keywords in the ad content itself, and of course, reflect that on

the landing page as well. So, we're covering the whole way through, and we can make sure we're covering our bases with our ad content because you can choose multiple headlines and multiple descriptions. So, that is why this segmentation is very effective. It gives you a balance of speed, execution, and simplicity, which is important as well when managing campaigns. Remember, this is one campaign for a business where they could have five or six campaigns, then this makes management a lot easier, but it also segments enough that you get strong results as well. So, here I am

back in the Keyword Planner for a very simple reason, and that is to find negative keywords. Now, we spoke about negative keywords earlier in the previous module, and of course, these are the types of keywords that block your ads from showing on the search results page. So, it's important to find a distinct list of negative keywords in order to preserve your budgets and make sure your ads aren't showing for anything that they shouldn't. The best place to start before a campaign goes live, because of course when a campaign does go live, you can see what

people are typing in to find your ads, is to block out terms that aren't useful. The best way to do it before going live is to go back to the keyword research that you've done, because the results within there can tell you exactly what Google could match your ads to in order to create negative keywords. So, let's run that process now. I'm going to go on to "Discover New Keywords," and I'm going to do exactly what I did before. I'm going to type in "boiler servicing," and I'm going to hit "Get Results." Now, when you

hit "Get Results," you're not going to be surprised to see the exact same keywords that I showed you when we first started doing this, but we're going to take a bit of a different turn. We are going to find negative keywords based on this list. So, before, we were looking for things that we wanted to bid on; this time, we're going to look for things that are actually going to be something we don't want to target. So, a perfect example: I'm going to scroll down, and you're going to come across keywords that aren't necessarily going

to be in line with what we were trying to do before. A perfect example of that, for example, is here: you have BG Home Care. This is a business name; you could put this as a negative keyword in your campaign if you didn't want to show for that particular competitor. Another one is "oil boiler." We weren't targeting oil boilers; we're targeting gas boilers in the campaign. So, "oil boiler" could be a negative keyword. We don't want to show for people wanting an oil boiler service because that's not the service we provide. So, for your business,

you need to think when you go through this research, when you type... In your most generic keyword, you want to target with your ads are the keywords in this list: anything I want to target. And if they're not, is there a potential that Google might match my query to this particular term? The answer for this list is yes because, of course, if you bid on the term "boiler service" as a phrase match keyword, there's no reason Google wouldn't show your ads for "oil boiler service." Therefore, if you do not deal with oil boilers, you will

need to make "oil" a negative keyword so any search term containing "oil" doesn't trigger your ad. The best way to do this is to have a notepad file handy where you can start adding negative keywords, and if you can keep scrolling down, you will see more examples of potential negative keywords that aren't going to work for your business. So as I'm scrolling down, let's have a little look. I'm sure we'll come across another one very, very easily. And we can see here "Checkatrade boiler service." Checkatrade is an aggregator that basically allows people to compare prices

and services for particular home care services, so boiler servicing is exactly one of those things. People looking for Checkatrade are looking for a comparison site. Do I want my ads to show when someone types in "Checkatrade"? Probably, but probably not. If I didn't want them to show for that particular keyword, I would make it a negative as well. Again, "commercial" is a business boiler. So if you work in an office or maybe a hotel or some kind of commercial property, this particular campaign is targeting home boilers: people at home with a boiler. "Commercial" is not

included in the services on the website, so you wouldn't target "commercial boiler service"; you would target the other regular keywords. So what we're going to do next is start to use a bit more logic to find the negative keywords within this because you can download this data and comb through it to build a comprehensive list of negative keywords. But some of these refinements on the right-hand side here can be very handy to help you on your way as well. As I said, to give you more of an example of what to look for when looking

at these refined keywords on the right-hand side, this can give you a good source of availability of options to help you find negative keywords. So instead of doing what we did before, where we're looking for positive keywords, using this expansion list to kind of see whether or not different areas should be targeted, we're going to use this to find negative keywords. So for example, as I said, all of these other companies are things we shouldn't be bidding on because if we wanted to target competitors, we would set up a separate competitor campaign so we can

more effectively target them and make sure that the budget is used more effectively. So with that in mind, you would want these to be negative keywords. We'd also want a lot of these contractors to be negative keywords as well because we wouldn't necessarily want to target them directly in our campaign. So here is a perfect list of examples of negative keywords. As I mentioned before, as you scroll down, you can kind of see the types of services and the types of boilers. Again, that same "oil" word comes up again. You have "gas" and "oil." This

campaign doesn't deal with oil boilers; we deal with gas, so "oil" is a perfect example of a negative. So what I'm going to do is jump across to my other screen, and I'm going to drag over a notepad file. This is a good place to start when building a negative keyword list. Start adding the keywords that you want to be negatives in this notepad file. So starting off with the obvious one for me, "oil" would go into this file. We have a list of all these other businesses here, so what we could actually do is

we could actually untick everything, scroll down, take all the contractors and all the companies, and then what we can do is download the keywords as a CSV. You'll start to see that download, and you can open that up, and all of a sudden, here you have a complete list of competing businesses that you can add as a negative keyword, so you don't target them. Now, one thing to mention is negative keywords, as I mentioned, work in the same way as positive keywords in that you can have broad, exact, and phrase match negatives, and they work

in the same way as the positive keywords. Therefore, with terms like this, where you have actual things you want to target within the negative term, so "British Gas," we don't want to target "British Gas," but we want to target "boiler service." In this instance, we'd want to add all of these as exact match negative keywords. So if you copy this list and then open a new tab and paste it here, I'm going to open this up by double-clicking the line between A and B, and I'm going to click down and go to column B, row

21. With column B, I'm going to double-click and press equals to start a formula and I'm going to type in "concat," and that'll bring up the concatenate formula. If I double-click that, that will start the concatenation process, and what we're going to do is we're going to make this an exact match keyword list by adding square brackets either side of this keyword using a concatenation, so if we start the process off with a double quote, opening square bracket, closing double quote, then... "Hit comma, then click this cell, then hit comma, and then double quote again.

You know what's coming next, don't you? The closed bracket, double quote, and hit enter. That creates an exact match negative keyword. So, these exact match keywords, I'm going to double-click the corner of here, and that will repeat the formula across everything here. Now we have a good list of exact match negative keywords to add to our negative keyword list. If I hit control and copy, go back to our Notepad file, paste those in; we have a great list of negative keywords added to this file. I'm going to continue doing this process alongside the manual way,

by the way, because, as I've mentioned before, the actual fields on this sheet on Google, when you look through these filters, don't pick up everything. As I mentioned when we're doing the positive keywords, it applies for negative as well. You need to download the entire data, everything, as we did before: so 1,120 keyword ideas. Download these ideas and look through and comb through to find any negatives. So again, "oil" is okay being a broad match negative because we don't want anything to do with oil at all. So, anyone typing "oil" into their search term, if

we use this negative keyword list, our ads won't show for any oil terms. However, as I mentioned, these terms have things in there that might be crossing over with our positive keyword list. So, it's important to start them off with a negative match type, with an exact negative match type. So that is the starting point of keyword research for negative keywords. I'm going to go ahead and find more negatives and complete our list, and when you've completed it, be sure to save it because you're going to need it later when we start building the campaign

because that will go into your negative keyword list. So let's talk about text ads—the actual thing that makes people click on your campaign and actually what drives people to find your business. It's all about your ads. So, what is a text ad? Well, text ads are the actual adverts people see on the search results page when they go into Google and perform a search. They contain the clickable link that takes the user to your website. So, when somebody goes to Google, searches for something that triggers your ad to appear, maybe it's a product or service

you provide, they go onto Google, do the search, and then they see the adverts on the search results page. Those adverts on the page are known as text ads. So, whenever we refer to the ads on Google for search campaigns, typically we call them text ads. Here’s an example—I’m sure you’ve seen these many times before—and, of course, you’re going to be building these kinds of ads for your business. So, these are prime examples of text ads. As you can see, there is a URL for where the potential page will be, the actual clickable blue link

as well, which people actually click to get taken to the website. Underneath that is a description, and in the particular example you can see on screen here, the first ad in that list has additional links as well, which we’ll go on to because you can add additional information to your ads as well as the pure text ad side of things. So, we’ll go on to that as well in the next section. So now we know what the ads are, what actually makes a good ad? One of the things you need to consider is your call

to action. There are a few things that make your ads powerful, and this is one of the most important. For example, a call to action could be "Get a Quote" if you're talking about maybe a service; "Book a Test Drive" if you're talking about cars; "Book an Appointment"; "Call Today"; "Buy Online." Basically, what you're doing is you're hinting at what the user will have to do once they click your website. Now, this might sound obvious—you think people know exactly what they need to do—but actually, by having a call to action, it encourages people to take

that action. So, a call to action becomes really important as a way to encourage clicks to your ad and also plant the seed as to what the person will be expected to do when they click through. This means they will be primed and ready. For example, if your call to action is "Book an Appointment," they know when they see that advert the next action that they should take to take things further is to book an appointment. So, it kind of sets the scene for the user. In addition to that, strong and relevant headlines are crucial.

Your headline is not dissimilar to a newspaper headline; it's all about grabbing attention. Remember, you're not the only person on the search results page—in fact, you're not the only paid search result on the search results page. You've got the organic results, and you often have Google who also adds additional information to the search results in terms of knowledge graphs and things like that. So, it's really important to write a strong headline that grabs attention and is relevant as well. There's no point in writing a really catchy headline that has nothing to do with what the

person searched, so make sure you cover both of those bases—make sure that they're relevant but also a really powerful attention-grabbing headline. It should contain variants of your target keyword; it's really important that you do that as well. Another thing is to highlight your unique selling points. What makes you better than your competitors? What are you going to..." Provide that they can't, or maybe that you're better than them at some examples. Maybe you provide a free delivery, which is a fantastic benefit to e-commerce, and maybe do 10% off for your first order, which is a good

incentive. Maybe your third item's free, so maybe buy three items and the third one is free. You might match quotes, like I know, for example, John Lewis here in the UK used to do that. If you find a genuine quote or price for an item elsewhere, they'll match that potential price. So maybe you do that. Basically, what you need to do is think of the unique selling points or the positive selling points, because a lot of these aren't necessarily going to be unique, but they're going to be positive. So think of the positive things you

can do to encourage people to buy from you or choose your service over that of your competitors. So, as I say, things like "rated five stars" or maybe Trustpilot or other review sites out there, that's really going to help you as well. So that's a really important thing to look at too. As I've mentioned, there is a bit of a balancing act you need to do when writing ads, because what you need to do is make sure that they're relevant, because Google rewards relevancy. Remember, the quality score is based on your click-through rate, and one

of the main factors of that is going to be how relevant the user's search term is to your ad content and, of course, how relevant that is to your keywords. So, that's one part of it. But how do you write content that's highly relevant, containing your target keywords but also compelling and well-written? Well, that's the challenge we have as PPC professionals. The challenge is to ensure your ad is well-written, grammatically correct, really punchy, and makes people want to click while also covering the base of mentioning your target keyword and being relevant. So you might have

to practice writing ads and actually testing content yourself before just going into Google Ads and writing the ads outright. We will cover this on the course. I do have a planning spreadsheet that's really handy in testing out ad copy and planning your campaign ahead of time, which we will cover on this course. But it's just something to think about: you have to balance those two very different distinct skill sets in order to write ads successfully on Google. So up next, we're going to talk about text ad formats because there are multiple formats to text ads.

As I've mentioned, we've seen some examples on the screenshot previously, but there are also a couple of other things to take into consideration, and we'll understand what those formats are in terms of responsive search ads and call-only ads. So, let's start off with responsive search ads, which are the default format for ads when you create a new search campaign. These are the main ads you're going to be using in your account, so it's really important to understand what comprises a responsive search ad and what you need to do when you create them. So, what is

a responsive search ad? A responsive search ad is the default setting for Google Ads campaigns. They allow you to test multiple variations of headlines and descriptions in your ad copy. Now, I touched on this during the keyword research phase when I was explaining that you don't necessarily need an ad group for every single variant of your keyword; you just need to group them into effective themes. The reason for that is because of this ad format right here, because it allows you to test multiple headlines and descriptions, and Google's job will be to automatically serve the

right combination of headline and description based on the relevancy to the user's search and the likelihood of conversion. So, what I mean by that is if you go back to that keyword list: if you have multiple themes within the same ad group, potentially, as long as you cover your bases with the relevancy in the ads—which is the responsive search ad—you can write multiple headlines and descriptions to make sure you're covering all of the relevancy you need to for all of your ad groups. So, what is the format of a responsive search ad? You can write

eight headlines of 30 characters each, so that's advisable to use as much real estate as you can when you create these ad formats, because it allows you to have more data to test when it comes to Google trialing different headline and description combinations. So that's important; make sure you complete this area as well. You can write eight headlines, and you can write three descriptions of 90 characters each. You can even write more than that, but generally speaking, per ad group, I would advise three descriptions to write per ad. Then the other thing is what's called

your display URL, which is a URL that you define in your ad that's for vanity purposes. So, if, say, for example, you have a page that's like www.bobsplumbers.co.uk/boiler-servicing.html or something like that, if you want your URL to look more effective or more advertisable, then you can change that URL in the ad only to say, for example, www.bobsplumbers.com/boiler-servicing, and then that's more relevant to the kind of keywords in the potential ad that you're creating. So, it's a vanity URL that basically makes the person searching think that the URL they're going to go to is more relevant,

but they'll still be taken to your actual page URL. So it's for vanity purposes and to help with your click-through rate. So the display URL has two areas; they're 15 characters. each because after your main core domain, which you can't change on your display URL, you can do forward slash something, and then forward slash another thing. So it could be forward slash boilers, forward slash servicing, but you have 15 characters to play with either side of that slash after your core domain. So here's the format, as you can see. This is what it looks like

when you're creating a responsive search ad in Google Ads. As you can see here, you have your key; you can choose multiple headlines. If you were to scroll down on this screenshot, you will see multiple descriptions, and you'll also see a display URL, as I mentioned. This is what it looks like when you're creating them in Google Ads, which, of course, we will do as part of this course. We're going to walk through an entire campaign setup, building the campaign, and planning on Google, so you can see end-to-end how this would look. This screenshot is

for illustrative purposes, so you can see what the interface looks like ahead of time. It has something called ad strength as well, which basically allows you to get an indication from Google whether or not you're covering your bases. If you don't include enough headlines, don't include enough descriptions, or things like that, then that can be a potential issue as well. Google will show different configurations of your headlines and descriptions based on the likelihood of conversion and relevancy to the user's search term, but you still have to make sure you give them enough information to optimize

with. So you'll see here the ad strength in this example is average. The idea is you want to try and make it excellent, meaning that you've covered all of your potential keyword subject matter in your ads, and you've covered enough keywords and enough headlines and descriptions. So how do these ads appear on Google? As I say, they'll show different configurations based on optimization factors and likelihood of conversion, and of course, relevancy to the user. They can estimate which combination will likely lead to conversions, and of course, because it's AI, it will learn as the campaign

goes on. Ads won't start off being optimized; the campaign will start gathering data as people click your adverts, and from that, Google can optimize the headlines and descriptions based on those two factors. So that's important to realize as well, and that, in a nutshell, is a responsive search ad. We will be using these as part of our campaign setup, so you'll see end-to-end how these are created and what the ad strength metric actually means as we create the ads. So don't worry; you're not going to see that now. This was an explanation as to what

a responsive search ad actually is. Now, we're going to take a look at call-only ads, which are basically an ad that forces customers to phone your business, and it's quite a good option if you're in a service-based or lead generation industry. That's pretty self-explanatory, so let's take a look at call-only ads. Call ads allow you to create an ad that appears on mobile phone devices. So that's the first thing you need to realize. These ads will only appear on devices capable of making a phone call, namely mobile devices, smartphones. When the ad is clicked, instead

of taking the user to your URL or your web page, what this ad will do is it will initiate a phone call to your business. So that action of a customer clicking your ad, you pay at the point of click as usual, as you normally would, but instead of the user going to your website, they actually initiate a phone call. So it's very different from a responsive search ad that we looked at, where you're taken to the website for the user to browse and potentially get in touch. So it's very different and much more proactive,

and it could be quite effective for particular types of business. The format of a call ad is very different from that of a responsive search ad. The headline is you have two headlines of 30 characters each; you have two descriptions of 90 characters. So the 30 character and 90 character count of the headline and description respectively are still the same, but you're not creating loads and loads of variants like you would with a responsive search ad. The display URL is the same as well, so you have 15 character URLs for vanity, as we mentioned in

the previous section, that you can use to increase your click-through rate. The other thing that's not included in a responsive search ad that is included in a call ad is the business name. You need to provide the name of your business and a website URL as a fallback. So on this ad format, potentially, people could go through to your website, but only if they want to; it's a fallback, essentially, if they want to go through to your website, but they can just click and make a phone call, which is really important in terms of how

this looks. This is exactly how a call-only ad looks. You'll see that the main call to action is a phone number; you have the business name, a headline, and multiple descriptions, and a potential display URL. Of course, you need to make sure that your phone number is valid and working because ultimately, when they click that button to make a phone call on their mobile device, it's going to go through to your business. So you need to make sure that's all working correctly. So that is how the ad appears on Google. The same place as where

a text ad would be, but formatted for mobile devices with a phone icon, as you can see in this preview. This is how it looks within Google Ads when you're building this ad format. It's much more simplified than a responsive search ad, but nevertheless, this is how it looks in Google. So, how do they appear on Google? This is exactly what it looks like, and it will basically show your telephone number alongside your headline, your business description, and your website link. So, we've covered this already in terms of how it looks. Just remember that it

will appear on Google in a search as it would with a normal responsive search ad. The only difference is that when you click the ad, the user will be taken to make a phone call to your business via their phone. So, why would you use a call-only ad as opposed to a normal responsive search ad? So, this is the thing: it's a balance between the type of business you are. If you're an e-commerce business, then it might not necessarily be great, but if your business is primarily reliant on inbound phone calls, it could be a

great way to maximize phone call leads. For example, if you're a taxi service and you're marketing a taxi business on Google Ads, a call-only ad could be ideal because ultimately, if somebody goes through to a taxi service, they want to make a phone call to book a taxi. Or maybe it's an airport shuttle, or whatever it might be. All of these different services taxi businesses provide are primarily delivered via the phone, so that would make perfect sense. It will mean not wasting time clicking through to a website to later find the phone number to make

a phone call to book your taxi service. Car service garages could be a potential one as well. People want to book a service; they literally click and call. In fact, the campaign we're building in this example of a boiler service company could be a good example of that, but people might want more information. So, we've not done it in this campaign type, but it could be one worth testing. During the setup, we may create those as ads as well alongside our responsive search ads. The handyman service, potentially, if somebody wants some stuff done around the

house, maybe some handyman work, they might want to speak to somebody to find out the quotes, what they're capable of doing, and not necessarily need the website to explain all of that information. So, that could be quite useful. These are some examples of businesses that could benefit from a call-only ad. Maybe yours is one of these types of business. If it is, it's worth considering using this ad format because it could be quite effective for your business. Disadvantage: users may not see your website and may miss out on USPS as a result. Meaning when they

see the search results page and they see a phone number, but they also see competitors in your search results who are promoting all kinds of USPS because they're using responsive search ads as opposed to a call-only ad, then it means that they might miss out on seeing your USPS instead and going to your website to see those, meaning they're more likely to actually take action off the back of that phone call lead that they are. That could be a disadvantage. It could be bad as well for visual services. So, anyone who's selling apparel or maybe

a graphic design service or landscapers—people want to see examples of your work. Even though ultimately if you wanted a landscape gardener, you will more than likely pick up the phone and speak to whoever it is that's providing that service, you want to see examples of their work as a visual service. So anything visual, like graphics or gardens, you don't necessarily want to use this ad format because you want people to go to the website and let your visuals do a lot of the talking because it's a visual service. So, I would advise you not to

use it for these kinds of services. It also stops users from converting in other ways or buying directly online. If you're an e-commerce business, you shouldn't really be using a call-only ad because you want people to buy from your website. If you're a business like the SEM Academy, which you're learning from right now, you wouldn't necessarily want a call-only ad either because we, of course, want people to enroll in the course. So, with that said, that is the reason why you would not use a call-only ad. Think about your use case for your business. What

would be beneficial? Would a call-only ad be beneficial based on your niche or industry, or based on what you've seen in this section of the course so far? Would it be something you need to get away from because your product or service is more visual or more of a consideration purchase—something that people may need to read up on on your website? Just think about those two things because ultimately that's going to determine whether or not you use this ad format. If it is something you want to test and you are in a niche that works

well for this format, then it's going to be a very, very powerful tool for your campaigns and something you should definitely test. So, I would like to introduce you to the campaign planning spreadsheet. Now, this is basically going to form the basis for the campaign you're going to build in Google Ads when we do the full walkthrough. So, this spreadsheet is going to... Help you plan your campaigns in order to know exactly when you go into Google Ads what you're going to be entering. To explain the format of this spreadsheet, we have our ads section

here so we can decide the headlines and the descriptions for all the ads. Now, we've gone through responsive search ads before, so you know that the minimum you need is really two descriptions and about five headlines. You can write more if you want, as there’s space enough to write up to eight headlines and up to five descriptions. Keyword content-rich ads basically allow you to plan. What will happen is, as you start typing in a headline—for example, "the best boiler repair"—you'll see it counts the characters. The limit for a headline is 30 characters, and the number

of characters you need to enter is basically shown next door, so you can see a live, up-to-date character count of the characters in each of your headlines. The same goes for descriptions. This explains the ads section where you can have your ad copies written and tested. This is a great way, as well, if you work as a freelancer, as an agency, or even in-house, to share ad content with stakeholders. They can see the content that's going to go live on Google Ads, and if they don't like it, they can make edits within the character counts

and limits. You can basically hand this back and forth to make sure everybody's on the same page when it comes to creating ads. In addition to that, you have the ad group keywords. For every single ad group, if I go down here and return to what we did previously, you can see our ad groups have been segmented, and the keywords are segmented into ad groups. Each of these are the ad group keywords that we want to target in our campaign; these are reflected in this document. For example, in this section here, I've got the ad

group name "test one," but in reality, when we start building this in the sheet, we'll call this "generic." So let's start the process right now. I'm going to call this "generic," we'll add our ad copies here, and then the ad group keywords will go here. Then, if I go back into this and take those keywords, I'm going to copy them and paste them in here—here are the keywords; they're all pasted in and ready to go. So when we build the campaign, we have our ad copy and keywords ready to hand, and we can actually start

using them. Again, negative keywords can be added at both the ad group and campaign level. If you want certain phrases to be eliminated or blocked from showing across all of your ad groups and all of your keywords, you can add campaign-level negative keywords here, and there's a lot of room to add them, as you can see. If you have ad group-level negative keywords, you can add them in this column, so if there's something you want to show in one ad group but not necessarily in another, you can add negative keywords at the ad group level

as well. Each of these sections corresponds to an ad group. We have "generic" here; you go further down, add your next ad group, and your ad copies. You can do this across everything. What we're going to do is build the first section of this report and then come back so you can see exactly what it looks like and what we can consider as the campaign setup. Then, I'll jump forward and complete this whole sheet in terms of every single ad group in our campaign. We'll come back and actually review this, and then we'll have the

basis that will form everything for our campaign that we're going to build in Google Ads. It's a great practice to do—it saves a lot of time instead of fumbling around Google Ads when you're in the platform, scratching your head and wondering what you're going to write. This eliminates all of that worry by getting the content down, getting the right stakeholders in the room when you're discussing that content, and then going from there. So, let's go ahead and build out this spreadsheet, and then we're going to come back. Okay, so I have completed a lot of

this sheet in order to show you what it looks like when populated. Going back to the first ad group, we have our headlines in place, and we have our descriptions in place. I haven't utilized all the spots; if you want to, you can add more descriptions. When we actually start building the campaign, we may need to, depending on what Google thinks of our ads—more on that later. We've also got our keywords in place in terms of what we want to bid on, and we have our full negative keyword list down the side. As I scroll

down, you can see all the different ad groups in here. You've got the gas ad group with the keywords and ad content relevant to the keywords, which is what we talk about with relevancy. The same goes for when we have the best ad group, the backseat, which is a brand ad group, and then the cost ad group. All the ad groups we talked about have been set up. Here, in fact, I haven't set all of them up in here just in the interest of time and not making you bored of me setting up, you know,

20 ad groups. Because by the time I've done three or four, you understand the process, and we've gone through the process of segmentation anyway. So this is for illustrative purposes, so you can see the sheet is completed, and we are ready to now look at building our campaign. Our conversions are something we need to track in addition to what we have already, and then, once we've got our conversions decided and in place, we can actually start building the campaign. But this document essentially forms the basis for our Google Ads campaign. You can download this as

part of the course materials, and you can use this sheet to plan your campaigns as you need. In the next upcoming section, we're going to talk about something called ad extensions. Now, we've talked about text ads a little bit, where we can actually create adverts that people see on Google, which has the link that people can click to go through to your website. Now, ad extensions are a bit different, and an ad extension allows you to show additional information within your text ads—things that can help users click your ads over your competitors. You can show

bullet points of potential USPs (unique selling points) and benefits as to why they should choose your business over your competitors. You can add links to specific areas of your website; you can add loads of different information to ads, including even images. Now, we're going to talk about ad extensions and how you should leverage them, so we're going to go through and look at all of the available extensions to see whether or not your business can make use of them, and the best practices of how to use each of them so you can maximize your click-through

rate, increase the quality of your ad, and get better quality scores—and, of course, get cheaper clicks through optimizing your ad extensions. So let's take a look and understand a bit more about ad extensions, a really important part of Google Ads. Okay, so let's learn about callout extensions, which are a great way to promote your unique selling points. So, what is a callout extension? Well, it allows you to list your unique selling points and benefits to your business. Maybe you have cheaper pricing; maybe you have better service; maybe you have some kind of unique thing, or

maybe even a not-so-unique but beneficial thing that your business does, and you want to highlight it. This is an additional area of the text ad where you can highlight this information. They appear as bullet points within your ads, and unlike the link at the top of the ad that has the title and the headlines, it is not clickable. So, it's an area of information on your ad, but it's not something the user can click; it's just additional text content in the ad itself. So here's an example taken directly from the Google Ads platform. When we

go ahead and create our campaign in this course, you will see this screen when we create our callout extensions. You can see in the example here it is a private medical company based in London, and here are the benefits of their blood testing service: rapid test results; they come to the patient, so you don't have to go into the hospital; they come to your house; and NHS doctors and nurses and same-day appointments. So, you get the kind of thing that's happening here—it's all kinds of benefits and examples of things that will be beneficial to the

end user. This is the perfect place to start using this kind of content—the callout itself. You saw there were four callout extensions on that example just on the previous slide, and that's kind of what I'd advise: four callout extensions at minimum. Any more than four, and Google will start to test and rotate them and not show all of them; they'll show the ones most likely to lead to conversion. But four at minimum gives you a good opportunity to use all the space on the ad unit itself on the search results in order to maximize this

extension. Every single callout that you saw on that previous slide has to be a maximum of 25 characters. You can't exceed that or you won't be able to save your callout extension, so that's an important thing to remember as well. But when you type into Google to do your callout extensions on Google Ads, if you went over that limit, it will tell you anyway. So just to be aware, it is 25 characters you have to play with. So, why would you use callout extensions? Well, they provide crucial information to customers above and beyond the content

of your ad. So it's additional information; it's an opportunity to also add more relevancy to your ad. So, if you're targeting a specific keyword in your ad group, and you want to use a callout extension, it would make sense to maybe include a variation of your keyword in your callout extension. So this could be something like, if you know for example that ad we showed before with rapid blood tests with the same-day results, the keyword could be blood test London—you might say rapid tests in London, for example, if that met the character count—because you're reinforcing

the subject matter of your keyword. So it's a great opportunity to do that as well, and it takes up more space on the search results. Ultimately, the more real estate you take, the higher your click-through rate could be. Are lazy? They look at the information, they scan a page, and if your advert appears larger than other ads because you're making use of all of the extensions, this will be a great benefit for you as well. In addition, it can improve your click-through rate because adding more benefits and USPs to your ad is actually going to

make it more appealing, which could lead to a higher click-through rate as well. So, what makes a good call-out extension when you're creating these? Of course, mention your unique selling points, your USPs. Think of the benefits to the customer: what can my business do that I really want to highlight? If I met my ideal customer in a lift one day and I had to tell them three things about my business that would make them want to pick me, what would those three things be? Or maybe even four things, as I said, with the extensions you

can have four. What would they be? What would you actually pick? Think of these things when you're creating your call-out extensions. Mention the key features and benefits, and make them relevant to your keywords. That's going to be important as well in terms of creating a highly relevant ad that works. Up next, we have site link extensions, which are a great way to link to key areas of your ad directly. So, what is a site link extension? Well, it allows you to add links to other key areas of your website. If you imagine your search results,

you have your main clickable link in the headline; you can also add additional links underneath this within your ad units to link to key areas. This way, you can cross-reference other specific areas that may be of interest to your customers, so they can find them more easily and quickly. Here's an example of a site link: as you can see here, you have the blue clickable link at the very top of the ad unit; you have "Electricity Business Electricity Deals" at the very top, and underneath that, you have three other links in blue. Underneath, these are

what are called site links. You have "Business Electricity," which is a link directly to that kind of service, you have an example of where you can save on your bills, and you have a price comparison link as well. Regardless of what area of the buying stage you're at—whether you just want to compare prices online, maybe you want to learn more about business electricity, or maybe you want to see specifically how you can save on your bills—on this particular business example, they have you covered in all areas of the links, so the customer can find it

more easily. In terms of the format of a site link extension, you have 25 characters to play with. If you exceed this, you won't be able to save your site link extension. For the description, which you can have underneath your site link (which you wouldn't have seen on the previous slide, because that was a mobile site link example), on desktop, quite often, a description of text can show underneath the actual link itself. You have 35 characters to use when creating this kind of link, and it's recommended you have at least four site links. Any more

than that, Google won't show over four; any less, they can show three. I rarely see them show two, so make sure you hit that marker (four) to maximize the size of the ad unit. You can add more if you want to, but Google can show a maximum of four at a time, so it's important to remember that as well. So, why would you use site links? Well, as I say, they allow you to find key information in one click directly from the ad, as opposed to clicking through to the main link and then going to

your navigation and finding the service you're looking for. You can literally just click the ad and go straight through to the page that you need. They allow more opportunities for relevancy as well. Remember, going back to your keywords and relevancy to your ads, you can even add more relevancy by customizing the title of your site link in line with your keywords to specific areas of your website. Thus, you further increase that relevancy on behalf of the customer, so they click your ad more often, increasing your click-through rates, which is the next point. Of course, they

improve the overall quality of the ads. Ads that don't use site link extensions are seen as lower quality by Google because you're not making use of these extensions. If you don't add them, Google will actually ask if you want to add them in terms of their recommendations in the platform, and it's because it improves the quality of the ad, which can lead to a better quality score in the long term as well. So, what makes a good site link extension? Of course, it needs to be relevant to the user's search. For example, going back to

our boiler service campaign, if we're running a boiler service campaign and we have a site link extension to bathroom installation, it's not necessarily relevant to what we're doing. However, if you had "New Boiler Installation" as a page on the website, that would be a relevant link to what the user is looking for. Maybe "Boiler Faults," "Boiler Leaks," or "24-Hour Emergency Servicing"—all of those kinds of things are relevant services to the core campaign message. If you go outside of that with a site... Link: you might dilute your campaign a little bit because that user, with the

intent of what they were looking for, would have to navigate back to what they needed on your website. It’s important to try and reduce that and keep that to a minimum. You want it to be enticing and clickable, so the link itself needs to be something the user wants to click. Write it in such a way that makes it more appealing to the user. You can use USPS in your site links if you can tie them together with that very small character count you have to play with. You can do that if you're good at

creative writing in that small space, but it’s something to consider. Of course, you want to land people on a sales page. I’ve seen time and time again people linking generic "About Us" pages with the staff team on there, which is all nice and good, but ultimately the person searching wants help with something. They want a problem fixed or some help in some way, or they want to buy something that they want to indulge in. They don’t want to see pictures of your lovely faces. I’m sure that would be very nice for you, but ultimately that’s

not going to help them. So it’s important to make sure you land on a page that can do some heavy lifting and can sell your products and services; otherwise, again, it will reduce your overall conversion rate if you land on a non-sales page like blogs or things like that. Keep that in mind when you’re creating your site links. Now, let’s take a look at call extensions, which allow your customers to make calls from your ads on Google. So, what is a call extension? They allow your customers to call you directly from your ads, so your

contact number displays within the ad. When you click the contact number—or should I say when the customer clicks the contact number for your business from within the ads on Google—that will initiate a phone call from their mobile device. The phone won't start ringing; it will pop the number up into their dialer, and then they have to just press the green button to actually make the call. But at that point, when they click that number, you are charged for the click, so it's the pay-per-click model still. Even though they’re not going to your website and it

initiates a phone call, you still pay for that click to generate that phone call. When somebody makes a phone call, it registers as a conversion in your account if you enable conversion tracking for phone calls, which we will go into in this course so you can understand how to do this. Of course, mobile customers click the number in order to make that phone call from the search results. So let’s take a look at how that looks on Google Ads when you’re building your extension. As you can see here, when you look at the left-hand side,

you can create your phone number, choose your region, and enter your details in terms of your actual phone number. You can also add your conversion as well. If you have a conversion for phone calls in your account, which we will build on in this course to show you how to track phone calls as a conversion, then we will do that as well. As you can see in the image on the right-hand side, the headline of the ad appears as normal, and you can see the white strip with the phone icon; that is the telephone number.

If the user clicks that when that result appears on Google, they can initiate a phone call to your business. The format for a call extension requires you to select your country, of course, and add your telephone number. You can also set scheduling as well, so obviously you want the phone to ring during hours of operation. Maybe you don’t, and you want it to go to voicemail for some calls out of hours. Either way, you can schedule the extension to appear during your office hours so you can actually pick the phone up. You can also opt

out of conversion tracking as some people might want the phone to ring but might find that a lot of people are just asking general questions. They don’t want to classify these as conversions or optimize their account towards Google Ads. You can opt out of your call extensions from being a conversion point, and of course, you can set your device preference. You can decide whether you want it on mobile, both, or all devices. It’s important to decide whether you want to do that. Generally, I think mobile is the way to go for using a call extension,

but adding both doesn’t really make much of a difference anyway, so that’s something to remember as well. So why would you use a call extension? Well, it allows you to track phone call leads directly from Google Ads. It’s a really easy way to initiate phone calls for users, and it gives a customer an opportunity to convert early if they know the service they’re looking for and the text ad is written in a way that makes it very clear that you can fix the customer’s problem. If they can call you right there and then, then they

can, and it’s a great way to skip the middleman of your website. Now, of course, don’t undervalue your website. You still want to send traffic to your website through Google Ads, and you still want... To get conversions on, in terms of phone, in terms of form submissions or things like that, but it's a good alternative for people who might be time-pressed or people who just prefer to pick the phone up. Because you're going to have different types of customers, and it's a great way to service those who might want to pick the phone up as

opposed to submit a form. And it's also a great way to attract leads; of course, that's the whole premise of this extension: it generates phone call leads for your business. So, when do you not use call extensions? Now, as I say, I've not mentioned the reason not to use any extension so far because you should use the previous ones we've talked about in every opportunity you have. However, when you have a call extension and you're an e-commerce business, then it doesn't make any sense. You ultimately want people to transact; you want them to see the

product, get all the information. You want your sales pages to do the heavy lifting and get the customer to convert. So, you want people to convert online. By having a phone number in your ad, you're taking people away from that objective. And even if they have questions about the product, it would be great if they clicked through first because they can get most of their questions likely answered. And of course, it means if they're on the website, that it's easier to convert them with your content. Now, the other point is, of course, if your main

conversion point isn't via phone. So, if your conversion point, again, is not via phone—maybe you're selling information, like maybe the SEM Academy here—we obviously have this Google Ads course. We don't necessarily want a phone extension on the ads that we're running because, of course, it means that people might phone in instead of going to the course pages and actually reading the information about what we're training and teaching here. So that can be an issue as well for us, and that's why we don't use them on our ads for that reason. So think about the kind

of business you are and whether or not you could benefit from call extensions. It's okay if you don't benefit from them and you want people to transact online. But if you're a business like a taxi company, where you rely on phone calls as your day-to-day, or maybe a service-based business where people often have questions about what you're doing, your availability, or something like that, that could be great as well. If you transact offline in terms of a service-based business, think about where your business sits and then decide whether or not call extensions are right for

you. So, let's look at structured snippet extensions, which is a way to allow you to list your services or types of service on your ads, in addition to other information. So, what is a structured snippet extension? They allow you to list your products or services in a distinct list predetermined by Google, so you have to select what kind of list you want it to be. They appear categorized based on the type of the product or service, so again, you need to pick your category for your products and services directly for what's available in Google. So,

it's important to have a think about specifically what kind of thing that you're promoting. There are some options you can potentially fall back on if one of your services or products doesn't necessarily fall into any of Google's predetermined categories. So, with that in mind, let's take a look at this site link example. You can see the header is in English, of course; you choose your language in the drop-down on the right-hand side of English. Where you can see that on the left image is where you select your type of service. All the different types of

things going to be in there, like hotels or courses or whatever it might be. You can list all the different types of courses or different types of hotel suites you have. The fallback for industries that don't necessarily have a predetermined example is called "types." You can see that there where it says in the drop-down "types"; that's the one I've selected for this example. When we go ahead and build our campaign, you'll see "types" is in there as well. So, it's important to maybe use that as a fallback if one of the predetermined ones isn't on

there. Character counts, of course. You choose your category, as I said. In the example I just showed, it is "types." And, of course, each structured snippet—I would say—needs four at minimum, at 25 characters each. So, again, 25 characters is the magic number for most extensions on Google. 25 characters each at max; again, if you exceed it, you won't be able to save your ad. Now, when I mentioned previously about the categories you can select from Google that are predetermined, where you can list your services or options—this is what I mean. Structured snippet categories include amenities,

brands, courses, degree programs, destinations, featured hotels, hotels, insurance, cover models, areas, service catalogs, shows, styles, and types. So, you can see where some of your obvious businesses would fall into some of these categories. If you're selling maybe a type of trouser or jeans, you can put "styles" in. If you're selling hotels, you can put "amenities" in for your hotel. Again, "courses" and "degree programs" are self-explanatory, so they're very specific in a lot of ways. And, of course, if you're a handyman or something like that, you have your service catalog in terms of services you provide.

Some very specific structured snippet types are in there, but always fall back on types as a fallback if nothing fits your business. Ultimately, you're just listing the types of services or products you provide, so that can be a good fallback for you. So, why use a structured snippet extension? They provide customers with services to reassure them before they click that you can indeed carry out what they're looking for. Of course, we have the callout extensions promoting USP. We've covered that already. You've got site links as well, showing them even more services you could potentially promote.

This is another string to your bow, another option you could potentially use in order to ensure your ads are even more relevant. You can be really more specific and more niche in terms of the services you offer when you list them; they allow for more opportunities for ad relevancy as well. Remember, going back to keywords and search terms, the users type into Google that match your keywords, and the relevancy of your ads to that. This is an additional area where you could potentially optimize towards getting more relevancy into your ad as well. Again, most extensions

will have this benefit as well. They take up more space on the search results and improve your click-through rates. As more people take up more space, the more space you take up, the more likely people are to click. And, of course, the better information you provide them, the more likely they are to click as well. Again, like many extensions, this one can improve the quality of your ad. If you're not using them, Google might ask you in the kind of recommendations they make automatically to try using them, and it's a good option. Sometimes I don't

agree with Google on everything they do, but for example, this is something that's very good for them to suggest. It's a good way to improve the quality of your ad overall. So, it's quite a simple extension really; it's not something that is as massively complex as the site link extension. All that makes a good structured snippet extension is that it's relevant to the user's search. So, make sure that the services you list are relevant; if they're not relevant at all, you could actually deter users from clicking your ad. Make sure they're comprehensive, so you can

use, you know, it's essentially a list of services. If you want to go deeper into more services, you can list as many as necessary, and of course, it needs to be relevant to your actual offering as well. So, that's important to remember as well when you're creating your structured snippet extensions. Let's now take a look at location extensions, which allow the customers to see where your business is physically located. A location extension allows you to show your exact business address to your customers. When it's clicked, a customer will see the map on Google, and it

will show the location of your business. Data for this extension is pulled from a tool called Google My Business, which is the small business location management system from Google. It's a free system, and it's important to create an account here if you haven't already. If you have a location-based business where your location and your serviceable area are important and specifically required in terms of what you provide, maybe you do something like a taxi company where you want to drive people from a specific office where your taxis are booking from, then you want to make sure

you have a location extension because it means your local radius could be covered. Data is pulled from Google My Business, so it's important to create an account with this tool if you haven't done so already. If you have a location-based business, I'd be very surprised if you haven't already created an account. In terms of setup, once you are on Google My Business, all you need to do is go in there and link your account to your Google Ads account, which you can see in this screenshot on the left-hand side. This is taken directly from Google,

by the way. On the left-hand side, you can see a list of available addresses in this individual client's Google My Business account, and on the right-hand side, you can see specifically where it will show on the ad. You can see the pin drop icon and the distance from where the user is searching, which is another important factor, by the way. Google knows where people are searching from, so it can actually show you the distance between where they're searching and your location. So, when somebody sees your router, they can see how close your business really is.

It's a key extension if you offer location-based services or operate out of a specific location and do business there. The structure of the data is pulled from Google My Business. It will show the first line of the address, and again, as I say, it will automatically show the distance from the user searching on mobile devices. So, why use the location extensions? Well, you're going to tell your customers exactly where you are. It gives them an example of exactly where your business is, so they can find you more easily. Ad hoc searches can see how far

away you are from them, so if you're a store, they can find you quite easily and see where you are. It gives customers more location relevancy. So, if you're in a certain suburb of London, for example, and someone's searching, they'd know if they typed in London and your business came up. You're based on the other side of London; maybe they live in West London and you operate out of East London. They can see that you're going to be too far away, potentially, so it gives users extra information before they click your ad. You want to

also use your ads to disqualify users who aren't in your serviceable area. Location extensions allow you to show your customers exactly where you're trading from and where you operate. Again, when not to use location extensions: remember, all businesses have a trading premises. All businesses, including e-commerce businesses, have a headquarters or a head office. Some people might be tempted to add their location extension to ads where they're selling products and services online. This is not important for businesses that don't rely on locations. So again, going back to our example of the SEM Academy, we don't rely

on location; we trade with the entire world. So there's been no point in our Google ads to have a location extension, which is why we don't use it on our ads. That's exactly why it's important. So when you're creating your location extensions on your ads, take a moment and consider whether or not you should or shouldn't be using them on that basis. Now we're going to take a look at image extensions, which are a great way to make very text-heavy ads have a bit more visual appeal. So, what is an image extension? Well, it does

exactly what it says: it allows you to show images in your text ads. Now, Google has introduced this extension very recently; it's not something they've always had. In fact, the reason for it is, of course, they want you to click the ads above the organic results—hence why they're at the top of the page—because they want to get money from people advertising on Google, like us. This is great for us as advertisers because, of course, we want to get eyeballs on our brand. The way they're doing that now is by bringing in image extensions, which allow

you to get more eyeballs on your ad. It makes it a bit more, I guess, a bit more appealing to users when they're searching on Google, and images can provide additional context as well to promote products or services. So, if you're selling a particular type of product and you show the image in the ad before the user clicks, you're qualifying them; you're giving them a screenshot of what the image of the product is before they click. Therefore, expectations are higher. Again, going back to what I said about qualifying customers: if the image you're showing is

a product that they're not interested in—something they don't want—then it means you've disqualified them, saving you money. Remember, you don't always want people to click if they're not going to be relevant to what you're providing. As you can see here in the screenshots from Google Ads in the platform, all you need to do when creating an image extension is literally choose the campaign to add it to, upload your image, and, on the right-hand side, as you do that, you can see a preview of where it will show on various devices. So, it shows to the

right-hand side of your ad content and it can provide a bit more context in terms of your ad. Now, you can't just upload any image; it has to be a certain size. A square, a one-by-one ratio, is good. You can use landscape images; they will be accepted, but it's not recommended because, ultimately, Google will crop the image however they want in order to make it fit a square ratio. So, pre-crop it yourself so you have control over the quality of the image. In terms of aspect ratios, you can see here that square images should be

300 by 300 or 1200 by 1200 pixels. And, of course, if you want to use landscape images, they've provided sizes there as well. The file formats have to be static GIFs, JPEGs, or PNGs. These are the three formats of images you need to be aware of when adding an image extension to your campaign. Something to remember is that not everyone can use image extensions because Google is giving a lot of trust to allow users to upload images to their ads. You could upload something illicit or illegal that they can't necessarily check because a text ad

can be read by Google; they know what words you're using and they can block certain criteria around maybe different types of industry that you shouldn't be advertising in. They can see that with a text ad, and images are very different. They can't actually see specifically the image you're uploading unless somebody complains or the algorithm manages to somehow catch it, which is quite rare. So, it means that people need to show Google that they can be trusted in order to use this extension. You need a good history of compliance in a Google Ads account in a

relevant vertical. That means you can't be involved with anything related to sexual content, alcohol, gambling, or healthcare; image extensions are not available for these industries. So, if you are in these industries, you just won't see this extension in your account. You also need to have a Google Ads account that has been open for more than 90 days. If somebody decided to create a Google account and pop up and create an illicit ad with an illicit image, that can happen. Google can see that; Google probably hedged their bets and thought the risk of people doing that

in the early stages is quite high. So, they're going to give advertisers three months to prove that they can be trusted with this type of extension. If your account is relatively new—newer than 90 days—you also won't see this extension in your account. If your account is over 90 days old and you have a good history of compliance, and as far as you can see, you haven't violated any of Google Ads' terms, then you should get in touch with Google Ads to find out why the extension isn't showing for you. It should be showing for you

by that point, and of course, you need to have a Google Ads account with active campaigns. So, if your campaigns aren't running and there's no spend going through your account, even if you have good policy compliance, if you're not in an industry that is illicit in any way or is something Google sees as a controlled industry, and your account's been live for 90 days, it doesn't matter. If you're not spending money on Google, they won't let you use this extension. So, if you're not seeing it in your account but you have all the other boxes

ticked, it doesn't matter; Google will still not let you use it until you start spending and having active campaigns. So, why use an image extension? Of course, it gives more context to your products and services. It makes your ad more appealing, which can, of course, increase your click-through rates. One thing I want to emphasize to you guys in the course is that your click-through rate is very closely tied to your quality score, so it can lead to cheaper traffic as you optimize your quality score through better click-through rates. It can also improve the messaging of

your ads as well, so you can actually show an image to give more context to your messaging. Again, it helps to qualify traffic pre-click; if the product you're selling is in your ad and the user isn't a fan of the product or they look at it and they don't like it, if they click your ad, they're not necessarily going to buy it. You've pre-qualified the traffic by showing them what you have to offer, so that's a good thing. So, what makes a good image extension? It should be high quality. You don't want it to be

too blurry; it's going to be a small image, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get it to high quality. The better quality you have, the easier it is for users to see the content of the image because, of course, it is a small area of content. You want it to be something that the user can see. It's got to be highly relevant to your ad groups, so for example, if you're promoting black dresses, use a picture of a black dress. If you're promoting pink dresses, use a pink dress. There's no point in getting the

wrong product or item on your ad compared to what the user is searching for; you want it to be highly relevant. So, you need to set it at the ad group level, specifically based on what you're selling. And of course, use compelling and strong images that stand out. There’s no point in using an image where, when shrunk down to the size of the extension, it’s hard to see and hard to understand what it is. It’s just going to make the image extension pointless and maybe even deter people from clicking your ads outright. So, follow these

kinds of examples and these tips, and you'll do very well from using image extensions on Google Ads. Now, let's take a look at lead form extensions, which allow users to type in their details and submit a form directly to you as a business, where you can receive that form submission as a lead directly from the ad itself. Lead form extensions allow customers to submit an inquiry form directly from the search results page, so they don't click through to your website; they don’t go onto your form submission page or your forms on your website. This form

pops out directly from Google Ads itself, so it's a way for people to send a lead through to you or become a lead, I suppose, and submit their information to find out more about your services without even having to click on your website. They can leave their contact details with you to allow you to follow up with them in order to convert that lead into a sale. So, here's the setup in Google Ads. You can see here you have a business name at the top, and you need to provide your business name. You can also

see the form submissions there as well. Of course, there’s going to be a disclosure from Google because the person is submitting personal details, so you need some kind of policy there as well. There are a number of things you need to realize when you create this form on Google that you need to address in order to run this type of extension. Those things include your headline of 30 characters, your business name of 25 characters, and a description to explain why you're asking somebody to submit their details—that needs to be under 200 characters. Of course, you

need to ask your questions, such as name, email, postcode, and phone number; these are all things that you want to know from your customers depending on the service they're requesting or the products and services you're providing. So, you want to ask qualifying questions as well, for example, "What is your current job role?" For the qualifying questions for this section of the lead form, you have to choose from a predetermined list designated by Google. So, for example, "What is your job role?" is one of those things in that predetermined list. As I mentioned, you're submitting data;

your customers are submitting data directly to you, so you need to have a privacy policy link active where you can share that privacy policy with Google in the ad extension itself. This way, you're covering yourself. You can use background images as well, so if you want the form to look on-brand in terms of your brand colors or imagery, you can actually upload an image to the background of the form to better meet your brand guidelines and brand appearance. So, why use the lead extension form? Of course, it allows for faster conversions. Users don't even have

to go to a page on your website to get in touch. So, if you're a lead generation business and you do your selling offline, and you work with leads, this could be a perfect extension to get leads sooner. People don't even go to your website in order to submit it. However, to use lead form extensions, again, Google has to trust you that you're using people's data safely and correctly. You need to have a good history of compliance, working in a non-sensitive vertical. As I mentioned, alcohol, gambling, sexual industries, and things like that are sensitive verticals,

so you cannot use lead form extensions for privacy reasons. Of course, you need to have a privacy policy on your website; you're taking user data. Google wants to become comfortable and know that you're going to handle that data effectively and safely and that you're not going to spam users with any illicit content or any kind of communications that they haven't opted into. So, when do you not want to use the lead form extension? Of course, if you're an e-commerce business, you want transactions; you don't want leads in terms of form submission. So, it's not necessarily

the best type of extension to use for that kind of business. If you're an e-commerce business, you want that transaction. And, of course, if your business doesn't have a mechanism for following up on leads, you're also wasting your time. If your business is used to getting phone calls and people actually dialing out—maybe it's a cold calling business where you're calling random data in order to get your leads and sales—but you don't have anyone dealing with inbound leads and actually following up on those leads, then it wouldn't make sense to have this as a field. You

would just end up disappointing your customers, especially if they're not used to leads, particularly if your salespeople aren't used to leads coming in from this particular type of ad extension channel. So, make sure you have everything in place in order to work these leads when you start using this extension. And, of course, if your product is complex and needs a lot of explanation, a lead form might not necessarily be the best option because there might be so many different types of things that the person could need or want that the lead form may not capture

it adequately. You might want them to go to your website, where you can get better qualified leads. If that's the case, you're kind of disqualifying people who aren't necessarily going to meet the needs of your business. But, I think, even in this example, even with a complex sale, I think it's worth testing a lead form extension to see what kind of quality leads you get. Of course, a lead on your website, if you have a very long form where you're actually collecting a lot of data, that's going to be a better lead than a lead

form on Google Ads. Nevertheless, it's worth testing, and lead form extensions can be a very useful way to get extra information from users in order to follow up and generate leads for your business. So, let's move on to price extensions, which allow your customers to see your pricing before they even click your ad. So, what is the price extension? They allow you to tell your customers your prices, and you can showcase the pricing of up to eight products and services within your ad itself. So, it's a great way to communicate your pricing, particularly if your

price-sensitive customers can see that you have better pricing than your competitors and that your pricing is indeed competitive. Here’s an example of a price extension set up on Google Ads. You can see on the left-hand side you choose your information in terms of your language, your brands that you want to promote in terms of your pricing, and then your currency. Then, there’s a price qualifier; maybe you need to buy two to get a certain price, or maybe there’s some kind of promotion available. The price qualifier can be selected from a drop-down list as well. In

the extension itself, you give your product or service a header, a price, and of course the number of units you want to display. So, that is kind of how it looks on Google. On the right-hand side, you can see here how it appears: your brand appears at the top, your pricing, and then, of course, your information header and description as well. It’s a good way to show in tiles and in kind of a slider on mobile what kind of prices you’re showing for your services and products. So, the format of the price extension—I’ve touched on

a few of these already. Choose your language, choose your type of extension. So, whether it's a brand event or a location-based service, you choose your headlines, your products or service name, your currency, and your number of units. So, maybe, as I say, it's a number of quantities in order for the pricing to show—so maybe two of something for ten pounds or whatever it might be. Your description for what the actual product or service is, and of course, the URL you want to send the customer to should they click through from this extension and go to

your website. You want to share the page itself with more information around the promotion that you're running or the prices that you have. So, why use a price extension? Well, you're telling customers the price, and it qualifies them as a customer. So, if your pricing is highly competitive, it could be a great way for you to make sure people can see that and get more traffic to your website because your competitors may be less competitive than you. If your pricing is premium and you want to avoid the budget customer, they can be a great way

to protect your budget. So, if you're a premium or luxury brand and you want to advertise a product that's at the really premium end of the market, then putting the price in—even though it may deter clicks—will qualify your account with the right kind of traffic. This way, the people clicking through can actually afford the products you're selling. Conversely, again, promoting low pricing can encourage clicks and conversions because it means your price-qualified or price-sensitive customers can see that you're likely going to be quite cheap; therefore, they'd flock to you and click your ad over that of

your competitors because they know you're going to provide the best pricing. So, I think in either case, whether you're at the premium end or even indeed the lower end of the market, a price extension can be a great way to qualify your traffic before they commit to clicking. The final ad extension we're going to look at now is the promotion extension, which allows you to show your product discounts and offers on the ads themselves. So, they allow you to showcase your deals and discounts within your ads, showing people exactly what you're discounting, how much, and

what they need to do to qualify for the discount. With that said, you can promote both monetary and percentage discounts with either automatic discounts (which are literally where the price has already been discounted) or promotional codes as well. So, if you use a certain promotional code, you get a discount on the training, course, or whatever it is that you're selling. You can also use promo codes in this ad extension itself. So here is the setup screen for a promotion extension—again, something we will go through in the training when we're building the campaign itself based on

all of our keyword research we've done up till now. As you can see, you choose all of your information in terms of the language, your currency, your monetary discount, and other details in terms of the item itself that's been discounted, a link to the page, and other qualifiers as well in terms of promotion dates. Maybe it's a time-based promotion where it has a start and end date—that's something to consider as well. With a promotion extension format, as I've mentioned a few things, you have your language, and you can also choose an occasion. Now, I have

an example here: Christmas. But they have literally any holiday you can think of, whether it's a religious holiday, a spring sale, a summer sale, or a winter sale—whatever you want to call it, it's in that predetermined list. Again, you can't type in directly and choose what you want the reason for the promotion to be, but you can choose it from a drop-down list. Your currency, of course, is going to be important. You can choose whether it's a monetary or a percentage discount, your price item, and the link you want to send people to when they

click your promotion. You also want to add your promotion details here, whether it's redeemed instantly when they go to the website or if they need to use a promotional code. You can actually put your promotional code within the ad itself as well. Finally, as I've touched on, scheduling is going to be important as well. If a promotion is going to run for a certain period of time—maybe a number of hours, maybe a number of days—then you can also schedule your promotion to run at specific times. This way, you don't have to go back into Google

Ads and then turn off your advertising for this particular extension; it can also have an expiry date as well. So, why use promotion extensions? Well, the same reason you'd actually use promotions—having promotions encourages new business and drives sales to your business as well. It entices customers to click your ad and buy through deals and discounts. It can showcase your competitive pricing and value to customers searching as well, making them feel like they're getting a great deal. And of course, you can hijack seasonality and trends. So, as I said to you, we can do Christmas; you

could do Hanukkah; you could do Eid; you can do any religious celebration; you can do any kind of other celebrations as well, or just do sales in general. Because, of course, when things change in the time of the year, changes come—and I know this with Christmas; Christmas is front of mind as soon as it gets to mid-December. is at the front of your mind. So, if you're searching for something with a Christmas promotion, because it's front of mind, it can also be a bit of a callback to improve your conversion rates and also improve your

click-through rate on the ads as well. I would say if you're running a promotion on your website of any kind and you want to promote that same thing being promoted on your ads, it makes sense to use this extension because it's going to reflect the promotion accurately, and it means you can promote on both your website and on the ads as well. So, let's get started with bidding. Bidding is essentially a very important part of Google Ads because it's basically saying to Google what you're willing to pay for a click and how Google should actually

spend your money. When we talk about bidding, we talk about bidding strategies. So, what is a bidding strategy? Well, in Google Ads, you bid on keywords based on the most you're willing to pay for a click. If we go back to our example of boiler service, say you wanted to pay no more than one pound fifty per click; you would simply find that keyword in your account, set your max CPC bid at one pound fifty, and Google will never exceed that. That is essentially how manual bidding works. This premise of Google Ads and setting your

bids only applies to manual bidding because there is another type of bidding called smart bidding. Smart bidding is very different from manual bidding. Smart bidding allows you to set—sorry, manual bidding allows you to set the most you're willing to pay for a keyword. That's something that's been a legacy feature of Google Ads. Automated bidding is a bit different; automated bidding lets Google decide how much you should pay for your traffic based on your objectives. Google can either raise or lower your bids at the point of auction for every auction, depending on whether or not the

person's searching is closer to meeting or further away from meeting your objectives in Google's estimation. So, that is what smart bidding is. Smart bidding, known as automated bidding, is basically allowing Google to set your bids at auction time for every single auction. Your campaign objectives are going to define what Google will bid because, of course, if Google wants to meet your objectives and there's a customer searching who is very close to meeting your objective or a potential, I guess, your objective might be something around traffic, and the person coming to search for you is very

high intent or the keywords you're bidding on are cheaper but high volume, then Google will set bids based on those objectives. There are a number of automated bidding strategies to choose from. I've touched on a couple of them already, so let's go through and understand when I talk about smart bidding and bidding towards an objective. Let's look at what those strategies we're bidding towards, or could bid towards, actually are. There are two categories of smart bidding strategies I'm going to go through them so you understand what I mean. First of all, the best bidding strategy

for smart bidding, generally speaking, is either going to be on the left-hand side in the green box. We're going to start with maximize conversions. So, maximize conversions means Google will try and achieve the most amount of conversions for your budget—a really good strategy. Next up, we have maximize conversion value. Now, if you're tracking the value of sales in your Google Ads account from your conversions, this is a fantastic strategy because it allows you to say to Google, "Get as much revenue for my ad spend as possible," so another really good strategy. Now we're going to

move over to the right-hand side box because these are a bit different. The next strategy to look at is maximize clicks, where Google will try and achieve the highest number of clicks to your website for the budget you give Google. So again, it's a strategy that's a bit different from the others on the left, and I'm sure you can probably see why. But there's one more strategy we need to look at, and that is maximize—oh, sorry, that is the target impression share strategy. Your impression share is how often your ads are showing on Google versus

the total number of searches your ads were eligible for. Google won't show your ads for every single auction; there are a number of factors that play into that, you know, quality of your ads in terms of your quality score, your max CPC bid, the actual optimization of your campaign to make sure that you're not limited by your quality scores and auction levels. So you have to increase your bids, or maybe it's just a case of you haven't used much budget, but your impression share is an important metric to see how often your website and your

ads will appear in the searches versus the total number of searches that have occurred that could have triggered your ads. On Google, you can actually set an objective for Google to bid towards a target impression share. Maybe you want to show for a particular campaign a hundred percent of the time for every single search. Google will set bids in order to do that. Maybe you want to show only, maybe, fifty percent of the time. Google will set bids in order to achieve that impression share. So, it's quite a smart strategy, but you can see the

reason they are in two different boxes, and let me make it clear to you. The ones on... The left in the green box is ROI-based, so they're based on return on investment. When you spend money on Google Ads, this is the kind of strategy that's going to see a return on your spend. It's basically asking Google to deliver on that return. On the right-hand side is what I call vanity bidding, where it's not bidding toward a specific metric or business goal, such as making revenue for your business, which is the whole point of Google Ads.

Vanity bidding basically looks at the lower metrics that aren't necessarily tied to business success. For example, maximizing the clicks you get because clicks don't equal sales; there are going to be plenty of times when people click that don't result in a sale. Telling Google to do that is a vanity thing. Impression share also falls into this category, so if Google is basically tasked with hitting a certain impression share, they're not even concerned with conversions. I would call these two bidding strategies vanity bidding strategies. That kind of gives you an overview of the bidding strategies, but

of course, this course is in-depth, so we're going to go through and understand a bit more about all of these strategies so you can decide which one is right for your business and when you should or shouldn't use each of these strategies. Even the vanity ones have their uses, so we're going to take a look. We are going to get started on bidding with the original bidding strategy of Google Ads, which was the whole premise of the system when it was first created, and that is manual CPC—the original Google Ads bidding strategy that we've all

been used to if you've been using the platform for any length of time. So, what is manual CPC? Manual CPC allows you to set your own bids; you choose the maximum you're willing to pay for a click to your keywords. You can obviously change how much you pay for each of your keywords. Some keywords you might see as higher value, where you want to set higher bids because you're willing to pay more for them since they convert better. Conversely, some keywords might convert at a lower rate, so you want to reduce how much you spend

on them, but you still want to show for them, so you can lower the bids for those particular keywords. Your position on the search results page depends on both your bidding strategy—outbidding your competitors—and your quality score, which is based on your ad, equaling your ad rank. We've covered ad rank already, so manual CPC is a way to control your visibility quite strongly. You can massively increase your bids to force visibility, even if your ad rank isn't that strong. Of course, you should be fixing your quality scores if they're low, but it's an important point to

realize that increasing your bids manually with manual CPC can help you gain more visibility. However, that comes at a cost: you're going to pay more for your traffic. The idea is you want to reduce the cost of your traffic. So, why would you use manual CPC? The main thing is, of course, it gives you full control over your click costs. If you are maybe less confident with smart bidding, haven’t had success with it, or feel like you want the control, then this is the best option for you. You can take full control of your campaign,

deciding how much you're willing to pay for your traffic. It makes things more predictable and helps prevent overspending as well because, of course, Google Ads is liable to overspend. Controlling your bids will help manage your spend. Imagine if you're in a smart bidding scenario, where your bid suddenly jumps up because Google determines that a certain person searching is closer to your objective. They might be willing to pay more to reach that person and get higher up the page. In that case, the click cost will be astronomically high, which could potentially push you over budget if

that happened consistently—and it can happen. Google's smart bidding can also... sorry, manual CPC can also make your traffic volumes more predictable. If you set your max CPC bid, then you generally know how much you're paying for your traffic. If you have a fixed budget, you typically know how many clicks you're going to get in a month. It becomes predictable and also makes performance optimization a manual process. This can be both a good and a bad thing. Generally speaking, a smart bidding strategy will help you meet your objectives without you intervening. With the manual CPC strategy,

all of the optimization is down to you. You need to adjust the bids based on the success or otherwise of every keyword, and you need to make those changes in the account to improve performance. Sometimes that control and making those changes and adjustments is beneficial; other times it may not be as good. So be aware that you are fully responsible for the performance of manual CPC campaigns and all optimization. If you don’t optimize it yourself, it won't learn, whereas smart bidding strategies are supposed to learn and optimize as they gather data. Now, there's a slight

twist on CPC. A while ago, Google decided to bring in what's called eCPC (Enhanced CPC). This was basically introduced as a bridge between manual CPC and full smart bidding. Bidding ECPC allows you to set your bids as you would do with a normal CPC campaign with a max CPC; however, it also allows Google to increase or decrease your bids at the time of auction in order to meet a revenue or CPA target. So, if you have a revenue target of a certain amount of return on ad spend for your campaign, or if you have a

certain target cost per lead or cost per sale, then you can also give that information to Google as part of your campaign build, and your ECPC bidding strategy will allow you to do that. This brings you closer to smart bidding. You still have a lot of control over the bids, but Google has a bit of wiggle room to increase or decrease bids based on the likelihood of meeting your objectives. It’s a good bridging gap; it could be a good way to maintain control while also leveraging the power of Google Ads’ automated smart bidding. So, I

think this can be a good place to start. Generally speaking, when I set up a campaign for the first time ever—having never run a campaign before—ECPC or even manual CPC can be a good place to start because it means you have full control over the initial stages. Google sometimes chooses favorites very quickly without other keywords getting any visibility, so it gives you an opportunity to fully test and see whether certain keywords are going to perform or whether they’re not going to perform. That’s an important factor to remember as well, and because of this early control,

it allows you to build data and gather the important touch points for your campaign, such as your keyword data. Eventually, you can transition to a smart bidding strategy with good data for Google to optimize from, using that smart bidding strategy. So, there are some good things about manual CPC even though it’s not as clever as automated smart bidding. To use manual CPC and ECPC, you can select that from your bidding strategy in your settings; of course, we’ll cover this in the campaign setup walkthrough, so don’t worry if you don’t know what that screenshot is from—we’re

going to cover it. We’re going to do a full setup walkthrough in the course, so you’ll see how that works in action if you stick with this. Let’s first start with the bidding strategies that are not focused around revenue, which I call vanity bidding strategies, to find out when you should use them and what they even do. We’re going to start with maximize clicks and target impression share. Starting off with maximize clicks, it’s an automated strategy that allows Google to focus your budget on getting as many clicks as possible. You have your budget, and Google

knows how much your budget is; they’re basically going to adjust bids at the point of auction to maximize the number of clicks generated from your ads. It’s a strategy that can generate the maximum amount of traffic from your campaigns. So, what are the advantages of maximize clicks? A lot of high traffic comes to your website. If you have a maximize clicks strategy, you’re going to generate a lot of traffic. You’re going to maximize how much traffic you generate, and of course, you can also control the maximum cost per click as an additional setting if necessary.

It can be a bit of a hybrid. There’s actually a setting within this bidding strategy where, say for example, you want to maximize your traffic but you don’t want Google to go crazy, you can set a maximum CPC bid that Google won’t exceed. Of course, this will tie the strategy back a bit; it will tie its hands behind its back, meaning it won’t necessarily achieve the most amount of clicks for your budget in its true form. With this additional layer of rule on top, it allows you to have a bit more control as necessary. Now

we get to the disadvantages, and as you can see, the page is a lot longer for disadvantages than for advantages for obvious reasons. This bidding strategy is not focused around revenue; of course, the whole point of Google Ads is to generate revenue and a profitable campaign for your business. So, it doesn’t really make sense to use a strategy that isn’t tied back to that kind of top-level business and marketing objective. It’s not even really a brand objective. Maximizing clicks, especially when people are searching for you already and are looking for your services, doesn’t really make

sense. Leads and sales are more important than clicks. Clicks are one element of a Google Ads campaign. Yes, having lots of clicks to your website might look good, but unless those clicks are converting, then there’s not really much point in generating any traffic. You should be choosing a revenue-focused strategy instead. Unless your clicks are turning into sales, you are wasting budget, and Google could potentially choose keywords that lead to the most clicks. If that means that some more expensive keywords are going to generate more sales, Google won’t have the wiggle room to bid effectively on

those keywords, because its objective isn’t based on sales; it’s based on traffic. So, you would miss out on potentially really powerful searches that are great for your business and generating sales, all because you’re tying Google’s hands behind its back by forcing it to generate traffic as opposed to sales. There isn’t really an effective use case for maximize clicks. Some people like to use it because... They think that loads of clicks means loads of sales; this is definitely not the case. Google Ads is a much more sophisticated tool than just generating pure traffic. The whole point

is you can optimize campaign performance—whether it's yourself or whether it's Google's automated bidding—you want to put your budget where people are going to convert, and this strategy simply doesn't do that. Now we move on to Target Impression Share. Impression Share, as I've mentioned, is a metric in Google that measures how frequently your ads show versus how many terms could trigger your keywords. When you think about all of the potential searches that could trigger all of the keywords in your ad account, your ads don't show all of the time—100 percent of the time. With certain adjustments

you can make in terms of this bidding strategy, or if you set your bids really high, or have excellent quality scores and loads of budget behind your campaign, you can indeed achieve 100 percent. However, a lot of the time, you're not going to show for every single term. The frequency at which your ads show against your potential—how many times they could show versus the potential searches out there—the frequency of that is your Impression Share. This is based on those factors: your quality score, your bids, and your budget. Those three factors are going to affect how

often your ads show versus how many searches could have triggered your ads. So again, Impression Share is measured in percentage, but using a Target Impression Share bidding strategy basically means you can tell Google what Impression Share you want to achieve. Now, your budget could still be an element that holds you back from achieving this; if your budget isn't high enough, even setting a high Impression Share with this bidding strategy isn't going to work. However, if you had an open budget or a large budget where you could literally have a lot of budget behind your campaign

and you set this objective, then the two other elements of quality score and bid are taken care of. Because even if your quality scores are terrible, Google will just push your bids up massively in order to counteract that and try and achieve that Target Impression Share that you've set. For example, at an 80 percent Impression Share, it means your ads were shown to users who triggered them 80 times out of 100 eligible searches. This gives you an understanding of how Impression Share, as a percentage, works. You can instruct Google to bid towards that Impression Share,

maximizing your visibility. Think of Impression Share as visibility on Google. If you go to Google and type something in to trigger your ads and your ads don't show, then that's a missed impression. If you type something in again and your ads show, then you've hit that impression. So, that gives you a breakdown of what I mean when I talk about Impression Share; it's essentially a measure of ad visibility. So, what are the advantages of Target Impression Share? A Target Impression Share allows you to increase and decrease your keyword bids to the point of achieving a

specified Impression Share, which is powerful if you want to show at the top of the page. I guess it's a good way to maximize your visibility. Visibility is an important part of Google Ads—again, it's not as important as generating sales or revenue, but it's nevertheless an important factor in success. Of course, you can literally target the top of the page in terms of the top four positions on the page, or you can actually target position one as well. You can also layer this with position-based targeting. So, it's an important strategy if you really want to

maximize visibility. Now, the disadvantage: we've been here before when we spoke about maximized clicks as a strategy. It doesn't focus on revenue; showing at the top of the page or having very high visibility doesn't guarantee conversions. There's no point in being highly visible to somebody who's very unlikely to convert or being really visible for a keyword that isn't going to convert. This really presents a difficult use case for this strategy. The best use case you have for this strategy of maximizing your Impression Share is if you decide to bid on your own brand name. Now,

of course, you want to show in position one at all times for your own brand name, and typically, clicks to your own brand are going to be really cheap. If you have a bunch of competitors bidding on your brand name and you want to protect your brand, instead of playing the game where you're increasing bids and then they increase their bids and you increase yours, you can set a strategy to say to Google, "Show me at the top of the search results at all times, outbid my competition, and keep me in position one for my

branded terms." That could be a really good way to protect your brand. However, apart from that one use case, where if you have people bidding aggressively on your brand and you want to protect it, there's not really any other scenario where you would use this strategy. So I would probably steer away from this apart from that one use case. As usual, you can select either of these kinds of vanity strategies when you create your campaign and you're selecting your bidding strategy. Again, don't worry if you don't recognize the screenshot; we're going to go through this

when we build the campaign and go through the bidding strategies in real time. So now we're going to move on to the bidding strategies that are focused around... Revenue and sales and generating leads, which are the most important bidding strategies you're going to find in Google Ads, are the maximized conversions and maximize conversion value bidding strategies. So, what does maximize actually mean? When we talk about maximizing conversions or maximizing conversion value, it means getting as much revenue or driving as many conversions as possible for your budget. That is what Google will try to do; it

will look at the budget you have and think, "How much can I get in terms of leads or conversion points?" If you're doing a maximize conversion value side of things, it will consider how much revenue can be generated from the spend and the budget you have. These bidding strategies give Google free reign to set bids in order to meet those objectives. So, it's basically bidding to see what level of conversions or what level of revenue it deems achievable, and it will adjust bids at the point of auction to meet either of those objectives. So, what

are the advantages of maximizing your campaign? It allows you to drive a higher volume of conversions or revenue, respectively. It's basically giving Google unrestrained target objectives, not limited by a CPA or a target return on ad spend. This means pushing Google to the max—basically telling them to go out there and achieve the most they can get, or what they think they can get, for your budget in a revenue-driving or lead generation context. This is very different from vanity bidding, where we were bidding on minor metrics like visibility or clicks. This is bidding for achieving results.

This also means management is a lot easier; automation means you don't have to manually change your bids all the time. With manual CPC, optimization takes place by adjusting your bids based on performance in the campaign. However, smart bidding uses a ton of signals beyond what Google would give us control of as advertisers. Of course, you can adjust your bids in your account, but Google has dozens and dozens of other signals at the point of auction that they can use to determine whether or not somebody has high intent. This could include things like historical searches, device

performance, and all of these different types of metrics and data points. Google uses these to predict whether or not someone is less likely or more likely to convert, and that is the advantage of smart bidding. It makes management easier and, in theory, should yield better results. Now, let's talk about setting limits. I discussed maximization and instructing Google to get as many conversions or as much revenue as possible for the budget I have. However, maximizing your strategy gives Google full free reign, which could potentially lead to costs spiraling out of control or may leave you feeling

like you're not achieving the levels you need. For example, say you have a business that can only sustain a £30 cost per lead because you know how many leads convert into sales. In order to be profitable, your leads need to come in at under £30. If you were to go with a normal maximize conversion strategy, Google may exceed that level but maximize the total number of conversions you get overall. If you want to rein Google back a bit and say, "Okay, get as many as you can, but try not to exceed £30," you could set

that as an objective. On the other hand, with a return on advertising spend (ROAS), if your business can only sustain a return of 800 percent, you can tell Google to set a maximum of 800 percent, meaning they should bid towards achieving that objective. Without this limit, Google will try to maximize as much revenue as they can into your account. When you set a return on advertising spend of 800 percent, Google would aim to achieve that based on your objective. However, if you give Google free reign, they may achieve even more revenue for your business, which

sounds good, but it may come at a much higher cost, making it unsustainable. Setting limits can also mean that the returns could be stronger for your business and in line with your current performance. Remember, Google doesn’t know much about your business. They know about your advertising and your setup, but they don't know your specific business scenario; they don't know, for example, that you can only sustain a £30 lead cost. So, it’s important to set limits with these strategies as well. This is a crucial part of using either of these strategies. Now, let’s discuss target CPA

(Cost Per Action) and target ROAS. Setting a target CPA allows you to have more cost control. Google will try to achieve your targets. So, it comes back to that balance of volume versus value. You may achieve a lower cost per lead, but your overall volume of leads potentially available may be lower than what’s out there. The same goes for return on advertising spend. You may achieve a return that's in line with your business objective, but there will still be some missed revenue opportunities. By putting those restraints in place, you’re always balancing between overall revenue volume,

lead volume, and the kind of restrictions necessary to bring everything in at the right cost. Generally speaking, most businesses need these elements to come in at the right cost to remain profitable, so I would advise setting limits within these bidding strategies. Go on to do this. So, again, this is where you would select it in Google Ads. These two bidding strategies are available to select, and we will cover this on the walkthrough. When we go through and actually build the campaign, step by step I’ll show you exactly how we’re building things, and all the groundwork

we’ve done will come into play as well. Before we start building our campaign, there’s one more thing we need to do, and that is to actually set up our conversion points. What is the most valuable to you in your business, and how can we track that activity on your website? Conversion tracking is tracking those successful website interactions. It allows you to track positive and affirmative customer activity on your website. A successful conversion or successful interaction can be attributed to many different types of metrics. For example, if somebody submitted a contact form on your website and

that was cast as a successful action you wanted to track and generate leads through, then you could measure that conversion to keyword, device, location; basically, you can find out a ton of information about where that conversion comes from in your account in order to optimize performance and also understand a bit more about the overall performance of your campaign. So, ask yourself: What do you want customers to do when they get onto your website? What are the specific actions you would like them to take? They should be important end goals for your website. So, there’s no

point in tracking somebody visiting a certain page or clicking a certain link necessarily. What you want to track as a conversion is somebody doing something affirmative—a kind of commitment, whether it’s a purchase or something along those lines. Let’s have a look at an example of conversions. As I’ve mentioned, a website form is a really key example and a clear example of a conversion point on your website. Somebody goes to your website looking for information; they submit a contact form, and you get their details. That person is a lead to your business. That’s a good conversion.

A phone call—somebody actually decides to phone your business to find out more—that’s a conversion, particularly if you do sales offline and over the phone and generate leads that way. Of course, an online purchase is probably the clearest example of a conversion you can get: the person has purchased the product or service online. You can also get quotations; maybe somebody's completed a quote form or a price comparison. So, if you're in the UK, you know, like Compare the Market—getting a quotation before even buying insurance could be seen as a conversion point. And, of course, you have

other conversion touchpoints, like live chat. If somebody initiates a chat on your website, you might want to track that as a conversion because it’s an affirmative and positive interaction with your website. So, you will need to go through your website and look at all the specific actions users would take that you could class as affirmative and something that shows intent towards purchase. Make a log of all those things you would like to track. Then, of course, conversion tracking is the activity of tracking that activity. To track conversions in Google Ads, you will need to have

access to your website code or work with a web developer. Google Ads conversion tracking is basically a way for Google to get information around what’s happened on your website. In order to get that information, you need to implant certain codes onto your website in order for that to work. If you don’t have access to the codebase of your website or you don't have access to a tag management system, for example, you might need to speak to a developer who can help you implement conversion tracking. I’ll show you how to do it anyway in this training

coming up and walk through how I would do it for an instance of a website—for the example we have, which is Bob's Plumbers—and we’re going to go through and track conversions for that website. But for your particular website, you might need a developer to help you. The steps to conversion tracking: 1. Of course, decide which conversions you’d like to track. Do an audit of your website and understand what the user interaction is that you want to track as a conversion. This could be really obvious, subtle, or it could be multiple conversion points. Basically, decide what

you want to track. 2. The next step is, in Google Ads, you generate the tracking code for each conversion. Every conversion has a different method of setup and requires a slightly different code so they can all be reported on successfully. In Google Ads, for example, you might have a live chat feature, a contact form, and a telephone number, and for all three of those conversion points, you want to track them separately as a phone call, a web form submission, or a live chat submission. Each of those conversions can report properly in Google Ads. 3. Step

three is you place the code on your website to specifically trigger when a successful action happens. For example, a thank-you page following a form submission is a perfect example of where that code should trigger to say this is a conversion. When that code is triggered, that logs into Google Ads as a successful conversion, and that can be tied back to the keyword, the campaign, the ad—all the different metrics within the system—so you can understand what’s working and what’s not working. 4. Of course, step four: once you’ve actually implemented this code when you want it to

trigger, you have to test it. Test the conversion code to ensure it is working properly. Walk through the system yourself and see whether or not it triggers correctly; that is going to be important testing to make sure it works. If it doesn't work and it's reporting incorrectly, or sometimes even worse—if it’s double or triple firing and triple counting—it can really inflate your conversions and reported conversions in Google, which can be a problem as well. So, it's important to figure that part out, too. You might need help; conversion tracking is technical—it's more technical than many other

aspects of Google Ads because Google Ads is about advertising keywords and setting up how people search for your business. This is different; this is about how you would implement a tracking code based on specific user interactions and events on your website. Conversion tracking is crucial for campaign measurement and success measurement, so it’s really important that it's done properly. If you're not sure how to do conversion tracking, please, please, please work with a developer who knows how to implement it and brief them on what you need, even on a freelance or ad hoc basis. If you

don't have an in-house development team, or maybe you're a freelancer and you’re not a developer yourself and you’re not sure how to do this part of Google Ads, hire a developer for an ad hoc project to get it done. It’s very important that this step is executed correctly because it’s going to set the tone for the entire campaign. As I said, we're going to do a conversion audit and set up on Google Ads. We're going to walk through Bob's Plumbers, look at the potential conversion points on the website. I believe there are at least two,

so we'll examine those and go through building those conversions in Google Ads and implement the conversion tracking codes on the website. Previously, in this course, you've looked at a conversion rate optimization audit to make sure we can get the user to convert when they hit the website. Now, in addition to that, we also want to ensure we can track those conversions effectively. This is where a conversion audit comes into play. We want to understand what actions a customer could potentially take that we want to track in Google Ads to measure success. The first thing is

to identify and make a list of all of those actions so we can proceed to track them as conversions within Google Ads. The first thing I’m going to do is look to the right-hand side here, and you’ll notice this button. This button is a click-to-call action; if somebody clicks this button, it initiates a phone call on mobile devices. Now, this is a key interaction we would want to track; it's very important. In addition to that, we don’t just want to track the click-to-call action; we also want to track people who just type in the phone

number. Remember, if you’re on a desktop device—like you can see right here—you’re looking at a desktop version of this website. If somebody types the phone number and makes a phone call, we still want to track that as a conversion. Google Ads allows you to track phone calls as a conversion even if it’s not a click-to-call number. That’s two conversions already from this one action. Further down is the confusing one. You have a "Get a Quote" button here, and if somebody clicks that button, it does show user intent, and it's an action you might want to

measure. However, the issue is that when somebody does hit this contact us page right here, it isn’t actually a sign of intent until they submit a form, make a phone call, or send an email. They need to exchange information for you to contact them as a business or agency in order for them to get in touch. So, this is something that would be maybe a step toward conversion; clicking that button is not an interaction I would track in Google Ads. Let’s go back to the homepage. As we go further down, there’s another phone number here,

which ties into what we said—we want to track people who want to make this phone call from this number. But of course, the main thing is this contact form; we also need to track conversions following submissions of this contact form. If a customer submits this form, we want to track it. So, by my count, that is three conversions we would want to track on this website: we have phone number click-to-call, phone number calls from the website, and contact form submissions. Whether it’s on this page or on the boiler servicing page, there are going to be

contact forms on all of the pages that we want to track, and that is something we need to also monitor. Now, we’re going to go ahead and track all of that activity and show you step-by-step how to set up conversion tracking for each of these actions. Okay, here I am in the Google Ads account, and the first thing I'm going to do is head over to Tools and Settings, then go over to Conversions. Once you're in the conversions window, if you have conversions... In your account already, you'll see them here. If you're like this one

and have a brand new account, you won't see any conversions yet. So, we're going to create our first new conversion action by clicking the button. The first thing we want to track are phone calls. As mentioned, there are click-to-call actions and there are telephone actions as well. So, I'm going to click on phone calls to start the process, and then you have the options down here: calls from ads using call extensions or call-only ads, calls to a phone number on your website, or clicks to a number on your mobile website. If we're going to track

people phoning the number themselves manually on the website, you want to click option two, which is what we're going to do now, and I'm going to hit continue. So, I'm going to call this one "Calls from Website." That will do. Next up, you have assigning a value to a conversion. Google recommends you assign a value to a conversion. The way I would assign a value for a lead generation campaign is that you have to work out your average order value and the number of leads it takes for you to get to your order. If you

divide your total average order value by the number of leads you get to get to one order based on your conversion rate, some of the metrics we discussed before that question of how many leads it takes for you to make a sale and what's the average order value of that sale: you want to get the total value divided by the number of leads to put in as an indicating figure for your conversion value. For the purposes of this, I'm just going to leave it as "Don't use a value." Generally speaking, for Google, you want to

use a value, but for the purposes of showing you how to set this up, I'm going to leave it just like this. Next, you want to decide if you want to count every single conversion or just one conversion per session and per click. The idea behind this is if you count every single conversion with a phone call, it means no matter how many times an individual, based off one click, rings the phone number, that will count as the conversion. So, if somebody in the same session makes a phone call, then calls back again two minutes

later, and then maybe calls back again a few minutes after that, that will equal three conversions. If you count one conversion for that user, it means that you're telling Google you want to count a customer as a lead, as opposed to the number of times that customer interacts. It's very important to just count one, not every conversion, because otherwise you're double and triple counting multiple interactions from the same customer. If you're selling online and every single conversion means money in your bank account, then you want to count every single one because you want Google Ads

to optimize based on that fact. So, for the purposes of this, I'm going to keep it as one. Next, we move down to the area. Of course, we're building a campaign in this demonstration in the United Kingdom, so I will select that territory. If you're obviously in the United States, select United States. Wherever you're based, you will select that territory. Next, you want to enter the phone number. So, if we jump over to the website, we will see the phone number, which is right here. I'm going to copy that, and I'm going to paste it

in here—that's our phone number. So, display number—this is the phone number basically that you want to send phone calls to because remember, what Google's going to do is it's going to find the phone number on your website and replace it with a tracking number. That tracking number needs to go somewhere. You can decide whether or not you want to send it somewhere different from your actual number on the website in this section because you can do that, but generally speaking, you'd want to just keep this the same as the number on your website. The display

number is the number that's on your website that's going to be replaced by the Google forwarding number, and that is going to be the same number as well. So, this number, as it appears on the website, will be forwarded to this number; this number will be replaced by a tracking number when somebody dials that tracking number. They'd really be dialing this number up here. So, really, there are two fields here, but they essentially do very similar things. The only time you'd want to potentially change this is if you want your Google Ads phone calls to

go to somewhere specifically different from your main business line. Therefore, you'd want to replace your main business line phone number to be substituted with a tracking number by changing it here and then maybe changing the phone number that destination will go to up here. But ultimately, generally speaking, you'd probably want both of these the same. Call length is an important one because if somebody picks up the phone and makes a phone call, and it rings maybe once and then they hang up, you don't want to count that as a lead because it's not enough time

for a transaction or even for one of the customer service team to take details or get the customer's information. So, that won't be a lead. By default, Google sets it as 60 seconds because, generally speaking, in one minute, you get enough information from the customer in order... To be able to get back in touch with them or to advance conversations through further communication in the future, it's a pretty good default to leave. But it depends on the type of product you're selling. If you're selling a complex product over the phone, then this probably is going

to have to be something a lot longer. If you're selling something very quick and easy, you might even want to keep it as 60 seconds. For the purposes of this, I'm going to keep it as 60 seconds. Then you've got the conversion window. So conversions basically can be tracked in Google Ads after an initial click. So, say for argument's sake, I click an advert, then I leave without converting, then I come back five days later. That click I initially took can be attributed in Google Ads, and the window for the attribution can be defined here.

You can go as far as 60 days; you can go custom, and you can go to 30 days or even one week. Generally speaking, I leave this as the default 30 days because it leaves enough window open so that if somebody has shown interest, they've got 30 days before they could potentially convert, and you can attribute that click correctly to the initial traffic that drove their visit. So, generally speaking, I tend to leave this on 30 days. If you have a longer sales cycle product, you can expand this to maybe 60 days, or if you

have a product that's very easy and quick to buy, you might want to even put it as low as one week. It all depends on your business. Attribution or discussion around lead attribution is all down to the type of business that you're operating within. It's not something you're just going to pick up on this training because you have to decide as a business whether or not your customers convert relatively quickly, where you need a smaller attribution window, or whether your business has a very long lead time, where you want the attribution window to be as

wide as possible. That's completely down to the discretion of your business. In this instance, I'm going to leave it as 30 days. Then finally, on the subject of attribution, Google will determine how much credit to give each click on the route to conversion. So, say for example, I click an advert that I don't convert, then I click the same advert again, then don't convert, then click it a third time, and then do convert. Google has to give each of those clicks on the journey to conversion some credit, and that credit is broken down by breaking

that conversion down into pieces. So, don't be put off if you see in your account, after setting up this attribution model section, that a keyword drove 0.5 conversions. Because, obviously, one conversion is a conversion, to see it split by decimal might seem strange, but what Google is doing is breaking that conversion down into which clicks actually led to that conversion. The way it breaks that conversion down based on those touch points is using attribution. It determines how much credit each ad interaction gets for your conversions. Data-driven is the default one basically. Data-driven will use Google's

learning to understand whether or not a click contributed positively or not even negatively, but which one contributed most positively to the interactions and to the conversion. So, let Google deciding is basically the recommended model. However, you can choose your own conversion model. Based on the three touchpoints I mentioned in terms of click one (no conversion), click two (no conversion), and click three (conversion), each of these attribution models has different intents and different ways that it can split that conversion's credit. Last click will give all of the credit to the final click. First click will give

all of the credit to that first click. Linear will split the conversion evenly across all three clicks. Time decay will give more value to the conversion closest to the end goal. So, the last click will get the most credit, the second click will get medium credit, and the first click will get the least credit because it decays towards the time that the conversion took place. Position-based is a bit of a different conversion model where, essentially, it gives you credit based on the first and the last interaction and distributes it across those two key interactions: first

touchpoints and last touchpoints, which can be a good attribution model. But generally speaking, I leave it as data-driven so Google can understand and learn what users are doing and how to give the credit for those conversions across your keywords and interactions in your ads. So, there we have it. Click "Create" and continue, and that will save your conversion. Then what you have to do next is actually install the tag. So, what we're going to do next is go ahead and start installing the tag so we can actually set this conversion live on the website. Okay,

so once you've actually created the conversion action, you need to install tagging so Google can actually do the conversion on your website and track the activity effectively. You have three options when you want to use conversion tracking in Google Ads. You can either install the tag yourself, email it to developers, or use Google Tag Manager in order to deploy the tag through this system. Now, Google Tag Manager is quite an advanced conversion tracking technique that we can look at another time further down the line in the course, but for the starting point, we're going to

start by looking at installing the tag ourselves so you can see the process your potential developer will have to go through. So if you click "Install the tag yourself,"... You're given a few options. First of all, you have what's called the global site tag. This tag is essentially recording all of your visitor data; it's kind of the core tag for Google Ads that will relate to all of your conversions and all the activities the users take part in on your website. This tag will track all of that activity, but the key thing to remember is

that this isn't the conversion itself; it's the global site tag to track the activity across everything. Then, further down, you will actually create the conversion tracking. So the first thing is you choose the option most relevant to your business. If you have installed this tag on your website already, then you'll find you can just proceed straight down to actually adding the phone call tracking snippet. But I'm going to assume you haven't actually installed your global site tag, so leave the option that states, "The global site tag isn't installed on all of your HTML pages," and

then you're going to download that snippet of code. So that's downloading now, and if I open this for you and just drag that over from my other screen, this is your global site tag. This tag needs to be on every single page of your website within the head tag. Now, when I say things like this, where it needs to be within the head tag between the opening and closing of the head tag, if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, you need to speak to your developers. This course is about being a marketer,

building Google Ads campaigns, and running them successfully. But if you're a marketer who isn't used to editing website code or going into web pages and making edits, then you need to speak to your developers and brief them on this. It might even be worth using the "Email the code to a developer" option when doing this, but if you don't choose that option, you can have the code here. It's downloaded, and you can send this off to your developers to put that within the head tag. So I'm going to keep that code and save it for

later because I'm going to add it to the website and make sure that it's in place. Then, further down here, you actually have the phone snippet. This will essentially be the piece of code that will replace the phone number as it appears on your website, which is in this format for our website, and it will replace it with a Google tracking number. So I'm going to download that code as well so I have that to hand. Again, if you download it, this is what it looks like, and you want to put this on the website

as well in the head tag, again, between the opening and closing head tags of your HTML pages across your entire website. Now, there are so many different types of websites out there, including WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and Shopify. There are so many different ways you'd have to do this depending on those technologies. So I'm not going to show you how to do this. Either you know how to do this, or you need to work with a developer to do this. But I'm going to go ahead and add these tags to the website and make sure

that they're in place correctly. Then I'm going to hit next, and then that's it. The conversion is set up, pending, of course, the fact that you've added the tags that I've just downloaded onto the right places on your website in terms of that head tag. So once you've done that and you hit done, you'll see the conversion in here. As that starts to get conversions, it'll start reporting in here. It says "unverified" at the moment because no data is actually passed through this conversion, and it will stay like that until conversions actually start coming through

and you start running campaigns. So that's how to create a phone call conversion on Google Ads. Okay, so up next, we are going to track another conversion. I'm going to click on the blue conversion action button here, and we're going to click on phone calls again because this time I'm going to do something a bit different. We're going to track clicks to a number on the mobile website. Before, we tracked people who could have typed the phone number into their phone manually. They see the phone number on the website, and Google will replace our original

phone number with a tracking number. But this time, what we're going to do is actually track the clicks to that mobile number on the website. So I'm going to hit continue. We're going to call this "click to call" as our conversion. The other one we called "calls from website," and we're going to do the same thing again. We're not going to assign a value; we're going to count one conversion per person. We're going to keep it as 30 days; we're going to do a view-through window because this is slightly different. Before, we didn't have this

option. A conversion window typically works with clicks. So, when we talk about the attribution of 30 days, if somebody clicks an ad on day one, and then on day ten they go back to the website and then convert, then that is a 30-day attribution model. We can actually track that user back to that initial click within that 30-day period. If they go beyond that 30-day period, we would no longer track that as a viable conversion. View-through conversions are a bit different. This is basically if somebody sees your advert as opposed to clicking it, how long

do you want the attribution to last? If I go onto Google and type in "boiler servicing," for example, and I see an advert for Bob's Plumbers but I don't click it, then I convert later on in the same day. That view-through conversion would count towards my conversion tally. So, the one-day view-through model is usually what I'd leave it as; anything else is too generous. Ultimately, if a user hasn't clicked your advert and they've only seen it, you don't want to open an attribution up massively because you might be misattributing. There might be other channels involved

in getting that user back to your website. Of course, if you haven't used any of the kind of features on ads that allow you to show your phone number, then it's not likely they would have come through your ad directly; they would have come through potentially another means. So, one day as your view-through is something I would recommend, and 30 days, generally speaking, as your main click-through conversion window. Again, for the attribution model, I'll keep this as data-driven; Google recommends this and it's good because Google can also learn where those touchpoints are leading to conversions.

Then, I'm going to click on "Create" and "Continue," and again you have these three options. I'm going to click on "Install the tag yourself" for this option this time. The global site tag is installed on all of our pages when you created another conversion action, so that's the opportunity to tick if you've done the steps we did previously. If you generated the global site tag and then added it to the website successfully, then option number three is the one you want to tick because we created it when creating another conversion in this Google Ads account.

You can actually use a global site tag via other products as well, so Google Analytics is another one or from another Google Ads account. But generally speaking, once you create your first conversion and successfully install the global site tag, any further conversions you create should be using option number three. Here is our event snippet code if we want to track people clicking our ads. I'm going to download that now. This is the code that's going to do it, and again there's a pattern emerging: you need to put it between the opening and closing head tags

of your HTML pages. Again, it depends on your platform; I'm not going to walk you through how to do this. You should either know how to do it or, if you don't know how to do it, more importantly, get support from a website developer because this is something a developer will likely have to help you with if you're not someone who's used to editing website code. So, with that in mind, that is exactly how you would go ahead and create a conversion for click-to-call. There is one final conversion point we need to track on this

website and that is, of course, if we jump back over this big blue form right here. This is going to be a key conversion point that we want to track. So go back to Google Ads; we're going to track that as a conversion. Click the big blue button in order to start tracking a new conversion. Instead of clicking on phone calls like we did previously, we're going to click on website because we're tracking activity on a website, including signups or conversions based on lead forms. The first thing it's going to ask you to do is

to scan your website, so it will give you suggestions for conversion actions, and it's a better way for Google to understand potentially what you want to track. So, I'm going to paste the website domain in here and click on "Scan." "Create conversion actions automatically from website events" is going to be one of the options, so this basically allows you to build your conversion action. Now, when you build a conversion action, for example, on a contact form, you need to know what the URL is once the form is submitted. What is the thank you page URL?

For this one in particular, it is "/thanks." Once it loads, there we go; this is the thank you page URL, so this is the page we want to actually track as a thank you page because when you submit that form, this is the page that users are going to see. So, in order for us to do that, we need to first of all select the conversion category, and we're going to make this one a lead category. So you have all these options for conversions and checkout for e-commerce businesses; you have a subscription option as well.

I'm going to put this one as "Submit Lead Form," so when somebody registers interest in your business and submits their details, this is the best option to choose. The options you have to match that to are here: you have "URL is," "URL contains," and "URL starts with." So if you click on "URL is," if I put in this URL exactly as it's written, that would work as a conversion because that is exactly what the URL is. If I wanted to make this a shortened extraction, I can do "URL contains," and I can just do "thanks"

like this. If the URL contains "thanks," then that will track as a conversion. "URL starts with" is not something I'm going to put in because it just wouldn't work for this particular rule. I'm going to leave it as "URL contains" because it means there's less chance for error; sometimes in these tools, if your URL is slightly different or differs slightly depending on your domain and how it's typed in. HTTPS side of things, or HTTP; they could cause an issue. So I'm going to leave it as a simple URL contains, and then "thanks," which is the

page domain that we're going to track as a thank you page. Then I'm going to click on ADD, and that has added our conversion action based on that thank you page. Now, if the page URL doesn't change when a form is submitted, you're going to need to do some more advanced tracking. You're going to have to track the form submission as an event using something like Google Tag Manager. So, that would be more advanced conversion tracking. At this stage of the course, we're going to keep things simple, and if you are tracking conversions with a

thank you page, this is the way to do it. So, once you've added the action, you can also create a conversion action manually using code. By doing this, all you do is generate a snippet of code and then get your developers to deploy that code at the point of the event you want to track. It's a bit more technical again because you need a developer to actually deploy this code on your website based on a customer's event. You could even do it for this form submission. So, say for argument's sake, the thank you page didn't

appear when somebody submitted the form. You could actually just say to your developer, "When somebody submits the form and it's successfully submitted, can you deploy a manual piece of code?" You can click this option here in order to generate that code snippet for developers to do that based on a specific action. But again, we're going to keep things simple, and we're going to continue with this conversion we've set up. When we do conversion tracking when the URL doesn't change, then it will be more complex and something we would use Google Tag Manager for. So, I'm

going to click on Save and Continue. It's saying the global site tag isn't connected, but that's fine because I've not actually added it on yet. We've only got the code snippet to hand; I've not gone on and put it onto the website yet. Here is the global site tag again; it's just reminding you that you need to have this on the website in order for conversions to track. Be sure to put this on, and you won't see this message. As I say, I've not put it on the website just yet; I've just downloaded the snippets,

and I'll go ahead and put those on. I've got them all down here. Again, as I say, here's the global site tag ready to go onto the website. We're just creating the conversions at this stage, and then I'm going to hit done. And there we have it! We have the conversions we want to track on the website. We have calls from the website, the click-to-call option, and we have the thank you URL of the form submission. So, that completes all of our conversion tracking. All we need to do now is make sure these code snippets

are added to the website successfully, and then we can start actually using these conversions when we run campaigns on Google Ads. So now, we're finally in a position where we can actually start building the campaign. Now, if you remember back on the module where we did the planning, this spreadsheet I'm going to drag over from my other screen is something that we need to refer back to. So, we've completed this already; we have our campaign plan all set and ready to go in terms of what we're going to build. So, this will make the process

a lot easier. Nevertheless, let's go ahead and start building this campaign. So, in your account, if you haven't got a campaign already, you'll have this prompt on the home overview screen. But if you click on campaigns and you click on this blue button, you can create a new campaign, which is exactly what we're going to do. When you create a new campaign, you're given eight options. Now, all of these options have different things that they lead to, so basically, you need to decide with Google how you want to create your campaign. Google will basically steer

you in the direction of creating a campaign based on an objective. Now, this is kind of a way to get guidance from Google in terms of what they think you should be building. The best thing to do, however, if you want the whole set of options on potential opportunities, is to click on the final option, which is here: to create a campaign without goal guidance. Once you've done that, you get the full list of all the different types of campaigns that are available in Google Ads. Now, as I mentioned, this course is all about the

search side of things. There are a ton of campaign types to go into in terms of Performance Max, Display, Shopping, Video, and Apps. If you want to sell apps online with Google, you can! There are a ton of potential campaign type options, but this course is all focused around search. So, we're going to click on the option for search, and now that we've done that, we have all of these actions here that are ready to go for conversion. We have phone call leads and form submissions; these are the things we created already. I'm going to

close this prompt so we're ready to go. Google knows exactly what it is we want to track, so Google is very well aware. I'm going to hit continue, and then after that, you have an option to see the drop-down of the results you want to get from... The campaign: you can either choose if you want to get website visits, where Google will steer your campaign direction in terms of getting traffic. You can have a campaign that drives phone calls, or you can have a campaign that steers towards app downloads. Don't tick any of these options

because basically what we're doing is everything ourselves. We're choosing the options we want, picking from what Google has to offer, as opposed to ticking boxes and giving Google opportunities to serve us what we want to do. The first thing here is you need to name the campaign. I'm going to call this one "Boiler Servicing" in line with the campaign plan that we have. I'm going to hit continue; I'm going to close this as well. There are all these helpers when you create a new account; they can be useful, but ultimately, you're going to learn here

anyway. Next, you have to choose your bidding. What is it you want to focus on? You have a list of options; you have the bidding strategies we mentioned: the two that we talked about in terms of conversions and conversion value, and then the vanity bidding strategies I mentioned in terms of clicks and impression share. So, we are tracking leads in this campaign, so we're not assigning a value to those. We're not tracking an e-commerce campaign where people are making purchases, so I'm going to click on the option for conversions. Now, again, you can set a

target cost per action, which is optional and basically means that Google will try and achieve your conversions without going over a particular cost per conversion. It can be a very good option to have when you have campaign data, but before you get any campaign data, I'm not going to set a target cost per action. I'm going to let Google try and find as many conversions as possible, and then if I see them coming in at quite a high price across some of my keywords, then I'm going to set a target cost per action down the

line. If you wanted to set a target cost per action, you would tick this box, and you have an option to set a target CPA. For example, if I really couldn't afford my conversions to come in at over £50, you could put a £50 target CPA in there. But do remember: don't be too strict on your CPA. If you want to do this, don't think that if you give Google a target that's really low, it's going to achieve it, because ultimately it just won't increase bids enough to even get you any traffic or visibility. It

can really restrict your campaign performance, so give Google plenty of room to maneuver, and you can always optimize later. I prefer to go with just letting Google do its thing, finding customers, and then if you need to narrow it down in the future when you get campaign data, you can go ahead and do that. I'm going to hit next, and that takes us to the networks page. Now, this page is going to be important because there are a couple of options that are pre-ticked for us on Google. When you go to Google and type something

in to trigger a search that triggers your ads on Google itself—that's where you think your adverts are only showing. There are a couple of other places Google can push your adverts towards. Google also has something called search partners, and it's basically, if you hover over this option, it gives you the suggestion of what they are. A lot of websites and other places on the web are powered by Google; people are performing searches on different websites or areas, or different pages, and they're using Google search as an engine for that search functionality. If you tick this

option, it will include your website in searches on those partners or partner websites. Now, I tend to untick this option, even though Google says you should tick this option to expand and get additional reach. But I tend to find the quality on the search partner network isn't as strong as the Google Ads network, and I eventually untick this option anyway. So, I would advise you, even though Google says to expand using partners, not to do that, because I've never seen a campaign where the partners convert at a higher rate. If you want to get more

volume from your campaigns, and you get to that point where you're fully optimized and you want to find more volume, you can always come back and tick this option. But initially, I will always leave this unticked because essentially the traffic from search partners just isn't as strong as the quality of traffic you get from Google directly. This second option is one I will definitely advise you to untick. This one is the Display Network. If you see banner ads across Google when you go on to different blogs and websites, you see banner adverts. Google will try

and serve your ad content on these banner adverts as well, using their contextual targeting based on who they think is going to be likely to convert. Again, search advertising is at the bottom of the funnel; people are looking for your services and products, meaning they're highly likely to convert, or have a much higher likelihood of converting than if you push your adverts out there onto a blog or third-party website in a banner ad. People aren't actually looking for your services, and even though Google can potentially target people who could be looking for your services, you're

just not going to get the right CPAs, and the conversions are going to become more expensive using the Display Network. Again, Google will ask you to try and use the Display Network. Get conversions at a similar CPA using unspent budget, but ultimately, you don't want to go into the Display Network within your search campaign. If you want to advertise on the Display Network, you can do this separately. Google is trying to blend these two networks in order to get you to spend more budget as opposed to spending primarily on search. If you do want to

expand into display, you can do that with a display campaign. The final part of this page is where you choose your country or territories you want to target. In our instance, it will be the United Kingdom. However, if you click on location options, you can target different people in different locations as well. So, first things first, if I tick on another location, you can actually start typing in locations. If I were to type in London, London will come up, and you can target that as a target area. Essentially, you can target pretty much anywhere you

like, and you can also add locations in bulk. If you know the postcodes or zip codes and have them in a CSV file, you can upload them here too. You need to select the area of the campaign targeting for your business that you require. Where does your business operate? Who can buy from or work with your business? What area do you want to target? Here is the place you want to do that. In our instance, we're going to target the entire United Kingdom. These two options here are very interesting. You can target people who are

in or show interest in your target location; Google says they recommend you do that. Alternatively, you can target people who are actually in your target location, regardless of whether they've shown interest or not. So, they are physically in your target location. Option number two is the most accurate one because only people who are in your targeting area will see your ads. However, there's also search interest, which targets people searching for your target locations as well. This is probably the least targeted side of your actual location targeting. I tend to leave it on the recommended for

this, and the reason for that is because if you are targeting London as your customer base, where your campaign should be targeting, but yet somebody lives in, say, Scotland but searches for things to help someone they know in London, you want to show for that person. Even though the person they're searching for is in a place they're searching from isn't in your target location, they show intent for your target location. As a result, you don’t want to miss out on that potential traffic. I tend to leave that as the recommended option in order to get

to those eventualities and not miss out on potential conversions. Again, the difference between the two is not that massive, so I think getting volume to your campaign in this instance is better. You can control it with your optimizations, and you can see visibly where people are searching from. You can make bid adjustments, as we've discussed, around your locations as well. As for exclusions, if you have areas where you genuinely do not serve customers, then you can exclude those people. For example, if you are a business on the north side of the River Thames in London

and you want to target businesses in and around your area, but you can't go over the river, you can add those areas just over the river as negative locations. You can actually exclude people with that as well. However, we won't do that in this instance; we're just going to target the entire United Kingdom. If you click on presence locations, you can leave that as the recommended option, and you can add targeting negative exclusion targeting further down the line if you need to. For language, we're going to leave it as English. This will take on the

default language of your Google Ads account, and that basically brings you over to audience segments. So, we've got to the audience segment side of things, and you can add audiences in this section, but we're not going to do that now. What we're going to do is come back to audiences after we've built the campaign because there are some optimizations we can discuss when we go through the optimization side of campaign management. If you click on more settings, there are some additional settings you can change here. For a starting point, you can choose to show the

best-performing ads, which is obviously what you want. However, you can rotate ads as well, so you can opt to not optimize and show the best-performing ads. Ultimately, when you build your ad content, Google will show the best-performing content. But if you want to genuinely force Google to show your ads evenly—say, for example, you've got two ads in your ad group and want to force Google to show them evenly—you can do that, but we're not going to do that for now. The next thing in your settings is ad scheduling. You can choose when your ads are

going to show in terms of times of day. For instance, if you're a business that operates from Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, you can select that as an option, scheduling it for Mondays to Fridays from 9 to 5. However, we won't do that now. There is an optimization you can make using the scheduling tool; it's not just for when you want your ads to show. Also, do some really interesting things around bids, so we're not going to do that now. We'll come back to that with the optimization part of the training coming up next,

so we'll leave that closed for now. If you click on "More settings," again, you can set an end date and a start date if you want your campaign to end on a specific day or if you want it to start on a day different from the day you're setting things up. You can do that as well. For campaign URL options, if you want to do some tracking, for example, if you're using third-party software or using Google Analytics or something like that, you can set tracking parameters, but we won't cover that today. This is going to

be more of an advanced thing for more advanced tracking for different third-party tools and systems, so we'll leave that for now. Dynamic Search Ads—basically, this is a setting that you could use if you are a larger, maybe an e-commerce website or a website with tons of products and services, where it would literally be impossible to build a campaign for each of your services and build an ad group for each of your services. It's going to be nearly impossible; that's where Dynamic Search Ads come in. Google will scan your website when you enter your domain, and

then Google will create campaigns and direct people to your website based on searches that they think are relevant to your website based on that scan it does. So, say, for example, you're a business like— I don't know—Toys R Us. I don't know if they’re still around at the moment, but that business has hundreds, if not thousands, of toys. There isn't going to be somebody sitting in Toys R Us creating campaigns for every single toy they sell. Even though each of those toys, especially around Christmas time, will have search volume, more than likely, they’re going to

be optimizing Dynamic Search Ads and doing ad targeting towards specific URLs based on maybe a sheet of different URLs and products within their business. That is what you'd use Dynamic Search Ads for. For the majority of businesses, this is something that you don't necessarily need to look at. So, that completes this section, from audiences all the way down to Dynamic Search Ad settings. We are ready to go and go into the next section. Now, we're on one of the most important parts, which are your keywords and ad groups. When you create a campaign and go

to the next section, you start off with your first ad group. If we go back to our campaign planning spreadsheet, which I will drag over, you'll see our first ad group is our generic ad group, and these are the keywords that are going to go into it. So, we’re basically there; this is why we did all this planning, because otherwise, you’d be thinking and struggling with what to do with this content in Google Ads. I'm going to go ahead, first of all, I’m going to call this ad group "generic." You can get keyword suggestions even

at this stage; even though we've used the Keyword Planner, we could, if we wanted to, get more keyword suggestions by dropping our URL in here and adding keywords in here. But Google generally comes out with a list, like you saw earlier in the training, where loads of keywords won't necessarily be relevant, and it would be a waste of time to sift through them. But we've done this activity already, so I'm going to go ahead onto my other screen, and I'm going to copy and paste in our generic keywords, which are all ready to go. Now,

you will notice again; your campaigns are using smart bidding. Yes, we are; we're using smart bidding in order to maximize conversions. Google is asking people to change keywords to Broad match; they've got this option built into the system now. This never used to be here. Now, the reason Google wants you to move to Broad match is because they think it can enhance their machine learning and provide more conversions. Broad match is the only keyword type Google has decided to take into consideration a user's historical searches. So, because of this, what it means is that if

somebody searches for something to do with your products and services, and then later searches for something that isn't, Google can serve your ad even though the search is adjacent to what you actually promote, as opposed to being directly related to it. Because of the historical searches they've done, they've given that power only to Broad match keywords. Now, the question remains whether or not you should be doing this. I tend to advise people not to change their keywords to Broad match. I think Google may eventually get this right; they may eventually reach a position where broad

match traffic, because of that additional power it has to take into consideration historical searches and user intent, could become a very powerful tool. But at the moment, when I go through campaigns and do audits on clients, broad match keywords tend to perform really poorly. They give you tons of irrelevant traffic and take a lot of policing with negative keywords, so I tend to ignore this option. So, ad group number one we're creating is our generic one. We've given it a name, we've got our keywords in here, and as we come further down, we get to

the ads section. This section is really interesting because you're going to see something called ad strength, which is a score Google gives ads. But for the meantime, let's go ahead, and we're going to add our ad content in here from the ads we've created, and then we'll go from there. Go ahead and create our ads now. As we mentioned, we're going to target all of our keywords towards one of the features on Bob's Plumbers, which is going to be boiler servicing. So, I'm going to go onto the boiler servicing page, take the URL from here,

and drop it in. Now all we need to do is build our campaign. The display URL path is basically your website URL, which is this here, and this is also replicated in the ad itself here. You can also add some fake URLs to the domain to make it look more authentic, or more relevant to the user's search. So, I could do something like this: put "boiler servicing" in, and you'll see what happens to the ad—/boiler/servicing. Even though that URL is showing like it is here, it will be going to this page. All of the traffic

will be going to this final URL, regardless of what's in here. This is more of a vanity URL, which will give people more of an indication that they're in the right place. You can basically use this as an additional area to get keywords into your ad content. So, that's it. Next, we need to create our headlines. You can have up to 15 headlines in a campaign in an ad, this being a responsive search ad. They've also got multiple descriptions as well. So, we're going to go ahead and start populating these with the content from our

spreadsheet. I'm going to go ahead and start copying these over one by one, and seeing what happens. When I say seeing what happens, you'll see what I mean in a second. I'm going to start copying some of these headlines in, and it also starts suggesting headlines. "Boiler servicing" could be a headline. I won't put in the brand, but I'm going to drop in a lot more of these headlines so we can start to see what happens. I'm going to add this one as well, and then we're going to keep going—two more to add. Then, adding

this one as well… there we go. So, now we've added all the headlines from the first ad we created from our spreadsheet. I just copied and pasted them over from the other screen, from our campaign setup spreadsheet. Once you've done your spreadsheet, you can do the same process I just did. What you will notice is that this score has changed; this is called ad strength. This basically reflects what Google thinks your ad is good in—well, Google thinks your ad quality is basically represented by this score. This score doesn't relate to quality score; it's basically a

metric to say whether or not Google is satisfied with the amount of content you put into your ads. They think that by having a higher ad score and ad strength, they'll be able to generate more sales for you when you actually start your automated bidding. They'll have more efforts to work with and more effective assets to work with. However, there is data to show from multiple agencies who have analyzed their data on ad strength that it doesn't really correlate with results, and I'm going to say the same thing here: ad strength does not correlate with

results. It's basically an indication of whether or not Google is satisfied that you've provided them with enough assets for their machine learning. It doesn't mean you're going to get better results with a higher ad strength. Remember, the principles of your ads remain the same: strong USPs relevant to your keywords that make people want to click. Sell, sell the benefits of your business, and be highly relevant to your keywords, and your ads will be good. Don't worry about ad strength too much; it's something that basically Google is using to coerce advertisers into thinking they need to

provide more content in their ads for Google's machine learning. I wouldn't worry about it too much. So, now we've done our headlines. I'm going to paste in our descriptions. I’m going to add in three, which we've done in our description. So, I'm going to add in one, two, and three. And there we have it—our descriptions are in, our ad strength is still average. I would not worry too much about that, as long as our main core keywords are included. Again, it’s a very clickable ad. And there we go! I'm going to click on done because

if you click on next, you actually skip through to the next section of the setup. But I’m going to click on done because we've only set up one ad group, which is our generic ad group. We actually need to set up multiple ad groups. So, I've clicked on done, and now I'm going to click on next. This has actually taken us through to our site link extensions and extension builder. Now, typically, Google normally used to let you build multiple ad groups at the previous stage; they've obviously eliminated this recently. I think they're really trying to

simplify the products, which is why it's important training like this exists. It basically leads advertisers to create very broad, very generic campaigns, meaning they spend a lot more budget but don't necessarily get the results. But nevertheless, here we are, creating ad extensions as the next part of the setup. We've gone through extensions before and it starts off with site link extensions. Remember, sitelinks allow you to link to specific areas of the website apart from the main services you provide. You can add sitelink extensions here; you can add up to four, and then we're going to

add some site link extensions now so you can see what they look like. So, I'm going to add those extensions now and come back when this page is complete, so you can see the extensions that have been added. Okay, so I have populated all of our site link content, the link text, which is the clickable part that users can click to go to different areas of your website, that's up here. You can add two lines of a description, so you can see and get a quote. The site linked text, we've got our description here: "Get

a free quote from our friendly engineers," and the final URL that that page will go to. The same goes for boiler servicing: cycling text, descriptions, and final URL. Leak Detection—I’ve not added any descriptions for this one just yet. We’ve also got site link text up here for bathroom installation and the two descriptions as well, along with the final URL. So that completes our site link extensions. I'm just going to add a description for leak detection: "We are experts in leak detection." Cool, now for a free quote; there we go. So that's all of our site

link extensions complete. We're going to move on to other extensions. I'm going to hit save, and that's added our site link extensions, but there are plenty of other extensions to add to the campaign as well. Callout extensions—again, these are unique selling points, benefits to your business that you want to highlight in your ads. As we've mentioned earlier in the training, if you haven't seen that part of the training or you've skipped it, you might want to go back to understand what these are. But this will give us additional content to promote our services so people

can find our ads more appealing than our competitors. So, I'm going to go ahead and populate our callout extensions as well. Okay, so I've populated our callout extensions here. Remember, these are unique selling points, and they are meant to be prominent to improve your click-through rate. So I've got some unique selling points: same-day callout and quote, 24/7 availability, reliable engineers, and low-cost service from £49. For your business, you need to think of what your unique selling points or powerful selling points are, as well as the benefits that you want to highlight in your ads directly.

Callout extensions are a fantastic way to do that, and by adding your callouts, you're basically in a position where you can improve your ad click-through rate. So, I'm going to go ahead and save these callout extensions, and there we have it; they are all saved. Up next is the call extension. Again, we've already done calls as a tracking conversion point, but this one's a bit different because this will allow a phone number to show within your ad, and when that number is clicked, it can initiate a phone call, whether or not you have a call-only

ad or a text ad, which we’ve got text ads in this campaign. But we're going to go ahead and create our call extension as well using our details. So, of course, we're based in the United Kingdom for this particular campaign. We're going to grab the phone number from the website down here and drop that in. We're going to use our account settings for calls from ads, which is the default value. You can add advanced options in terms of scheduling your ads based on mobile preferences because, of course, if you have a call extension and your

business operating hours are nine to five, you might want to disable it using the scheduler to show the extension only during your active phone hours. But again, it won't apply for this campaign, but the option is there if you need it. But once you've added your call extension, you can hit save as well. So now we've added three extensions: site links, callouts, and call extensions. There are a couple more we could still potentially add, so we're going to go ahead and do those as well. If I click on more extensions, you're going to see down

here you've got app extensions—not applicable to us—we have structured snippets, something we can use. You've got lead forms, price extensions, and promotion extensions as well. We've discussed a lot of these extensions, but we're going to go ahead and create structured snippet extensions because I'm going to cover the ones that will apply to all businesses on Google Ads, even those that are promoting for sales as opposed to leads. This extension, structured snippet, is going to be useful as well. So, structured snippet is basically listing your services or products based on a predetermined list. Remember when we

looked back at this earlier in the course? This predetermined list can be very useful for showing your products and services. So, let's take a look at this list. First of all, you just need to choose your language. For us, of course, it's English; choose the language applicable to you. Then we're going to go ahead and choose our header type—basically, what are the things we're going to list? For us here, none of these really make sense for us; there's nothing really just highlighting services you have: amenities, brands, courses, degree programs, things like that for all these

different types of industries. Whenever you're in a position where you don't find what you're looking for in this list, generally just choose "types," because then you're just listing types of service. So, it defaults to show you types of products here, like t-shirts, mugs, or bags. But for us, it's going to be types of service, so we can do something like boiler servicing, bathroom installs, and emergency plumber. So yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing you need to do for... Your business list out your services, your products, or maybe your business fits into one of

these categories. Essentially, you'll just be listing the options available within each of these headers to create your structured snippet extension. There are more extensions available: you've got app extensions if you are actually running with an app for your business and your Google Ads campaign; it's not applicable to us. You can also add a lead form to your ad as well to generate leads directly from your ads, and you can also add price extensions as well to kind of explain to people your pricing. So there are a few more extensions to go through that we could

potentially look at in terms of promotion extensions, leads, and price extensions. So we're going to go through those now that we have done our structured snippets. Let's hit save and then we'll move on to the other extensions. Now, okay, so up next, we have the lead form extension. To add this, just click on the blue button here, and then you're going to create your lead form. You can see the preview here, which will basically start building as you add to it. So I'm going to say "Get a quote" as my headline, business name is "Bob's

Plumbers," and the description for the form is "Please enter your details to get a quote." So, up next, we have all of these pre-filled areas. You want to have the name there, so you're going to want to have that as the full name. Basically, all the information you collect for this lead form is predetermined; there's nothing you can do from a customizing point of view. You can only choose from a predetermined list. So, I want the email, the phone number, and I want the name as well. So I've got my full name, email, and phone

number. If you want more information, in fact, I think I'll add the ZIP code as well because it makes sense for this type of business to know where the customer is to quote the job. So that's all fine. For B2B, you might want company names, job titles, work emails, and work numbers. You might require proof of age as well; you can also add that as an option. If you were to tick this, you select the minimum age the person needs to be to engage with your services. I'm going to leave the language as English, and

you can also add qualifying questions as well around different industries. So you have things around retail, real estate, jobs, general. If I click on general, you can start to see some of the questions that come up. You can't ask somebody a customized question with this extension; you have to choose from a predetermined list of questions. So when you're thinking of how you want to qualify customers even more, you'll have to explore that list to find people. But for the purposes of this exercise, this is all I need from the users: pretty much in line with

the lead form I've got on the website—name, email, phone number, postcode. We've got those details; we can come back to the customer and quote them for a boiler service. So the privacy policy URL goes here. I've actually got it open on the website here, so I'll jump across and copy it and paste it in. You will need to add your privacy policy URL as well, the same way I've just done that. Now, you can also add a custom background image here if you would like to. For the purposes of this, I'm not going to do

that, but if you wanted to add an image to fit your brand colors within this form, you can do that. You can also finally here add your submission thank-you message. So mine at the moment says, "Thank you." To make it more in line with the brand of Bob's Plumbers, I'll put, "Thanks! We'll be in touch with your quote as soon as possible." There we go. And then the next option is to visit the website and the call-to-action URL. I'm going to jump back to the website and grab the URL here, and I'm going to drop

that in. Call to action for your ad itself—whether or not you want somebody to do a specific action when they land on the website, for the purposes of this, it's going to be around the lead form and about getting in touch. So it'll be "Getting a quote." Choose the appropriate action for your business for this form, so "Get a quote" is going to be the action to actually submit this lead form. Then you can say a small description underneath; as you can see, it would appear here. You can do "Get a no-obligation quote today." Not

quite; we'll just say "Get an obligation quote." There we go, and that's in there with the "Get a quote" call to action. With a lead form extension, you've basically got to accept Google's terms of service as well because, obviously, you're getting privacy; you're getting data from customers through the ads without actually going to your website. So you need to agree to Google's data processing in order to do that. So I've just accepted those. Now, when you go down, you also have an option to export your leads into different systems—whether it's Google Sheet, a CRM like

HubSpot, or into MailChimp directly. There are plenty of integration options available here. I'm not going to go into that now because it's much more technical, and you might want to work with a developer to build some of these integrations. But just know that when somebody submits a lead form, you can export it beyond just your inbox and Google Ads. itself. You can also export to one of these many tools here as well, so once that's all done, just hit save, and that completes your lead form. There it is, all completed and ready to go on

Google Ads. So, price extensions are a good way to promote if you have competitive pricing. Maybe you're priced cheaper than your competitors, or maybe you're in a position where your premium pricing is something you want to talk about in your ad content. With a price extension, it's very simple to create. You start off, of course, by choosing your language, which is English in this case. The type of extension you want it to be: is it a brand, an event, a product, or a service? I'm going to click on Services because this is the service that

we're providing as Bob's Plumbers. Currency: I'm going to choose GBP, wherever that might be. There it is for British pounds. Price qualifier: I'm going to do no qualifiers because this is just going to be the pricing. I'm going to call this "Boiler Servicing" and the price I'm going to put is £49. I'm not going to put any units in; it's just a one-off cost. Maybe you want to do pounds per hour or per week or per month, or per night if you're a hotel, for example, but I'm going to keep it as £49, and I'm

going to put the description as "Expert Boiler Servicing." Final URL: I'm going to pick the boiler servicing page. Once that loads properly, there we go, and I'm going to drop that in. There we go. You can choose a mobile URL if you want, which is optional. Generally speaking, you probably won't need this option; just drop in the final URL, and that completes our first price extension. So, this is an item: boiler servicing, £49, and that's the price extension. Now, if I remove a few of these, you can have three price extensions at a minimum, as

you can see, so I'm going to go ahead and create two more price extensions to complete the list of price extensions needed, which is three at minimum. Okay, so we're back, and I've completed all of the extensions. I've created the three minimum required. So, boiler servicing, as I showed you when I was creating it, is up here. We've got emergency call-out as another service, and we've finally got bathroom installs as a £500 service per day. So yeah, this is basically completed all of our price extensions. Remember, for your business, you need to think about your

pricing and how you want to position your services. Choose the most important services and put them forward in this extension because it's going to help your customers see your pricing with transparency. So, before they click, they know what to expect, and you're not wasting money trying to find people who maybe can't afford your services and wasting money from clicks that way as well. So, it's a very useful extension to have. The final extension I'm going to show you today is what's called a promotion extension. Again, it's something we've looked at earlier in the course in

terms of the purpose of this extension. If you can't remember, head back to that unit in the course, and you'll see a full explanation and breakdown of this extension. But essentially, it lets you promote your promotions for your products and services, whether that's discounts, codes, or coupons you can use and share. It basically gives users an opportunity to get a deal. You can choose the occasion for this particular deal or sale. You could have pretty much every religious holiday, things like back to school, carnivals—basically, you have it covered for pretty much any reason at any

given time of the year. You can choose the appropriate celebration or holiday in order to promote your discounts. For the purposes of this, I'm going to choose "Spring Sale." The language for me is, of course, English. You choose your language, and the currency for me is, of course, British pound, so I'm going to find GBP in this list somewhere down here. Then, you choose your promotion type: is it money off, a percent off, or an "up to" monetary discount? So, for sales up to £100, get a certain amount off, or is it "up to" a

percentage off? So for sales up to £100, get £10 off. Basically, you're choosing what the promotion is. I'm going to keep this as a monetary discount—I'm going to put it as £10. The item I'm going to call "Boiler Servicing." Final URL again: I'm going to jump back over to the website to take the URL from here and drop it into the final URL section. So this basically, so far, is saying that for boiler servicing, you get £10 off because of the spring sale. Next, you have promotion details. Is it a promo code you have to

use if it's an e-commerce website, or is it for orders over a certain amount? Maybe you promote your promotion only takes effect if somebody spends a certain amount with your business. This is where you actually choose those stipulations. I'm going to leave this as none because I don't need to have any other qualifiers for the promotion. Of course, you can schedule it; you can schedule when the promotion begins, and you can schedule an end date. This works really well with holidays, for example, Christmas or any other religious holidays with a defined start date and end

date. You can schedule that here to make sure that... Customers are aware when a sale is going to start and end, and it also means it can be in line with your promotion schedule as well. So, if your business has a promotion schedule, you want Google Ads to reflect that. You could actually just add the schedule into this extension so you don't have to remember to disable this promotion on your ads; it will automatically come offline. I'm going to leave these as none because I'm not going to schedule this promotion. If I want to take

it off, I might just take it off when I feel like it. But for your business, you need to determine what promotions you want to run, how long for, and what the reasoning is and then choose the appropriate options for your business. But this basically highlights how to create a promotion extension. Once you're done, there are some more advanced options in terms of advanced tracking templates and other advanced scheduling options, again based on when you want promotions to start or end or when you want them to show based on time of day. Potentially, you don't

want a promotion necessarily showing if it's going to end in your office hours or if they are already over. So, this gives you the extra level of control as well because if a customer can't actually transact and they see your advert in the afternoon when your office is closed, then it will frustrate the customer. So, you can actually schedule this extension here as well, but again, for the purposes of this, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to hit save, and that's my promotion. That completes all of our ad extensions; it's time to move

on to the next stage of the setup. Once you hit next and go through to the next page, it goes on to your budget. Now, your budget is going to be determined initially by Google. Google will recommend a daily average budget based on the keywords and targeting you've selected. The combination of the keywords, in terms of the volume that they could potentially get, and also your target area, in terms of how many people could be interested in those products and services, will make up what Google thinks your budget should be. This recommendation is basically kind

of a high ball of what Google thinks you should be spending on a daily basis. In this occasion, based on the keywords I've given Google, it's £242.90. Now, you don't have to use this option. Google Ads is scalable as long as you have enough initial budget to get good keywords data based on some of those click costs we looked at earlier. Then you're quite comfortable setting your own custom budget. So, in this occasion, I'm going to change the custom budget to £100. This is the thing where it says selecting a budget that's less than £242.90

may prevent your ads from showing as often as they could. So, basically, what this means is that at some point in the day, with a budget as low as £100, my ads could come offline, and I could lose visibility for particular searches. Now, this could generally be seen as a bad thing if you're in a business where you want to maximize everything. But if this is the first time you're going into Google Ads as a channel and you want to test the water, there's nothing wrong with seeing this message. Remember, Google Ads is scalable. Even

if your ads come offline later in the day, if your budget dictates that you only have a certain amount to spend, as long as it means you can get meaningful data. So, if for example, your average cost per click based on your keyword research is £2 and you're going to get 50 clicks a day by having a £100 budget, that might be a good starting point to get some data, so that wouldn't be too bad. However, if, like some of the campaign examples I've walked through with some of the accounts I've looked at, you have

a £20 cost per click, if you're in an industry with a £20 cost per click and you're setting up a campaign with a £100 budget, you're going to get a maximum of five clicks, which is going to be next to nothing. So, if you can afford Google's budget recommendation, I would technically go with it because that's the line of basically your visibility 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or however long your schedule allows for. But if you go lower than that, don't be necessarily put off by this message as long as you're confident

in your average CPC expectations and your budget. So, you can get some basic kind of data to scale your campaign or make optimizations or scale the budget over time to get to this £242 daily budget level. Google Ads is scalable to some degree, so you don't have to go with Google's recommendation. I would say in the industry we're in for this particular campaign I'm setting up, £100 might be a bit too low. I'd probably go around the £150 mark to get meaningful data. So, I'm going to put in £150, which still isn't in line with

their recommendation, but again, as I say, it is scalable. So, I'm going to put in £150 so we get some data and potentially scale the campaign towards this £242 daily budget. Once done and you've chosen your budgets, be sure to hit next. Then finally, once you've completed all of the areas, be sure to go to the last page and click on "Publish Campaign." That's the last stage of the whole setup once you. Click this button; the campaign will actually go into the stage where it will be published live on Google Ads, and then it will

go live after a quick review from the Google Ads system to make sure none of the ads are promoting anything illicit. It doesn't take too long; usually, with less than 24 hours, your ads will be live on the system. So click this blue button once you're happy with your entire setup, and that will publish your campaign to Google Ads. As you can see, it is now published; it's got a green little circle here to say it's live on the system. Now, there's one thing we haven't done, which we have to go back and do, and

that is to add our additional ad groups to the campaign. All we need to do for that is you can see here is the generic ad group. If you click on this plus button, that will eventually load, and you can create a new ad group. I'm going to go back to my trusty sheet, and the next ad group I can see here is the gas ad group. I'm going to add all the keywords in for the gas ad group, which is here. I'm going to copy them on my other screen and paste them over; here

we go. Remember, this is all from this spreadsheet right here. Don't forget to use this as your trusty advisor as you build your campaign. Again, you're going to get this message for change to Broad match, save, and continue. The same principle applies when building your ads. Your ad strength will start off as poor; you want to go through and add your ad content based on all the things you've put into your campaign planning spreadsheet. So, more kind of gas-related keywords, which I'm going to do now. I'm going to drop those in from my actual spreadsheet,

so we'll drop those in and what we're going to start to see, hopefully, is after I start doing this, we'll start to see the ad strength increase. Hopefully, if not, again, as I say, do not worry because ultimately, ad strength is a score that Google is giving your campaigns based on whether or not they think you've added enough assets or enough variations of assets. So, the ad strength is poor— not a problem, that's fine. We'll move on to the descriptions, and we'll drop in some description content as well. And we're dropping the last one here

as well, and that's all done. Then, be sure to save and continue, and that completes adding another ad group to your campaign. You want to do this for all of the ad groups that you've planned. I haven't gone through them all individually because the principle is the same for all of them, but essentially, at this stage, all of your campaigns are ready to go, and your ad groups have been created. There's only one more thing to do, which I haven't done yet, and that is to add your negative keywords because that's not part of the

setup as well. So if you head into Keywords and then go on to Negative Keywords, as you can see, there are no negative keywords in the campaign. We've done our negative keyword research already; remember when we did the keyword research. So I'm going to click on this plus button, and I'm going to drop in my entire list of negative keywords from my spreadsheet, which I'm just copying over on my other screen. I'm going to paste those in, and I'm going to hit save. And there are our negative keywords all added to the campaign; that's all

done. All you need to do now is continue adding your ad groups because, basically, it didn't let you do it during setup, which is something Google has definitely changed recently. So, something to be aware of: your setup is only complete when you've added all of your ad groups and all of your negative keywords as well. So that's all complete; that is a complete Google Ads setup. But the fun doesn't stop here—no, it doesn't! We're going to move on to optimizations and what to do when the campaign goes live. After this, let's understand how to report

your results in Google Ads because, of course, when you start running campaigns, you need to understand what happened. So let's understand how we report on our success. So why would you report on your campaigns? Well, of course, remember back at the beginning of the course, we initially set goals for Google Ads in terms of our revenue or cost per conversion and how we wanted the campaign to perform in line with business goals. Well, the whole way and reason you find out whether or not your campaign is a success is by reporting. Reporting on your results

gives you that answer, so you need to measure how well your campaign has performed against your business goals. It's absolutely crucial—whether you're a freelancer on behalf of a client, an agency for the same reason, or if you're in-house to stakeholders in the business, you need to be able to communicate results in a campaign. So what is reporting? Reporting is essentially the process of analyzing your Google Ads campaign data. There are several metrics to understand in Google Ads that will help build a picture of whether or not the campaign has been a success, and your campaign

success will depend on your initial campaign goals, as I've mentioned. So, metrics in Google Ads—we're going to understand exactly what these metrics are and how to report on them. But I think, first of all, it makes sense to get a definition because, of course, you can see the Google Ads metrics that every hierarchy, from the campaign level to ad group... Level to keyword level, and you can measure performance against a defined time period. So, say for example, you can see the last 30 days, or yesterday's performance, or the last even years’ performance. You can literally

change the view to any length of time you require in order to report on previous campaign metrics and successes. The first step, as I said, is to understand the metrics in Google Ads and what they actually mean. Some of these may be obvious; others may be a bit less obvious, so I want to go through them regardless. So, clicks, of course, are the number of times your ad has been clicked, which perfectly makes sense. Cost is, of course, the total amount you have spent on your ads. When you start looking at the costs and clicks,

you can start understanding how much volume and how much you're spending in your campaign. Impressions are a bit different; the impression is the number of times your ad has appeared on Google. It doesn't mean somebody's clicked it; it means somebody has done a search that has triggered your ads to appear. An impression is an eyeball—or eyeballs, should I say. So, if one person sees your ad, that is one impression. This is a good metric to understand how often your ads are showing, and it gives a good indication of some of the other metrics we're going

to go through now that tie back into impressions. Click-through rate is a very key metric, as I mentioned, part of the quality score of your ads. It's a really crucial metric to take account of. Your click-through rate is the percentage of clicks to the number of times your ad has been shown. Your impressions, again, are the number of times your ad has been shown and seen, while clicks are the number of times somebody has physically gone in and clicked that specific advert of yours. So, the formula for click-through rate is your clicks divided by your

impressions, times 100, which gives you a percentage. For example, if your ad gets 2,000 impressions and 180 clicks, if you take 180 and divide it by 2,000, that is nine percent. So, that nine percent is your click-through rate. Your cost per click, again, ties back to your costs and clicks—the first two metrics we looked at. It is simply your cost divided by your clicks; it basically determines how much you're paying for your traffic. For example, if you received 120 clicks and your campaign has spent 300 pounds, then your average cost per click is 2.50 pounds.

Your click costs vary click to click; some clicks will be more expensive, some clicks may be cheaper, depending on how the auction goes for a specific user. But the metric we look at when discussing cost per click is an average across all the traffic received in a given period of time. Conversions—now, conversion tracking is something we've done, so we understand this is the measure of success. A conversion interaction is a successful interaction on your website. If it's an e-commerce website, it would be a sale; if it's a lead generation website, it could be any of

the following: a phone call, booking an appointment, downloading content—anything that's a positive interaction where the user exchanges information in order for you to get in touch or to make a sale or even make the sale outright in terms of an e-commerce conversion. This is what we mean by a conversion: what is the ultimate action you want somebody to take on your website that enables you to run your business? Conversion rates are the rates at which your clicks turn into conversions. So, similar to click-through rate, which is the rate at which your ads are clicked versus

the number of times they've been shown, conversion rate is the number of conversions you get versus the number of clicks to your website. So, if you generated 50 clicks and made three conversions, doing the formula for that—your conversions divided by your clicks—your conversion rate would be six percent. So, it's a metric that determines how frequently you get conversions versus the number of clicks you get to your website. It’s an important metric, if not one of the most important. Next up, we have cost per conversion, the average amount you pay for that conversion. So, we've looked

at conversion rates in terms of traffic versus the number of conversions; this is basically your cost versus the number of conversions. For example, if a campaign in a given period has spent 260 pounds and generated six conversions, the cost per conversion is 43.33 pounds, which is the total cost divided by the number of conversions. A very simple formula, but an important one nonetheless. Next up, we have quality score. As we've mentioned, this is a really important metric to keep an eye on because, of course, it determines how much you're going to pay for your traffic.

A score out of 10 is going to be given to every keyword in your account, and the higher quality scores lead to lower click costs and better campaign performance. Lower quality scores generally lead to lower campaign performance and inflated costs per click as well, so this is an important metric to report on, and it's at the keyword level you will find quality score. Up next, we have impression share—the number of times your ads have been shown versus the number of times they could have been shown. What I mean by that is your ads are not

liable to show for every single search that could or should trigger your keywords. There are going to be times when somebody searches for something, going back to our example... We're bidding on the keyword "boiler service." Somebody goes to Google and types in "boiler service," and the ad doesn't show. You’re going to get that if you work internally or you work with clients. Clients might tell you, "I've gone to Google, I've typed in a search, and my ads haven't come up. Why is that?" Or a stakeholder in a business might tell you, "I've gone to Google

and typed in the ads and keywords to trigger the ad, but the ads still haven't shown. Why is that?" Well, it all comes down to this metric: impression share. There are two sides to impression share. There’s the side where your ad quality isn't high enough, and in order to get more impressions, you need to improve the quality of your ad and essentially increase your ad rank. Your ad rank, of course, as we've talked about, is determined by your click-through rate (CTR) and maximum cost per click (CPC). So, your quality score and your max CPC bid—

a combination of those two factors—aren't high enough. Maybe your quality scores aren't that high, and if your quality scores are high, then it means you're not bidding enough to maximize your impression share. Of course, another side of it is simply being limited by budget. If your budget isn't high enough, Google cannot show your ads at every single auction because otherwise you’d run out of budget pretty quickly—or maybe even too quickly for Google to evenly pace your budget throughout the day. So, those are the two things that go into your impression share. If you want to

show 100% of the time, you need a really high ad rank and a high enough budget to maintain visibility throughout the entire day. These two factors are something you need to explain to any stakeholders who are questioning whether or not your ads should or shouldn't be showing. You could probably demonstrate this with the metrics within your account by looking at your impression share and understanding the reasons why your impression share is where it is. It’s a good way to explain this to clients and stakeholders. Here is an example of a campaign report; it's basically showing

all of the columns in a campaign you’d typically get. You can see the costs, the impressions, clicks, click-through rates, average CPC, conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate, and impression share. These are all columns that are customizable in Google Ads, and you can actually build reports around this data and customize it to any view you see fit. You can also start reporting on campaign results to understand what's happened and what’s going on over time. So, up next, we’re going to build a campaign report in Google Ads and interpret the data. There are two sides of reporting.

I explained that you can just go onto the campaign reports within Google Ads, as shown in the screenshot I provided. But in addition to that, you can also build custom reports as needed. We’re going to take a look at reporting within the Google Ads interface and understand how to report on these different metrics so you can show and demonstrate value over time to your stakeholders and customers. Here we are in a test account for Google Ads. This is an old account that’s expired, so it’s a good one to show you some existing data as this

account has a lot of data in it. So first things first is to choose your date range. What period of time do you want to report results on? So, let’s get that started. If I click on this option up here and I choose this date range—for example, let’s do it for a few months into June—and hit apply, you'll see that the data updates and you can see the population of that data. As you can see here, we have campaigns, spend, expenditure, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, average CPC, conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate, along with

the impression share, which is an important metric that I mentioned previously. Now, these aren't the only columns available in Google Ads, and if you can’t see these columns—because I find these are the most crucial columns to look at when reviewing a campaign—if yours aren't showing like this, or you want them to show like this, or maybe you even want to add more campaign columns because some are missing, just click the "Columns" option here and click on "Modify Columns." You can change your data range performance; it generally shows you the majority of statistics you want to

see in terms of clicks, cost, impressions, click-through rate, average CPC. Next up, you have viewability things as well, so you can see viewable impressions. This is all around display advertising, which isn’t something we're covering in this course. Then you have conversions as well: cost per conversion, conversions, and conversion rate. You have a ton of conversion metrics under here. If you’re doing e-commerce, you can also track orders, average basket size, average order value, and all the kinds of tracking metrics for e-commerce. But this course isn’t necessarily covering e-commerce tracking specifically; it’s more about Google Ads overall

search tracking generally. So, you can add those columns into reports if you would like to, but for the purposes of this, we are not going to do that. You can see performance metrics as you can see them on the screen now, and it’s a good way to understand, in a snapshot, what’s happened in a campaign. Take "business electricity," for example. In this period of time, the campaign has spent £142,000 or so, received 53,000 impressions, 4,951 clicks, a click-through rate of 9.22%, which is pretty high and good, and an average CPC of £28. Now, that gives

you an indication as to... How competitive this industry is! Imagine paying £28 for every single click to your website. This campaign did exactly that, and in fact, there's another one below it that got £30 per click. So, when you look at that expenditure to only get 4,900 clicks, you can understand why. Then, you can see your conversions: total number of conversions, cost per conversion, and the conversion rate. All of these metrics are basically going to show you exactly how the campaign is performing against your initial objectives. So, say for example, you set an objective based

on your business metrics of a cost per conversion of £70 maximum. This campaign would be fine because it's underneath that at £63. But say, for example, this campaign's cost per conversion was £100; you'd be able to see that actually, in the time period you're looking at, that kind of tells you that the campaign hasn't been performing. This is a very simple way to look at your overall performance as a snapshot by looking at the date range, looking at the columns, and analyzing the data to understand whether or not performance has been good or bad. The

second way to do this is, of course, to look at trends. Looking at trends in the data requires a bit more than just looking at this view. What you'd need to do to understand trends is to build a custom report to see that data, export it, and then import that into a graph so you can see trends over time. So, we're going to do that now. We're going to do a bit more of an advanced report where you can actually see what's going on in a campaign. Okay, so let's go ahead and create a custom

report that will show us campaign performance over time and by metric. I'm going to click on the reports tab and then click on reports; that will take us to this page. I’m going to create a custom report by clicking this button here. I’m going to make it a table because we’re going to export this table into Excel and manipulate the data in order to see trends. So, let me close this down. The first thing you want to do is to name your report. I’m going to call this one "Top Level Metrics Over Time" and hit

apply. Then click on save, and that will save the report, which means you can start building it and come back to it. Remember to save at intervals! As I said, I want this to report on campaign performance over time. So, in order to do that, you start off with a level of detail. I’m going to add in campaign, and I’m going to add in ad group for good measure as well, so we can report on campaign and ad group level performance and understand what's working and what's not working. There we have it; those are the

two breakdowns we want to show. Next up, we need to add our metrics, so let’s get started. As you remember, we want to start with impressions, which is "impr" on this, and we move on to clicks. There we go—into click-through rates (CTR), and then we want cost as well, of course. I want conversions as well. So now we have all those metrics in there. We want the cost per conversion as well, so we've got the metrics in terms of what's happening with our cost per conversion, how many conversions we're getting, and how much we're spending,

along with other key metrics in terms of impressions, clicks, and click-through rate. We can do that at the campaign and ad group level. Once that's done, you want to export this report. Before we export the report, we want to make sure we pull in the date as well, so that's going to be one of our breakdowns. I’ll click on "day" and add the date as well, so I’m going to put "date" at the top. You want by day, campaigns, and ad groups, so every single row will have a day, a campaign, and an ad group,

along with the associated metrics. Then you have your columns of impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost, conversions, and cost per conversion, and they're all ready to go. So now, we've done this and we’re ready to go. We’re going to save this report. I’m going to save, and that’s saved again. If we want to come back to this, we can. Data-wise, I’ve gone from February—let’s go, let’s get some more data, actually; let's go all the way through until November or December. Let’s go to December. I go from February 1st to December 31st and hit apply, and that’ll

bring in all of the data from that time period. Again, I'm going to hit save. Any changes you make, always save the report. Now I’ve got this ready to go. I’m going to export this data: click on the download button, download it as a CSV, and then that will start downloading shortly. When that does download, we’re going to open this in Excel, and we’re going to make sense of this data because there’s a lot of data—there are a lot of rows here—and it's going to pull in a row for every day, every campaign, and every

ad group. Then, we’re going to use that data to build a table to show us exactly what's happening with all of these metrics over time where we can filter. It’s by campaign and ad group performance as well, so let's go in and open this data. Let's tidy it up; let's remove the first two rows because they're not relevant. I'm going to click on A and drag it all the way across to all of the columns, and then by double-clicking, that will open every column up to the maximum width to show all the data. We don't

need the currency code; we know we're working in British pounds, so we will delete that. Here is our report. This is basically the report that we have, and it's ready to go. We can actually start using this to manipulate the data and start building the report that we want to see. Okay, so the first thing we want to do is make sure the data is tidy and appropriate. In order to do that, you need to just double-check that all of the columns have correct data, so they're all numerical values. The obvious thing I can see

here that we need to fix is the double lines; these double lines need to be changed. What I'm going to do is click on the column, do a Control + F, and replace the two lines with nothing—in fact, with zero—and hit "Replace All." That will basically mean our formula is working with numbers. We don't have to work with those two lines because that will break our formulas, and we're going to need them when we create our pivot table. Now we have all of this campaign data. Always remember to hit save at all times; keep saving

your data. We're going to select all of the data in this table by clicking on cell A1, pressing Ctrl and Shift at the same time, holding this down and pressing down while still keeping them held, and again, while keeping them held, we're going to press right. I’m going to click on "Insert," and then we're going to click on "Pivot Table." We're going to open a pivot table on a new worksheet, and that will take us to our Pivot Table Builder. You can see here that all of the columns we have in our report are shown

here, and that means we can actually start building our report out and understanding what's happening with the data. So, first things first, I’m going to drag "Day" into Rows, and as you can see, that's broken out all of the data by month of year. You can also expand that to include days as well. Every day that's included in the reports has now been rolled into one, and you can see this here. I'm going to change this label from "Row Labels." I'm going to call it "Month and Year" and then expand it. This is the first

part of the data we want to look at. So say, for example, we wanted to see in this account over all time what the conversions have been like by month. All we need to do is drag conversions down into Values, and that will give us that data exactly. So you can see here some conversions over time are shown here; that will tell us how many conversions we have had by month. But if we wanted to go further than this and actually visualize this data, we need to add a graph and make sure that it's visible

so we can see trends over time. This can show you trends over time, but it's not as visual as actually being able to see the data. So, from here, we need to actually insert, and we just click on "Recommended Charts" because Excel is smart enough to understand what we're trying to show. Here we go; if I click on this and hit "OK," we now have a column chart which reflects this data. You can see, over time, conversions have increased: a bit of a dip over May and June, and then it goes back up again. September

experienced a massive drop in October, then a massive spike in November. Clearly, something happened in the campaign to show that there might have been an offset—maybe something happened in October, and then spend increased in November to make up for that issue or problems in October. December, being a seasonally quiet period for business-to-business (which this account is in), saw conversions massively drop down again. It looks like February the campaign started ramping up; it kind of hit peak in September, had an issue in October, was offset in November, and grew again in November as a result of

maybe some budget adjustments. Then in December, it dropped down massively. If we wanted to see whether or not it was a budget adjustment, we simply drag conversions back down and then drag "Cost" into its place under Values. You'll see here that doesn’t quite tell the story. In October, spend was very high, but in November, actually spent less than October. That tells me October was a very, very unprofitable month because spend was really high and conversions were really low. To further cement that point, drag this away and then drag "Cost per Conversion" in its place. One

thing we need to do with "Cost per Conversion," because this works by totaling everything, is that it’s an average metric. It's the average cost per conversion, so we need to change it from totaling all of the cost per conversions in this table to make it an average instead. Therefore, we need to click this drop-down because, as you can see, the cost per conversion according to this is going to be weighing to the hundred thousand. "Pound Mark, which simply isn't true. So, click the drop-down here and go to Value Field Settings, and then change the sum

to an average. All of a sudden, you can see the cost per conversion is actually 70 pounds or just over in October. There was a massive spike in the cost per conversion, which shows you that there was a massive problem in this campaign. It could have been website issues or tracking issues—who knows what it could have been? But this is where you start to interrogate the data and have the conversations in your business to understand why this has happened. Using pivot tables and downloading these metrics over time, you can start to build a picture. You

can even start building dashboards by copying and pasting these pivot tables. You can literally just do this, and then create one for conversions instead of cost per conversions. Then, do another graph. Just go to Insert and then Recommended Charts, drop another one in, and put that here, so you can actually start really showing people the data. You can do this in meetings and discussions to understand what's going on by manipulating the data and, of course, labeling it appropriately. So, this one will be cost per conversion, and then here we have conversions. And there you have

it. This is how to look at data over time; it really builds a big picture. First of all, as well, we need to change this to a pound amount—there we go. That makes it even more accurate. They've got here as well conversions; that just needs to be in that numerical amount, which it already is. So, you could—the kind of sky's the limit with this! You can actually manipulate the data within these pivot tables as you see fit by dragging things into values, and you can also add filters. So, again, going back to this, if I

wanted to see the cost per conversion in a specific campaign, all I would need to do is add a filter. If I drag a campaign into filters for this particular pivot table and click this drop-down, I can actually select which campaign it is I want to look at. So, say for example it's just this campaign, I can click OK, and the data will update accordingly. You can see here, actually, in that particular campaign I just selected, the cost per conversion spiked at 250 pounds per conversion in October. So you can see at a campaign level

as well, and that's a really handy thing to look at because it gives you an indication as to the performance at a campaign level. Maybe you want to roll in all of the electricity campaigns, or maybe all the energy campaigns in this particular example. You can click more of them to add them into the aggregation of this view to kind of see what happened and which campaigns are contributing—or otherwise. So, filters become a very important part of this as well. This is a very useful way to build dashboards, and actually, if you add your branding

to this in terms of brand colors, you can format these pivot tables as you see fit. If you click on Pivot Table Design, you've got a number of colors you could potentially choose from. If I wanted to go for something more in line with green, which is my brand color, I could probably do that. It doesn't really look great on the default, but we could change it if we wanted to. But this is a great way to show reporting; it's a very simple way to do it. Once you've exported all the data, all you would

need to do to keep this up to date is to keep doing exports of the latest dates, adding it to the pivot table, and refreshing the data. It just pulls from this same table and then adds it into this pivot. So, this is a great way to do reporting and a way to show trends over time and break things down. Again, by default, when you're building your dashboards for stakeholders, you can preset these filters and label them. So, for example, this campaign I selected was Business Electricity. I could select that campaign, move this down, put

this in place here, and then I can call this Business Electricity. I could probably do like a box around it of some kind, like this, and then do an outside border box and then do a black banner, making the text white and bold. I could probably even increase the text size here as well, and then there you go! There's your Business Electricity data. You can have other tables within that, and you can share this with stakeholders. Then, you can also potentially show them all of this data and allow them to manipulate as they see fit,

and you can do the same as well. This is a great way to do reporting; it gives you a lot of customization options, and it's quite simple. People are often scared of pivot tables when working with PPC, but this is a very simplified way to do it. So now, let's turn to campaign optimization. Essentially, we've looked at building a campaign; we've looked at how to report on results. When you've got the results from the campaign and you want to make improvements, what can you do to improve campaign performance? Let's understand a bit more about optimization.

So, what is campaign optimization? Well, it's the process of making changes to your campaign to improve performance. Changes can be made to affect the individual metrics that make up the overall results. So, essentially, if you're looking at improving how much..." Traffic: you get to your campaign. You could look at improving the click-through rate so you get a better share of the clicks available within your niche or sector. So that's an example of improving campaign performance. Those micro metrics are managed essentially by increasing campaign performance; by changing and improving those metrics, it leads to an overall

improvement in the campaign. So, the two outcomes you want from campaign optimization—these are the two options you have, really: an increase in the volume of conversions or a decrease in the cost per conversion. What I mean by that is increasing the total number of conversions your campaign generates in terms of the actual overall performance of the campaign. What can you do to maximize the number of conversions, sales, or leads you’re getting? Versus how can I make the campaign cost-effective in terms of my budget? How can I make that work as hard as possible to get

as many conversions as I can for that budget at the right cost? They’re the two areas or the two outcomes you have for optimization. So, an increase in conversion volumes essentially means making changes to generate more leads or sales. For example, if your campaign is generating 10 sales per week, you make optimizations so the campaign could potentially increase to 14 sales per week. By making those changes to a campaign— which I’ll go on to discuss—you're basically improving your campaign’s overall volume. Here’s exactly how you could potentially increase the number of leads you get to your

campaign: better budget utilization. So, in terms of your budget, you know how much it is, and if you're hitting your budget every single day and you're not getting more, and you want more traffic, you need to increase your budgets to get seen more in the search results. This leads to more clicks, which leads to more conversions in line with your conversion rate. That's an easy way to increase volume. If you can increase your budget, there’s potential to do so, and again, look at your search impression share to see how likely it is you can increase

your budget. Next up, we have discovering new keywords. Now, of course, increasing volume means figuring out how to get additional traffic to your website. If you've increased the budget as high as it can go within your conversion volume limits, then what can you do? You can also look for potential new keywords. You can go further afield. Another way—I've mentioned this just a second ago—is through better click-through rates. If you can increase your click-through rate, you don’t have to do anything else to your website to increase your conversions, because it means you're getting a bigger share

of the traffic available for people looking for your services. As a result of that additional traffic uplift you get from an increased click-through rate, you will see more conversions in line with your conversion rate. You can also increase keyword visibility. If you have keywords in your account that have medium to low impression shares, and they could get a bit more volume, you could actually increase your bids for those potential keywords. If you're using smart bidding, you can increase your ROAS target or your CPA target and not put any kind of restraints on it to maximize

the volume you get. Remember, we talked about “maximize conversions” and “maximize conversion value” as two options to increase your conversion value or volume. By restricting it—by giving a target CPA or a target ROAS—you’ll get less volume. So, you could maybe push that a bit further or remove the volume restrictions altogether to maximize the volume you get in your campaign. Of course, the final option is improvements to your website to improve your conversion rate. By doing that, you don't literally have to change anything to your campaign. You can keep the campaign running as it is, but

by increasing the conversion rate of your website, you're going to increase your conversion volume, and you might even reduce your cost per conversion, too. So that's a good way to look at things as well. The other side of the coin I mentioned is reducing the cost per conversion. This is an important part because some businesses decide that they want to get more volume, while others decide they want to get leads that are at the right cost in order to make themselves profitable. To reduce your cost per conversion, you can look at your budget utilization. If

your budget is not maxed out and your conversions are still high, by increasing the budget, you're likely going to increase your cost per conversion. So, by over-utilizing your budget—if you set budgets really high because you want to get a lot of visibility—that can sometimes have a negative effect on your conversion value and, sorry, your cost per conversion or your ROAS target, because Google's going to push that budget as far as it can to get as much volume as possible. However, by doing this, your bids will increase, and Google will essentially look for as much traffic

and sales as possible, but your cost per conversion will go up as a result. So, your budget utilization becomes important there as well. Decreasing keyword bids or decreasing your CPA essentially provides you with less visibility overall, and if you do it too much, you can actually lose all your visibility. It’s a very careful thing to do, and you have to increment... This carefully: if you're on a Target ROAS or a Target CPA kind of campaign strategy, then by decreasing your bids in terms of your Target ROAS or Target CPA bid, you can get a better

cost per conversion. However, you'll also lose out on some volume, and it's basically a case of deciding which way you want to go. Again, going back to manual CPC, by decreasing your bids, you're going to get traffic at a lower cost, meaning your conversions are going to come in at a lower cost as well. But again, by lowering your bids, you are decreasing the overall potential volume of your campaign. So it's, again, a battle between the two. Website improvements can also reduce your cost per conversion. As I mentioned before, it has a double effect on

both the overall volume and the cost per conversion. By improving your website conversion rate, it uplifts everything in the campaign. Of course, you could potentially narrow the campaign focus. Now, if we go back to the example I've shown you throughout this whole training, if we were to look at the ad groups that we've created, we had the Bosch ad group for Bosch boilers, the generic one, the local one, and the kind of best boiler service campaign ad groups. If we can see in the data that some of those ad groups convert at higher or lower

rates, and if the ones converting at a lower rate are going to lift our conversion cost per conversion up and increase it by running ads on that, we could decide to remove them from the campaign altogether to bring the overall cost per conversion down to an acceptable level. Again, by doing that, you are going to lose volume. So that is how you have to view things when looking at reducing your cost per conversion: CPA versus conversion volume. When your campaigns get to a point where you've optimized them, they will reach a point where you have

to decide which way you want to go. Do you want conversions to come in at a good cost, or do you want a higher volume of conversions? You need to determine the most you're willing to pay for a conversion and balance that with the total volume of sales. Let's have an example: you decide the maximum you're willing to pay for a conversion is £10, and you're achieving 10 conversions per week. However, on reflection, you think to yourself, "Actually, we're getting 10 conversions per week at £10, which is fantastic. But if I can get a few

more conversions a week, then we'll really be flying, and I'm willing to pay a bit more for those additional conversions." So, the question could be: would you be willing to pay £12 per conversion instead of £10 in order to get an additional one or two conversions per week? That is the balance you have to strike. Essentially, what is the most you're willing to pay for a conversion? If you've hit that threshold and you've maxed out the campaign performance, and you've maxed out the total volume of the campaign, if you want to uplift your volume and

you've made all the improvements you can, you have to decide whether or not you want to pay a bit more for your conversions to increase the volume even further. For example, I had a client in the past who had a call center. If his phones weren't ringing, then he was losing money. On some days where it was extra competitive, he was willing to pay more for a lead because it meant that the phones were ringing, and people were actually calling his business. The call center staff weren't sitting there waiting for phone calls to come in,

and he was losing money. Instead, he was actually bringing money back into the business by closing sales. So it meant that he paid more for the leads on that particular day, but he was willing to in order to improve the overall volume. This is the conversation you have to have with yourself in your business: do you want to improve your overall volume, or are you looking for the right cost per lead and you're happy sitting at the same cost per lead because that's the point of profitability? In terms of actually optimizing campaigns and the actions

you can take, there are a few things you can do. You can obviously add or remove keywords. If keywords are performing well and generating conversions, you want to maximize their visibility or bring their conversion costs in at the right level, depending on your objective—again, volume versus value. You can also improve your ad copy to get better click-through rates, aiming to get a bigger share of the clicks to drive more conversions on the back end. You can adjust your bids on your keywords as well. If you're running manual CPC, you can increase bids on keywords that

are generating conversions and decrease bids on keywords that are less likely to get conversions but could still contribute to your overall conversion volume. If one keyword converts at 10%, you want to maximize its visibility; if another keyword converts at 1%, it's still converting, but you don't necessarily want to spend as much on that potential keyword. Again, those bid adjustments are made at the keyword level for manual CPC. If you're on an automated smart bidding strategy, then you're going to be changing that restriction level. So, on a Target CPA basis or a Target Return on Advertising

Spend (ROAS) basis, that's where you move the needle. If you're not running on manual CPC, again it goes back to volume versus value—a very key distinction. Lesson from this potent module of the course: remember that's what it's going to come down to when optimizing your campaigns. Do you want more volume, or do you want them to come in at the right value? In addition to that, improving the quality of your traffic by finding negative keywords is crucial. If you’re finding search terms in your search terms report that aren't in line with what you actually want,

then you need to, of course, make those changes and block those search terms from showing by adding them to your negative keyword list and optimizing your campaign that way. By improving the traffic quality, you will, of course, lose click volume, but it's not a big loss if those particular search terms, over time, aren't converting and the data shows that you’re not getting sales from them; then it's fine to do so. So, up next, we're going to do a bit of a walkthrough on an existing campaign to kind of show you where these conversion optimization points

are and the campaign optimization points, so you can decide for yourself whether or not it’s something you want to do and adjust and optimize. Okay, one of the things you can do to improve campaign performance is to analyze these search terms reports in order to find negative keywords. Because a lot of the time, Google will match your keywords, even those with strong match types like phrase or exact match, to search terms that aren't necessarily relevant to your campaign. So, let's get started. We're going to go into a campaign; let's just choose this one. We're going

to go to the keywords tab, and then we're going to go to the search terms report. Now, what this report will do is, in the given time frame (which here you can see), it will show you all of the search terms that matched to your keywords. So, you’ll see on the left-hand side column here the search terms that people type into Google, and here are the keywords that they match to—all the keywords in your campaign that Google’s decided match to the user’s search term and then serves your ads and generates traffic or impressions. This is

where it will show. So, as you go through this list, your job is to essentially find search terms in here that don’t match your campaign objectives or keywords. It essentially is down to you to make those negative keywords. In this example, I’m just scanning through the list. Here, I think, because this is quite an old campaign and we're quite far through the data, there's going to be a lot of search terms in here that are highly relevant. So, let’s go back a little bit further, and we will do from January to the end of February

and apply. Let’s have a look and see if there are any in here that aren’t quite right. So, if we go through here, you’ll see some excluded keywords. These are ones that have historically been excluded from the campaign as negative keywords. For example, this keyword here, "current business electricity rates," this potential search term doesn’t actually match our "business electricity rates" keyword in terms of the objective. "Business electricity rates" as a keyword insinuates that people are looking to change their business electricity tariff and get the idea of the rates. If people are typing in the word

"current," then to me, that sounds like somebody's just looking for the current pricing, so they’re not really looking to switch their account—they're just looking at the current prices, generally speaking. So, it's much further up the buying funnel, and when we're paying as much for clicks (as you can see here, 15 pounds, 24 pounds for clicks), you want to make sure the traffic is highly targeted in this particular campaign, so these were excluded. So, if I go through and click on this keyword here, you can click this option to add it as a negative keyword. When

you do that, it's already done, but just for illustrative purposes, I’m going to show you that you can add that negative keyword to either your ad group or your campaign or to a pre-existing negative list that you've got in the background. Generally speaking, I think if you add them at the ad group level, it’s the first kind of step of eliminating searches that aren’t relevant because if you add it at the campaign level, there may be other ad groups in the campaign, or in the future you might want to target that means you can create

those new future ad groups and not worry about negatives blocking those searches. If you were going to go down the route of bidding on keywords like the one I'm blocking here—which is "current business electricity rates"—if I wanted to reintroduce this in a separate ad group to get more volume for my campaign, then I’ll be blocking it if I add it to the campaign level negatives list. So, ad group level is always the way to go. By default, you’ll notice the negative keyword has square brackets around it because it’s an exact match negative. Generally speaking, that’s

a good thing to do, to add them as exact match negatives because it still gives you an opportunity to find volume for similar searches. If you add them as broad match negatives, then you're going to block out a lot of potential relevant searches. Generally speaking, broad match negatives should be one word long. If you go back to our example, one of the only broad match negative keywords we had was the word "oil" because we don’t deal with oil boilers in the example campaign, and that's a one-word negative keyword. So, generally speaking, unless it's a very

obvious term that you don't want to ever exist in your campaigning, and it's a one-word term, you want to make that a broad match negative. Everything else, you want to make exact match and keep optimizing and improving performance as you get the data. So, if you were to click save on this, that would add this as an ad group level negative keyword, as an exact match negative keyword, and that will block the keyword out. Your job is to comb through the list of potential search terms, find something that's not quite relevant to what you're doing,

and then you want to exclude those terms as well. This gives you an indication of how to optimize for negative keywords from the search terms reports. I would say you should complete this activity at least once a week, so you get enough data to kind of optimize and check your search terms. One thing I'll also say is, Google has changed the way search terms work. They used to show you about 100, or near enough 100, of user search terms, but because they're moving towards automation and they don't necessarily want users to block out a lot

of searches, they want to get the data themselves to optimize for you. They've actually hidden a lot of the search terms; they cite privacy as the reason. But Google is a very powerful company; they could actually just block keywords that give away private or user-specific information. However, they have eliminated, in some campaigns, up to 50% of the search terms from showing. In fact, I've seen campaigns with 60% of the search terms not showing, which means 60% of the ad spend doesn't actually show what the user typed in to generate the click, which is problematic. But

still, this exercise is a good one to do, and it makes sure that your traffic quality is as good as it can be. So, do this exercise at least once a week, and in the early stages of campaigns, you can have a look at this every few days to double-check that the quality of your traffic is strong. This is an activity I would definitely advise to optimize your campaigns, and that completes the training. Thank you so much for taking this course. I really want to bring you the best-in-class PPC training available out there, and I

really hope I've done that for you today. Now, don't forget, your learning doesn’t end here; it's only just beginning. Continue using the strategies you've learned in this training in your day-to-day lives as marketers. Again, because you've purchased this training, you have direct access to ask me anything. Even though you've finished, you can still ask me questions about any challenges you face in your PPC life going forward. The last thing I'm going to ask you to do is, if you can, please leave me a review because it's really helpful to understand whether or not I've helped

you. I really hope I have helped you, and you can leave a positive review. But if you have any feedback in addition to what you've experienced on the course, please let me know directly, and I'll be more than happy to discuss that with you. Again, congratulations on completing this training. I really hope to see you again in the future, and I wish you all the best in your PPC training, your PPC development, and your development as an all-around digital marketer.