The RIGHT Way to Set Up Google Search Ads Campaigns in 2024 | Step-by-Step Tutorial

in this video I'm going to share with you how to build a brand new Google ad search campaign step by step the exact structure and settings that I recommend from managing millions of dollars per month in Google ads how we set up our brand new search campaigns here at Grom my ads and if you stick with me to the end I'm going to share a few bonus settings that I always always recommend when setting up a new search ads campaign you're welcome so let's go ahead and dive in [Music] all right so I'm inside a

Google ads account right now and I am simply going to click this blue plus button this is create campaign and I am going to hit new campaign now this is going to ask what's your campaign objective so I want to emphasize this because I've heard a lot of misinformation over the years about this clicking one of these doesn't actually do anything to the performance of your campaign clicking one of these just limits some of the settings that Google will show you so if you click sales in your e-commerce it's going to limit some of the

some of the other settings that you might see inside of awareness or consideration or local store visits and promotions so this really is for you to click and give Google an idea of what you're looking for so they can can better give the settings that make the most sense for you however I'm going to teach you all the settings you need to know so you don't even need any of this so when we create campaigns whether it's search or shopping doesn't matter we hit create a campaign without goals guidance again I'm giving you everything you

need today so we don't need to limit ourselves here so go ahead to hit create campaign without go guidance then select campaign type obviously there giving you all of the different campaign types by the way watch so if I hit sales you see how that change you don't even get that if I hit aware and consideration now it's only giving me these campaign types that is what I mean by it filters the settings for you so again we're going to hit this then I am going to hit search and now we're at use the conversion

goals from your campaign performance so in this case it's going to be a submit lead form because what we're doing is going to be building out an ad for a carpet cleaning company so select the results you want from this campaign I don't need to click any of this and again this won't do anything in regards to the performance so we don't need this now campaign name make sure naming conventions are huge I can't tell you how many times I do Audits and then they've got like 20 campaigns in there and it is it looks

like getting in someone's car that they don't clean and there's bottles everywhere and trash everywhere and just a total mess right do not do that you want organization so you want a nice clean naming convention so in this case I I usually do so s stands for search that way I just kind of know it's a search campaign sometimes if I'm looking at just raw data in an Excel sheet or maybe even looker Studio reports so s and then we're going to do carpet cleaning and then I also like to a lot of times do

the location this is going to be in Fort Wayne and so I'm going to have it set like this and then we'll hit continue okay so bidding and by the way I have an entire video on bidding and all the different bidding options you can find that link in the description below make sure to watch that video after you complete this video but just know bidding can get pretty complex and I give you a complete breakdown of what bid strategies you should use when now when you're starting a brand new campaign many people have suggested

well just start with maximize conversions this account is brand new so this Carpet Cleaning company has never ran ads before I personally still find and recommend in most cases utili using either a Max clicks bid strategy and a lot of times I'll set like a maximum bid so if you did keyword research you know you'll know kind of what your your bids are going to be so I can set a maximum CPC bid limit when you get further into the campaign you can go back so once you've completed the campaign buildout you can actually go

back to your bid strategies and choose a manual CPC so you're telling Google this is what I'm willing to pay per click I recommend when you're first starting out use a Max clicks or manual CPC bid strategy the goal is then to get enough conversion volume over a period of time whether that takes you a month or two but the goal is to get about 30 conversions in a month you don't have to absolutely hit 30 but we have found that 30 seems to be The Sweet Spot in regards to being able to flick over

than two uh conversion based bid strategy but when you're building your campaign out and if you've never bidded on any of the keywords that are going to be inside of this campaign then start with Max clicks or manual CPC I'll show you how how to flick over to manual CPC after we build this campaign but just know that I still recommend using Max clicks or Minal CPC in the beginning now if you are building a campaign in a an account that you've already been running ads for a long period of time whether that's a year

or five years or even three or six months and you've got a set of keywords that you've already have been bidding on or there's some data inside of the account history and you're simply for a restructure purpose or organizational purpose you're building out a brand new campaign but the keywords that you're going to be adding and the conversions that it's going after whether it's a form fill a sale a phone call whatever it may be have already been accumulated inside of this account and and Google has some historical data then you can start successfully with

a maximize conversion bid strategy or a Target CPA or a conversion value bid strategy with a tr- as that's if you have historical data on those conversions and on those keywords I'm absolutely okay with that however I still find it's best to start with Max clicks or manual CPC if you don't have any of that historical data yet so in this case I have to go with Max clicks and then I am going to set actual CPC bid limit on this to $10 so basically what I'm saying is to Google hey don't bid more than

$10 but try to generate some clicks here then we have this customer acquisition setting this is somewhat newish that Google puts in the campaign buildout so build bid for new customers only this option limits your ads to only new customers regardless of your bid strategy listen in this case for a carpet cleaning company and for this campaign strategy I don't need to add this or or or limit this most the people who are searching carpet cleaning terms that I'm I'll be going after are not going to be repeat buyers so in this case I don't

even need to worry about this customer acquisition setting so I'm going to hit next now some further campaign settings you have to choose from okay so we have in Google auto puts you into these so you don't necessarily want this you've got search Network ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for terms that are relevant to your keywords so search Partners can include you know a bunch of Google's other sort of websites that they're networked with this also can include Google Maps which I do like for local service

based businesses however when I am building out a brand new campaign I normally will flick this off and the other setting here Display Network they want to be able to show your ads on the Display Network this is like one of the most horrendous settings I I hated when they when they did this many many years ago display and search are totally different the behavior is totally different I never run Display Network mixed in with my search campaign if I do a display ad it's in a display ad only campaign so I never absolutely never

run this display network setting and the search Network partner I did turn this off again for a brand new account or brand new campaign in time if I have a campaign and it starts to get dialed in and I I feel really good about the conversions and the performance is there then I flick it on to increase my ad Impressions and I'll monitor what the performances on the search Partners but when I'm first starting out all I'm trying to do is give myself the best shot of hitting success in the shortest period of time so

a lot of these settings I do not want on in the beginning all right location so in this case I am going to be targeting Fort Wayne now you can do you can add locations in bulk you can do radius targeting around a certain place so let's just do Fort Wayne Indiana so I can do a radius targeting there's 20 I could do 50 Etc you could really change this up if you want now you can also do zip codes so like 46825 if this is a zip so if I just wanted to Target certain

ZIP codes in this case we are going to do about a 30 mile radius around 4 Way boom that's a good radius targeting for this local Carpet Cleaning company they do travel within these other smaller areas outside of the city of Fort Wayne so I'm going to hit save now important setting and sometimes it gets hidden so this location options here we've got Target right so you have and it auto sets you to this presence or interest people in regularly in or have shown interest in your targeted location and you'll notice Google hits recommended then

you've got presentence people in or regularly in your targeted locations so the key difference here is these terms or who have shown interest in your targeted locations I do not like this setting in most cases so for this campaign I am flicking it over to people in or regularly in your targeted locations this setting basically saying Hey Google show my ads to anyone you think is interested in the area of Fort Wayne Indiana or who has shown interest or maybe has even been to Fort Wayne the problem with that is a lot of times then

you'll find your ads are firing for other countries or other obscure locations where absolutely someone's not actually going to be looking for carpet cleaning in in the city of Fort Wayne so we want to limit our ad or ads showing only two people who are in the 30 mile radius that we set for Fort Wayne Indiana so if I'm in Miami and I type carpet cleaning Fort Wayne I do not want their ad showing I don't want that I don't want it to show to anyone who's outside of that radius targeting this makes sure I

have laser targeting set and again Google gets very broad sometimes with this I've seen some like I've seen in the placement reports you got to dig deep into the reporting but I've seen countries like India show up countries in the Middle East obscure Islands it makes absolutely no sense so in the beginning always tighten that control and make sure it's only set to people in the targeted location you set then languages I only want English for this and all of our ads and AD copy and their employees only speak English so I have it set

to English now you've got this audience segment this you can get some observations from two things one you don't want to set this to targeting targeting means you're going to only show your ads to people who fit inside of your audience group observation is there for hey we're going to layer some audiences to your campaigns and you'll get some data at that sort of audience layer so in this case what we're going to do is basically go through there's some in markets sometimes you can just do a quick search too so here I'm going to

do carpet cleaning I don't actually think there's much but Google will give you the best in regards to that so in Market home cleaning services in Market household cleaning supplies I'll probably just keep it at home cleaning services for now in market for vacuums we don't really probably want that either rugs and carpet a lot of times this is always good data to figure out we'll have renters we'll also have homeowners and that's good for now listen you can go in and add sort of as many as you want I have found other than getting

data insights this is not a needle mover a lot of times some people have like at least on a search ad campaign have gone crazy into like audience segments in time when you're on when you're getting conversion data and you're you're set up on like a a smart bidding bid strategy whether it's conversion based like Max conversions or max conversion value Google does a really good job of finding people who fit your data points who look like your converters so the audience stuff to me is good insight to bring back for further campaign tests whether

I'm going to do something like on the Display Network or YouTube ads but a lot of times I I don't see it as this campaign would have performed better if I would have layered more audiences in there and and maybe added some bit adjustments to it it's very rare I I never see that so I like to look at it more from data analysis on different segments and a lot of these people will actually over laap a lot of times into these different segments so you don't need to go overkill on adding audience segments and

again make sure you have it set to Observation then keywords so it has this broad match it kind of wants it to force you into broad match keywords I'll explain keywords here in a second here to use broad match keywords switch to a conversion or conversion value based bidding strategy so it's actually set to off listen you can use broad match keywords whenever you want I could use them now even with this setting off so don't even really worry about this setting right now you can just completely ignore it then we have automatically created assets

so you can allow Google to help you generate headlines and description assets for your ads using your content from landing page domain and ads basically you're giving Google control to essentially add different headlines descriptions and AD copy to the ad now we're going to be building an ad in this step-by-step tutorial however if I have this set on Google can actually just go ahead and create ads for me I'm going to keep it off I don't really like using that right away in some cases over time I'll test it and Google is getting better at

including some good ad copy however I want to control the messaging right now for this ad so I want to have this turned off then you have this more settings we have ADD rotation you do not need to do anything here just keep this set to optimize prefer best performing ads don't you don't need to worry about that at all then we have start and end dates I am doing this video as of March 10th 2024 so today this campaign will start do not in an end date I don't know why unless you're creating a

campaign that is only specific to like a a sale or or an event or something that only lasts for a certain period of time I never usually use the end date though in those cases I'll use auto rules so here just keep make sure you have end date set To None believe it or not I've done audits before where they're like our Campa our ads stopped showing and then I found like well you guys said an in date why did you do that um so they just didn't even know now ad schedule this is important

so if you don't do anything here your ads will fire 24/7 well in this case for this Carpet Cleaning company we actually only only want to run Monday through Friday and we want to run 6: a.m. until so there's 2 3 four there we go and make sure you check your time zone I've seen accounts I think they were on a certain time zone when they weren't so based on the account time zone we would be Eastern Time Zone which is exactly what I want so I'm going to hit go ahead and hit have that

set up so Monday through Friday 6:00 to 5 and then URL options if you're utilizing any third-party tracking that would would need some sort of uh tracking template set up you can add that at the campaign level here we don't have any of that we don't need to worry about it then there's brand restrictions in this case I don't need to add any brand restrictions either brand restrictions is essentially making sure your brand terms don't fire inside of a campaign if you don't want them to I don't need that right now so we'll go ahead

and uh keep that not apply so then I'm going to hit next okay so now we are going to be adding keywords so now Google's trying to force me as you seen this popup get suggestions for your ads answer a few questions about your business to get suggestions for your ads headlines and descriptions so Google if you hit help create you can actually so if I go Steamworks fw. Google will actually use their AI now to help give you ad suggestions so here they kind of took context from our website and then I'm going to

hit help create ad and so this is always kind of interesting this is fairly new you'll notice this is in beta here they're trying to give you some keyword ideas you'll see which some of these aren't good and I'll we'll work on keywords here in a second and then also they went ahead and actually cre created an ad right away for me now some of these aren't too bad less air pollutants odor reduction some of these are not great either and so I'm going to change a lot of that but I did just want to

show you the the tool that can be used now so you have to be very very cautious of this but let's talk about keywords real quick so for this campaign you've got different keyword match types now now I have an entire YouTube video just on Match types so I do recommend going and checking that out I will have the link in the description below on a brand new campaign especially a brand new account like this I do not recommend starting with broad keywords I hear a lot of gurus out there saying just blast a bunch

of broad keywords in the beginning it still does not perform well from our tests and again we're testing millions of dollars per month so some of these cases of people saying just start with broad I always do wonder how much they're actually testing that not saying it can't work I'm just saying from our millions of dollars per month of testing across a large portfolio of clients we still see better results starting with tight matched keywords exact act in phrase normally then as we get the conversion data we move to Broad once we dial the campaign

in it's performing at the metrics we want it to perform at and we're utilizing max conversion or max conversion value bid strategy and that has to have a goal so technically a Target CP T roas I still don't even run broad if there's no goal set or cap set on a max conversion or max conversion value bid strategy however I am in no Camp there's a lot of people in Google ads where they they all seem to be in these like different camps it's like this is the only way you should be doing it I

don't care about a certain way I just care about making money right so you could test a brand new campaign and ignore all of my advice and only and go straight for Max conversions with broad keyboards and it might work for you we still find it's best to start with tight themed keyword master types and by that I mean exact in phrase so an exact match in this case would be boom with the brackets with quotations you've got phrase match and then broad would be this now I want to share one thing with you on

keyword match types just so you have a better understanding of what these mean if you've never used these match types before all right this is a Google support page on keyword match types so here just a quick explanation again go watch my YouTube video after this video on Match types to have a better understanding but exact match ads may show on searches that are the same meaning as your keyword so in this case they use Furniture Store um it could also mean it could also show for Home Furnishing shop but those two mean the same

right then phrase match ads may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword so here searches that are the same this could be include the meaning so here you have cheap furniture stores living room furniture deals what store is best to find a bedroom dresser so phrase operates almost in my opinion how broad match used to operate years ago so it's they call it moderate matching I even think phrase is pretty Broad and so just know though these are like the definitions of it exact is going to be your tightest match type then

you have and ads may show show on searches that relate to your keyword so here they have home decor uh cream colored leather sectional do you see how these two are like totally different home decor is different from someone looking for cream colored leather sectional it is super broad however broad match Works beautifully with smart bidding so if your campaign over time is dialed in you're getting conversion volume you're hitting your goal and you're on a tcpa or or traz bid strategy and you bake in a broad match keyword it will scale your campaign you

still have to be cautious of the Search terms it's showing but broad match is like the nitrous boost to a campaign once it's already dialed in again as of today March 24th or wherever I'm at March 10th 2024 I do not recommend using broad match in the beginning until your campaign's dialed in and using the tr- as or tcpa bit strategy okay and I want to show you a real life example so let's hop in there here is a real example of a broad match carpet cleaning services term and I just want to show you

everything that it's showing it's showing for carpet shampoo it's showing for competitors Stanley Steamer promo code it's showing for what cleans blood out of a carpet um scary rug cleaners near me that gets a bit iffy again more more bro or more competitor terms Stanley Steamer coupon $99 best way cleaners Bissell carpet clean Bissell is a actual vacuum cleaner that you would be buying so Google's not that smart in this case right when you go AB broad so this is why I do not like using it until you have that conversion data to feed the

machine learning otherwise Kuba just go still so Broad in my opinion and here they're firing for Branded carpet cleaning or vacuum cleaners that is someone who's looking to buy a vacuum cleaner not hire a carpet cleaning company all right back to the campaign setup all right so now I've got my keywords in here we have carpet cleaning Fort Wayne carpet clean CLE Fort Wayne phrase and then I'm also going to do carpet cleaning near me and then we'll do carpet cleaning near me and phase you do not need to run scags anymore that would be

called single keyword ad group so back in the day people would run like carpet cleaning Fort Wayne would be an ad group carpet cleaning near me would be an ad group you don't need that this all means the same thing these keywords will work for the ad that we have set for it now now if I wanted to Target commercial carpet cleaning Fort Wayne this has a different intent versus this this is going to be mainly residential so commercial specific would go into its own ad group then I would have a specific ad copy built

around our commercial cleaning services so I would not want to mix this inside the same ad group however near me and then also the city these can live in the same ad group because they're the same thing and the ad will relate to both of those Search keywords so just a a heads up on that you don't need to go over crazy with uh your ad groups consolidation is key today so consolidate as much as possible but do segment when you can create a better experience at the ad level and then the landing page level

for the keywords you're targeting so we're going to just keep it at carpet cleaning 4 and carpet cleaning near me right now then the ad again the AI created an ad I don't really like most of this and I already have ad copy built out here so I'm just going to go ahead and plug that in all right so I have my ad built out now final URL this is where you're going to be sending traffic that clicks your ad so in this case it's just going to their homepage for right now display path this

is not actually where they'll end up you'll see here in the example it shows like carpet cleaning this is just a easy nice way to bake in some more keywords that get highlighted in the ad usually but this does not mean the display path is not actually where they'll they'll go then we've got headlines you can add up to 15 and then we've got descriptions you can add up to four I'm just doing a quick add in this case so I just ran two but add as many as you can that makes sense and as

long as it's not fluff by the way we've got several videos on how to create irresistible search ads for these search campaigns so I'm going to have that in the description below lots and lots of YouTube videos to reference and go back to so you can expand on almost all of these areas I'm talking about in the campaign build out there's so much more to expand on we already have video content on a lot of it so I will have the ad copy videos in the description for you to check out then you can add

images these are ad assets guess what we have an entire video on everything you need to know about creating ad assets for your campaigns that will be in the description below here we have images already loaded up ready to go boom then business name and logos that's very simple site links we already have at the account level set up so we don't need to worry about those same with several of our other AD assets again go watch the Youtube video on ad assets I give you a complete break down on every one of these but

you can add promotions prices calls structured Snippets lead forms call outs apps there's a lot to talk about there you want to add as many as you can as they're relevant to your ad and again I have most of these already buil built out at the account level so I don't need to go through those in this particular tutorial so now I'm going to hit done and then I'm going to hit next okay so now we have the budget that we need to be setting my recommendation is usually you need to have enough set at

the campaign budget level in order for you to at least generate 10 plus clicks a day that's because if you go less than that you're just not going to generate enough Clicks in order to really even optimize the campaign in time and you'll be left with at the end of the month not enough data and you won't know how to make any decisions based off of it and a lot of times I see people just kind of burn out after that after a while cuz they don't know what to do so you need to have

enough money to spend for at least 10 clicks a day in this case in carpet cleaning clicks can get kind of expensive but we've got a nice $50 per day budget to work with so I'm going to put 50 bucks and then next all right now Google's going to check for airs thankfully it does usually save this as a draft in case something breaks but then once this is over we'll be able to double check everything and move forward all right so Google's done checking everything looks good says your campaign is ready to publish so

all I have to Simply do now is hit publish campaign all right so my campaign is now live now there are a few additional settings that I want to put in place that you can't quite do during the standard campaign creation process so I'm going to click back in here first one is I don't like running tablet traffic in the beginning not saying I'll never run tablet traffic it's just I want to get the fastest results to success and tablets is normally even on successful campaigns that I spend lots of money on for other clients

tablets is usually a small percent of that so I just want to remove the variable of if this campaign after a month isn't really quite working I'm like well at that point then I'd be looking at tablets and things like that I just like to remove it right away get it to work on your top devices which are going to be desktop and mobile first then once you've got The Campaign dialed in go back to things like tablets and you can turn them back on and get some additional volume there and see how tablets does

but for now I don't want to run it so I'm just going to minus 100% which means I'm essentially excluding it out okay then I wanted to show you the bid strategies remember it wouldn't allow me to do manual CPC during the campaign creation process what you can do those go back into bidding and if I wanted to I can now hit into the bid strategies and I can go or select the bid strategy directly and I can now see manual CPC here so they hide it from you and so in this case I could

just go and flick over to manual CPC and then hit save so now this campaign's on manual CPC bidding again I only recommend manual CPC or Max click bidding when you're just starting out not that's not the ultimate goal of bidding but only when you're starting out so that's why it is set to this manual CPC bid strategy then I also want to start adding some negative keywords right away so this as you can remember is not available during that standard campaign creation buildout so here I want to add some negative keywords like we don't

want to show up for Bissell which was a brand Hoover which is a carpet cleaning brand we don't want anything like used Craigslist Etc we could go all day on negative keywords I recommend doing some negative keyword research before launching your campaign I'm just giving you an example here a lot of good negative keywords though for like a local based business like this that's a carpet cleaning business in Fort Wayne out of area cities and states sometimes you'll see those come through creating a competitor list in the beginning it's usually not smart to show for

your competitor names but later on you can test it as a separate strategy Carpet Cleaning company they clean carpets they don't sell vacuum cleaners so every vacuum cleaner brand I I would go in and add that as a negative keyword so I'm not going to go through all of that but here always just make sure save yourself from money before you would actually pay for some of these and go ahead and add negative keywords there you go you now know how to create a Google ads search campaign the right way I hope you got great

value from this make sure to check out our free Google ads Community it's called PPC Launchpad I will have a link to that in the description below there's a free performance Max course in that Community you can ask any question you want on Google ads whether it's search ads or performance Max or display doesn't matter I'm very active in there answering questions so I would love for you to join if not no worries I'll see you on the next [Music] video