Creating Google search ad campaigns – Outline

How to Create a search ad campaign effortlessly 

Create a google search ad campaign for the first time is tough. It involves a series of steps which could vary based on the campaign objective. Worry not, i got you covered in this chapter. After this chapter you will able to create search campaigns at ease !

How can you create an effective search ad campaign? Just follow these steps in the same order. It worked for me as so many other marketers. It could work for you too.

Here’s the step to create search ad campaign :

• Campaign skeleton creation
• Ad group creation
• Ad copy creation
• Ad extension creation
• Negative keyword implementation
• Going live

Campaign skeleton creation :

This step involves setting up basics things like campaign name , objectives, budget.

Step 1 : Campaign name :

Up to you. You can give any name you like.

Step 2: Campaign type :

Search network only. There’s an another options as search network with display select. When you select search network with display select, you might not able to spent where you money is going to spend. Since you had selected search with display select, google will decide how much budget will be spent on each channels.

In this case, search network only, you get to choose the flexibility. The reason why i suggest you to go with search network only.

Step 3 : choose All Features

Choosing all features will have all the options for you to choose with. If you select a predefined options, you might not able to use other options. It’s always good to have all the options to enable while you create campaigns.

Step 4: include google search partners

It’s totally up-to you. You could include other partners or not. This options will enable other search partners such as aol.com.

Step 5: Devices

If you’re advertising for products which could be used on certain devices such as android smartphones you can select only those devices. If you’re selling something that’s independent of device you can choose all devices.

Step 6 : Locations

If the product/service you advertise is dependent on certain geography you can use the location settings to run an ad in those particular geography.

Step 7 : Language

Same as of locations and device. If you’re targeting audience can speak only certain languages you can choose language here.

Step 8 : Bid Strategy

This is the very important step in the skeleton creation. You have to choose bid strategy. For beginners to start with , go for manual bidding strategy. Don’t go for automated bidding strategies.

Automated bidding strategies needs past data to improve the performance using AI & machine learning techniques. So until the data is collected there’s no guarantee that you will get results. If you’re trying to learn with small budget, this might run out before the data is collected. Or you won’t be having budget for seeing the automated strategy to work.

Having said that, automated bidding strategy is not some magic. You can obvious get same results and better results than automated using the manual cpc. In general sense what automated bidding strategy does is allocating how much should be the cost for a click ( on behalf of you ) .

Another problem with using automated as beginner is feeding the wrong data. As a beginner you are bound to make errors in the ad creation while doing it for first time. If you wrongly misplaced you’re conversion tracking code in all pages than every page view would be counted as conversion.

In the actual world those are the page views by your target audience but google ( computer thinks that those are the conversions) . Imagine how good a results if google uses those data to optimize for conversions.

To start with go for manual bidding which gives you more control over the campaign.

However, it’s good to know what are the bidding strategies available in general.

Maximize conversions :

Maximize conversion bidding strategy helps you to get more conversions. It means, it will try to get you most conversions at the whatever cost it takes.

Target search page location :

This strategy will put your ad in the top page of the search results page. But this will also put your ad at whatever cost it takes to achieve that.

Target CPA :

This is a bit conservative version of the maximize conversions strategy. In this you set a cap on how much you’re willing to spend to get a conversion and then algorithm work to get the conversion at the cost.

Since you’re specifying the cost for conversion, algorithm will put your ad in whatever position and page to facilitate you’re conversion cost.

Target ROAS :

This is very similar to the target CPA but this works in percentage. If you’re marketing budget is $ 100, and to be successful you need make a revenue of $500, then you’re percentage return is 500%. Hence you should be using 500% as ROAS . The algorithm will put the ad in whatever position that fits the spend that matched your return on Ad spend.

Target Outranking Share :

This bidding strategy will help you if you want to out-rank one of your competitor. You can specify the competitor name and algorithm will try to ensure that.

Enhanced CPC :

In this strategy algorithm will adjust you’re bids slightly if the algorithm sees any scope for the conversion while the auction happens.

Manual CPC :

Completely manual, you get to bid how much ever you wanted for a click. This would give you more control on the campaigns.

Step :10 Budget

Budget is the total cost you are willing to spend  on that campaign. If you’re think how much budget you spend, here the rule of thumb. In search campaigns average conversion rate is 3-5%.

i.e for every 100 people you bring from search channel, 3-5 people will convert. So if you want to achieve results with this channel, you need to bring at least 100 people from search. So by this logic you should bring 100 clicks.

The ideal budget (minimum ) = cpc cost * 100.

The above is the minimum budget. But you can set whatever budget that’s above the minimum budget.

Step :11  Delivery Method

Delivery method is rate of budget spent.

Google offers two delivery methods:

• Standard
• Accelerated

Standard delivery :

In this, your budget will be spent in a way that your campaign will be running all through the day. In this method, your budget will spent accordingly so that campaign will be active throughout the day.

Accelerated Delivery:

Accelerated delivery aims to spent the campaign budget asap. One downside to this is, the campaign will stop running as soon as budget was over. On the brighter side, you will get more results in shorter time.