Launch a Google Ads Campaign

Once you’ve clearly identified your target and selected the networks where your ads will appear, you can define your marketing budget.

Define a Test Budget

First of all, you need to think about the budget you want to allocate to Google Ads in relation to all the other marketing tools that will help you achieve your goals.

After all, Google Ads isn’t the only solution for advertising online.

It’s not the only marketing tool, either.

So, you need to compare it with what you could achieve using Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads or any other advertising tool that might attract customers or increase brand awareness.

There’s no tool and no silver bullet. If you want to compare these different marketing methods, you need to test them out. This is the only way of knowing what each method can achieve.

With this in mind, our initial budget for Google Ads should be a test budget.

In other words, start small, and if you get results, you can gradually increase the budget.

Let’s go back to the previous step where we define the daily budget and the bidding strategy for our Men’s Clothes campaign.

Divide your total budget by the number of days your campaign will run, if you’ve provided an end date, or by 30 days (average number of days in a month) if you haven’t.

As I said, you should allocate a test amount to your initial budget.

You need to allow for a budget that will give you meaningful test results.

In other words, if you’re selling products with a high-ticket price, a budget of just a few dollars isn’t going to tell you whether or not Google Ads is the right marketing tool for you.

So, if you’re selling rooms in a luxury hotel for $2,000 a night, don’t be surprised if you don’t get great results by investing just $5 a day.

For our mountain sports online store, the prices are much more reasonable, so a budget of $10-$20 per day over a period of one to two weeks should be enough to give us an idea of how Google Ads will perform for our online store.

Google actually gives us an indication of the average daily budget, which is $15 per day for the US. It’s a useful average to use as our starting point and we can adjust it based on our goals and the prices of the products/services we’re advertising.

At the end of this initial test, if you see a positive return on investment—i.e., the campaign has brought in business of a higher value than what it cost—you can increase the budget as you see fit as long as you continue to see a positive relationship between the value of your new customers versus the cost of acquiring them.

Compare Bid Strategies

You need to understand that there are a number of ways of spending your budget.

We call this your bid strategy.

I'm sure you remember in the second chapter of this course, we talked about the bidding system that Google uses to assign advertising space to one advertiser rather than another, by ranking the ads.

If you want to use this bidding system, you need to define your strategy.

This is what we mean by bid strategy. It’s how you plan to take part in auctions.

There are a number of bid strategies available with varying levels of complexity. I’m going to show you some of the main ones you’ll use to launch and optimize your initial campaign in the first few weeks.

Manual Strategy

First of all, it’s important to know that you can take part in auctions manually. To do this, you need to select the Manual CPC bid strategy.

This strategy means that your bid is defined as a maximum cost per click (or Max CPC). This is the maximum amount you're prepared to pay for each click on your ad. This amount may be different for each ad group and even each keyword, if you like.

Automated Strategies

These days, we tend to use automated and smart bid strategies. The algorithm controls our bidding based on our selected campaign goal and bid strategy.

If we choose the Maximize clicks strategy, for example, we’re asking the algorithm to bring us the highest possible number of clicks within our daily budget. Similarly, for the Maximize conversions strategy, the algorithm will try to generate the highest possible number of conversions within our daily budget.

Smart Strategies

You can also choose a bid strategy that will help give you the edge over your competitors, or one based on CPA (cost per action).

For this strategy, you tell the system exactly how much each new acquisition (or conversion) brings you and it will optimize bidding for you.

Please note that if you want to use this bid strategy, you need to enable conversion tracking on your website.

A conversion is any action that is important to you that happens after someone clicks on your ad. This might include someone buying a product, filling in a form, spending a certain amount of time on a page, or clicking a button.

If you want to track these conversion activities on your website, you need to install conversion tracking (or get your webmaster to install it for you). You’ll need to install tracking code, created within Google Ads, on all of your web pages.

For our campaign, we’re going to start off using the Maximize conversions strategy. Our goal is to sell products from our online store, so this is the perfect bid strategy for us. If we don’t have conversion tracking installed on our website, we would have chosen a bid strategy focused on clicks or impressions.

One impression is recorded every time a digital ad is displayed after winning a bid. We talk about impression rate to indicate the total number of bids won by your ad and where it was displayed divided by the total number of bids your ad was involved in.

Impression rate = number of bids won/total number of bids

Create an Ad Schedule

Before we move on to defining keywords and so on, I’d just like to tell you about one last aspect, which is ad scheduling.

Once you’ve set your budget and bid strategy, click on Continue to return to our campaign settings. This is where we selected our networks, target locations, and language in the previous chapter.

Now click at the bottom of the page on the gear icon where it says More settings.

You’ll also be able to specify a start and end date for your campaign in this section. This is ideal for planning a campaign at a particular time, which is commonly used if you have a scheduled sale period, for example.

You’ll also be able to access the ad schedule.

But every business is different, with its own specific requirements. Some days of the week and times of day are more valuable than others.

So, a local business that’s closed on Sundays wouldn’t want to spend their advertising budget displaying ads while they’re closed.

Google Ads has made allowances for this, so you can restrict the display of your ads to certain days of the week or times of day.

For example, a plumber might ask Google Ads to only display their ads during their working hours, so they can respond to urgent requests by phone when they’re available.

For our online store, it’s not as important to control the day and time that the ad will appear, because it’s an online store that can take orders at any time.

So, we’ll just leave the default schedule alone and continue.

Let’s Recap!

• Define a test budget so that you can compare Google Ads to your other marketing tools and solutions, such as Facebook or LinkedIn Ads. 

• Define a budget based on the value of the products or services you’re promoting.

• Bid strategies let you specify how you want to take part when bidding for advertising space. 

• There are manual bid strategies, but Google recommends that you use automatic or smart bidding. 

• The ad schedule enables you to display your ads on particular days or at particular times that suit you. 

Now you’ve defined your budget, let’s move on to the next step, where we’ll select the keywords you’ll be bidding on.

There’s quite an art to it, as you’ll find out in the next chapter.