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Home > Blog > Digital Marketing > PPC >

How to Create PPC Campaigns?

When you are creating a very well planned Search ad campaign on Google Ads, there are seemingly endless things to consider. One of the most vital aspects to think about is your goal.

search-ad-campaign

Do you want to increase brand awareness and traffic? Do you want to get more leads and sales? Are you promoting an App or an event?

Once you define your goal, Google Ads can help you set up a Search ad campaign that will make it happen. In this article, we’ll show you how it’s done.

How to create a Search Ad campaign?

So, without further ado, let’s get stuck in to show you how to set up a search ad campaign.

Follow the steps below:

1. Start a Google Ads Campaign

First and foremost, log-in to your Google Ads account. Then, navigate from the dashboard to select + Campaign > New Campaign.

1. start-google-ads-campaign

2. Select Campaign Purpose

2. select-campaign-purpose

So, remember that goal you set? Here’s where it comes into play. You can set your campaign purpose according to your goal:

  • Sales – if you want people to buy products.
  • App Promotion – if you want more app subscribers/users.
  • Leads – if you’re starting a True View for Action campaign.
  • Brand awareness and reach – if you want to increase online visibility and audience size.
  • Product and Brand Consideration – if you want to show products from the Merchant Center alongside your YouTube ads.

In most cases, advertisers want to convert traffic into leads. By defining your campaign purpose here, you and Google have a way to track user activity, so you can accurately gauge your return on investment (ROI).

3. Select Campaign Type

3. select-campaign-type

As people search for products and services related to yours, you can reach them with text ads that appear in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

4. Name Your Campaign

4. name-your-campaign

Make sure you use a logical naming format for your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns so that it’s easy to tell them apart and understand their goals.

For example:

  • Running Shoes – Men – Brand Awareness
  • Yoga Pants – Women – Leads

5. Decide Whether to Use the Search Partner Network

5. decide-whether-to-use-the-search-partner-network

When you show your ads in the Google Ads search partner network, your Search ad campaign will reach users on hundreds of non-Google websites, as well as on YouTube and other Google sites.

Your ads may appear above or below the SERPs in Google, Google Play, Google Shopping, Google Images, and Google Maps – including the Maps app.

This option will be selected by default. However, studies indicate it can have an adverse effect:

  • 90% lower clickthrough rate (CTR)
  • 25% higher cost per click (CPC)
  • 33% fewer conversions
  • 16% higher cost per conversion

As such, it’s wise to turn this option off if this is your first time managing a Search ad campaign.

6. Set Start and End Date

6. set-start-and-end-date

It’s good practice to set a start and end date for your PPC campaigns. Otherwise, your budget may go to waste. Another problem is that you could attract click traffic and attention for a product that may no longer be on sale.

7. Tracking URL

7. tracking-url

You can customize your final URL through URL parameters in the tracking template.  Whenever a user clicks your ad, the information in the template creates your landing page URL.

With this information, you can fine-tune your campaigns and settings for enhanced performance.

What are Custom Parameters?

Custom parameters are an advanced type of URL parameter that you can add to your ad’s landing page URLs.  These parameters can be replaced with dynamic values when the Ad is clicked.

In the tracking template, enter your custom parameter’s name and the ValueTrack parameters, for example: {lpurl}? colour={_colour}).

After a click, Google Ads will replace the name with the value that you defined in your custom parameter. If this is your first Search ad campaign, it’s better to skip this section.

8. Dynamic Search Ad Setting

8. Dynamic Search Ad Setting

If you have keywords with low search volume, you can use DSAs to get more clicks. It will pull the words from the website content and will generate a dynamic ad heading. Google Ads determines your advertising costs by multiplying your ad clicks by the maximum cost per click (max.cpc) limit you set.

Warning: Don’t use DSAs if you have regular updates on your website. For example, if you run daily deals. Also, it won’t work well on gambling, adult, or pharmaceutical websites.

9. Select Appropriate Location

9. Select Appropriate Location

In your first Search ad campaign, you may be unsure of what areas to target. The first tip is to avoid selecting “All Countries & Territories” as your PPC budget will vanish with minimal ROI.

Should you use People in, or who show interest in your targeted location every time?

10. targeted location every time
  • It is only suitable for you if your product/services of global nature and you want to advertise everywhere.
  • it will create a problem if you have area-specific selling your services in New York
  • If someone who lives in New York but temporarily moves to Washington, he still be able to see your advertisement too, which may be of no use and it will just waste the budget.
  • You can also exclude the locations if you want where you don’t want to show an advertisement.

Should you use People in, or regularly in your targeted location?

  • This option lets you show your ads to people who are likely to be located, or who are regularly located in your target area.
  • This does not include people who searched for your target locations but whose physical location was outside the target location at the time of searching.

Should you use People Searching for your targeted location?

  • This option lets you show your ads to anyone who searches on Google for your targeted location. If a person doesn’t specify a location in their search, then the system uses their physical location for targeting.

What happened if you use people in or who show interest in, excluded locations?

  • With this option, Google won’t show your ads to people who are likely to be located in your excluded location OR who showed interest in your excluded location.

What happened if you use people in excluded location?

  • Don’t show ads to people within your excluded locations
  • This option keeps your ads from appearing to people who are likely to be located in the areas you’ve excluded. People who are outside these areas may still see your ads.

What happened if you select advanced search?

11. What happened if you select advanced search

If you click on “Advanced search” you can also target your location by radius. For example, you are offering some study courses at your location then you have to target the particular radius of your city where your institute located.

10. Add Languages

12. Add Languages

If your ad is written in English, you should only target English-speaking users. If you have multiple versions of your ad, with different languages, you can change the language targeting for each one accordingly.

11. Select Audience

You must know your audience to succeed in marketing. If you don’t have a lot of data to work with, you can still run your ad for a while to gather some behavioral data.

After that, you can make adjustments to things like location targeting or keyword bids, depending on the search terms your target audience tends to use.

13. Select Audience

What is Audience search?

  • Audience search helps you quickly find audiences across all audience types, without having to enter specific categories. Audience search is available for all campaigns supporting audience targeting or observation. Using Audience search, you can find additional audiences that are also related to your search terms.

What is Browse Audience?

  • You can either browse audience that is searching for same product or offers you are providing.
  • This type of audience targeting help you to increase your reach to more targeted audience.

What is audience idea?

  • Audience ideas can help you select the right audience for your product or brand and improve your reach by surfacing audiences in your target market. You can see these audience suggestions in the “Ideas” tab. Your suggestions may, for example, be based on your audience selection, website, search campaigns, and other advertisers like you. Suggestions use large amounts of aggregated advertising data, which can help you reach the audience best for your ads and potentially discover new audiences.

What is Combined Audience?

Combined audience allows you to reach the right audiences by combining various audience attributes, such as detailed demographics and interests that represent segments of your target audience. You can target your audience based on your advertiser’s background, needs,

Note: Combined Audience is Only Available For Search network campaigns.

For Example,

Let’s say you are doing business of rental cars before combined audience you are able to target the audience in-market and also to those who have interest in traveling. By Normal targeting you might be targeting those audience who have interest in traveling might have their own cars, so it will be waste of budget to show Ads to them.

Now here combined audience solves this problem. You can exclude the audience Who have their own cars but mutual include those audience who have interest of traveling, don’t own car and in- Market.

  • Click on audiences and open the combined audiences menu.
14. combined audiences menu
  • Click on Combined audience. A new window will appear.
15. Click on Combined audience. A new window will appear
  • Click on + new combine audience to add your audience.

Under “Audience name”, enter a name for your new combined audience.

16. combine audience to add your audience

Under “Include people who match the following”, add the audiences that you want to target your ads to. You may enter a term or phrase, or browse based on: Who they are, what their interests and habits are, what they are researching or planning, or how they’ve interacted with your business.

At least one audience must be included before an exclusion is allowed. The exclusions only affect the combined audience and does not impact other audiences targeted in the campaign or ad group.

17. audiences targeted in the campaign or ad group

What Types of Audience Can You Target?

  • You can search by “Jeans” you will get different categories where interest of people going related to “Jeans” and then you can mark to include in your list.
  • Even you can browse different available categories and target those audience who have shown interest in that. It will help to improve your niche.
18. It will help to improve your niche

Targeting: it is “Target & Bid “

  • When you’re using the “Targeting” setting for your campaigns or ad groups (like age, affinity audiences, placements or remarketing), you’re telling Google Ads who you’d like to reach with your ads or where you’d like your ads to show on the internet.

   More Relevant audience = Less Wasted Clicks = Confirm Customer

For Example:

  • You want to show ads only to those audience who has interest in jeans and in market audience.
    so if search term matches with your keyword and that customer falls under your defined audience only he will be able to see the ad.

Make sure you have selected the right affinity audiences like Travel and Adventure are common but Travel and Technology are not, so it will not narrow your reach.

Observations: it is a “Bid only:

  • you don’t want to stick with the defined audience. Although you have a selected audience who has an interest in jeans and in market. If someone who does not fall under these audiences and still write search term which matches with your keyword, still your ad will trigger.

New audience = More Wasted Clicks = Unknown customer (But Chances to make them confirm)

Initially, it is recommended only so that you must get familiar with the audience and customer behavior of searching. Once you have enough understanding about your audience you can always go with targeting options.

12. Set a Budget

19. Set a Budget

Regardless of how big your business is, you’ll want to set a budget for your campaign. Use this calculation to determine your daily PPC budget:

(Monthly budget / Average number of days per month = Daily budget)

E.g. 1000/30.4 = $32.89)

Recommended budgets are based on the following factors:

  • Recent campaign performance
  • Current campaign budget
  • Keyword list
  • Campaign targeting settings

In the early days, focus on the cost of a single keyword, its search volume, and your target conversion rates to hit your goal.

13. Select Bidding

Manual bidding is a good choice for newcomers, as it helps effectively manage a daily budget. Automated bidding requires historical data, which will quickly drain your budget without savvy management.

20. Select Bidding

When you start bidding, you can set your focus from the following aspects:

  • Conversions – Track conversions on your Search ad campaign so that you can monitor performance against your goal.
  • Ad Schedule – Time your ads to display for specific days and hours according to your customers’ online activity or your business operating hours.
  • Ad rotation – You can use the ad rotation setting to specify how often you’d like ads in your ad group to be served relative to one another. it is good to have 3 quality ads in each adgroup. That way, the system can optimize your performance, and you can check your performance data to learn what message resonates best with your audience.

14. Ad Extensions

You can use Ad Extensions to provide additional relevant information about your business. For example, you can include your business location or phone number.

21. Ad Extensions

By clicking + ad extensions, you can also select different extensions for your campaign

  • Sitelink Extensions – Links that take users directly to a specific page on your site.
22. Sitelink Extensions
  • Callout Extensions – Additional descriptive text in standard text ads. For example, in the following example call-out extension are being used to tell people about the quality and speed of delivery: “100 Day Guarantee Free Click and Collect Next Day Delivery.”
23. Callout Extensions
  • Click-to-Text Extensions – Display a call to action (CTA) that drives CTR on mobile.
24. Click-to-Text Extensions
  • Call Extensions – Encourage people to call your business.
25. Call Extensions

On mobile devices, users will see a different layout:

26. On mobile devices, users will see a different layout
  • Review Extensions – Leverage social proof by showing your star rating, which attracts new customers.
27. Review Extensions
  • Structured snippet – highlight particular features of your product/service to increase engagement.
28. Structured snippet
  • App Extensions – Link to your app from a text ad.
29. App Extensions
  • Lead Form Extension – Attract customers with a CTA for a special offer. People must complete a lead form to access the offer.
30. Lead Form Extension
  • Message Extension – Let users send text messages through your ad to book appointments, get quotes, request service, etc.
31. Message Extension
  • Promotion Extension – Increase awareness of deals to improve your sales volume.
Extension
  • Price Extension – Offer transparency on pricing and encourage people to consider your products and services more.
Extension
  • Location Extensions – help people find your business with an address, map, and the distance from their current location.
Extension

15. Select Ad Group Type

Standard Ad Groups are the default setting in Google Ads, allowing you to create ad groups for your PPC campaigns with relevant keywords that trigger your product or services.

Extension

Dynamic Ad groups work with dynamic search ads (DSAs). These ads use a different form of targeting, so they require a separate Ad group.

16. Set up Ad Groups

Extension

In the case where you have multiple campaigns, you must select the right Search ad campaign to add your ad group.

  • Name the Ad Group
  • Select relevant keywords for the Ad Group
  • Determine Match Types for each keyword

1. Broad Match: As its name suggests, it is the keyword match type that allows you to reach the widest audience. When your keyword is Broad Match, your ads are eligible to appear whenever a user searches any word in your key phrase, in any order. It also allows misspellings and synonyms to trigger your ads to appear. It is the default match type.

For example: if you use broad match on the keyword “jeans”, your ad might show when a user searches for “jeans pants”, “denim jeans”, or “men’s jeans”.

2. Using Phrase Match: Your ad will only appear when a user searches for your exact keyword phrase, in its exact order, but maybe with some additional words at the beginning and the end of the query.

For Example: If you use the keyword “men’s jeans” in Phrase Match, your ads are eligible to show for users searching for “skinny men’s jeans”, “men’s jeans Nike”, “from where I can buy men’s jeans” but not for “men’s Nike jeans” or “jeans for men”.

Extension

3. Broad Match Modifier: Gives you the crazy reach of Broad Match keywords, but allows you to be more restrictive around the specific queries that will trigger your ad by appending a ‘+’ to the specific word in your keyword phrase that you want to lock in place. When you lock a word in place, you are telling Google that you only want your ad to show when that word appears in the search query.

For Example: if you use the keyword “+men’s +jeans”, then your advertisement is only triggered against those search queries in which the word “jeans” is present like “I want men’s jeans”, “men’s striped jeans” but not for “blue jeans”.

Extension

4. Exact Match: Triggers your ads when search queries match your exact keyword. However, your ad will show when people search for closely related terms to your product or service or use synonyms of your keyword. It may trigger for misspellings as well. This filters out a lot of irrelevant traffic, but sometimes sacrifices qualified users too. To use this type, place parentheses “[ ]” around your keywords.

For example: if you use keyword [Men’s Jeans]. than your advertisement is triggered against those search queries which exactly matches your keyword or may have synonyms like [Men’s Wearable] as your keywords.

Extension

17. Create Ads

Extension

Now, let’s look at the creation process.

Headline

This is the first part of your ad most people notice. With text ads in a Search ad campaign, you have three headlines, each of which offers you just 30 characters to compel users.

So, you must make it count!

Description

Highlight information about your product or service here, and include a CTA to encourage people to take action. Whether it’s a promote to “Buy Now” or “Call Us,” a CTA can have a significant impact on consumers’ decision-making.

Length limits

length-limits

Final URL

Include your business website URL to give people an idea of where they will land when they click on your ad.

Display Path

The path fields are part of the display URL in search network ads, which is typically displayed in green text below the headline and above the description. This path text doesn’t have to match the exact language of your display URL.

Ad URL option

Perhaps you’re already using an external analytics system to track key metrics like mobile clicks. You can set up tracking within Google Ads with the different URL options.

Tracking template

As mentioned earlier, you can add tracking information here, which will be added to your final URL when your ad receives clicks. Any tracking template created at the account, campaign, or ad group level will automatically apply to all other ads at that respective level.

Custom parameter

Custom parameters consist of two parts:

  1. Name: Up to 16 alphanumeric characters
  2. Value: Up to 250 characters; can contain any characters (including |; _ / ^ (!), If you have a proper keyword ID and want to track your keyword, you can use a custom parameter as  {_mykwid}=1234.

Final URL suffix

The final URL suffix field allows you to enter parameters that will be attached to the end of your landing page URL to track information. So, when someone clicks on your ad, they will be directed to https://xyz.com/?x=y while the tracking is processed in the background.

18. Confirmation

Extension

In the end, before you launch your search ad campaign, you should review all your campaign settings, your ad, and the billing information.

Once everything is checked and confirmed, select continue to campaign.

If you spot something you want to change, select Go back and navigate to the area you wish to edit.

When you return to this step, select continue to campaign to run your successful campaign.

Wrap Up:

So, in 18 short and (relatively) straightforward steps, you can create a Search ad campaign in Google Ads.

Google Ads isn’t hard to get started, but you must be ready to monitor and test your campaign regularly. With this guide, your PPC ads will get off to the best possible start.

You can learn about campaign optimization through our  Ultimate Guide: Ultimate Campaign Optimization: 5 Core Areas and 20+ Tricks.

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