3.5 billion searches are made every day on Google Search. People use Google to search for information, shop online, compare product prices, get directions, learn something new and more. With Google Search Ads your ads show up beside search results when your target demographic is looking for the products or services you offer.

• How can you drive more traffic to your site, service or product?
• Where do you want your ads seen?
• How much do you want to invest?
• What do you want to share in your ads?
• What keywords will match your customer’s search terms?

Based on your answers to your questions above it’s time to customize your campaign.

1. Set a Goal: Sales, Leads or Website Traffic. For beginningers we recommend opting for web traffic.
2. Set Network Settings: These determine where you want your ad to appear. With Google Search Network your ad will appear on google search sites, Google Play, Google Shopping, Google Maps and non google search sites like CNN that partner with Google to show Search Ads. We recommend opting out of Google’s Search Partners.
3. Display Ads: You can opt in or out of display ads. We recommend that you opt out of display ads for your first campaign.

In the next section we’ll go over categories you’ll want to customize to the traits of your target audience for each ad. The good news is, if your site’s ads are not showing for a keyword, you will not be charged. However, you want to make sure your ads are showing to your target audience so they can start developing a relationship with your brand or completing transactions to increase your revenue. It’s also important to make sure your ads are not showing to those outside of your target audience. This is because you’ll pay for the ad to be displayed or clicked, yet because the branding of the site and products do not align with this user, there will be no ROI action like signing up for a news letter, further engaging with your brand and eventually making purchases.

• Device: Customize your campaign based on device: desktop, tablet or mobile. Work with your software developer to make sure your landing page and search ad copy is optimized for all devices. If you create separate landing pages or ad copy for different devices you should make sure your ad is exclusive to those devices.
• Location: Customize your campaign based on geography. Select up to 20 countries, cities or areas to target. You can select to target people in these locations or those interested in these locations (not in but search for information about these regions). We recommend for your first campaign to opt out of “interested in”. If you are running different campaigns or ads for different locations make sure for each ad the proper location is set.
• Language: Google ads don’t automatically translate to different languages. If you are targetting target demographics who speak various languages make sure you write separate ads and target for the given language.
• Bid strategy: controls manner in which you pay for users to interact with ad
• Budget: Average amount you want to spend each day on campaign. This can change at any time.
• Ad extensions: Add information like location info, links to pages on website and a phone number
• Start and end date: your campaign start and end dateAd scheduling: choose certain days or hours of the week for ads to show

For each ad group you need to create specific text ads and a list of search keywords. Keywords are words and phrases that prompt ads to show up.

It’s best to create ad groups around themes or products as it allows for message precision. For each ad group:

1. Create a unique list of keywords: Think about search terms people may use when researching or looking for products
2. Decide bid amounts: This is the max amount you want to pay when customer clicks ad
3. Create a set of text ads This includes:

• Headlines to catch customer’s attention
• a URL which is for the page they will reach and the vanity URL which helps with SEO. Make sure to put your keywords in the vanity URL
• Descriptions which are used to highlight details of offers

Google offers a service called dynamic text ads where ad copy including headlines, vanity URL and descriptions are automatically aggregated from the content of your website. Likewise, a list of keywords is automatically generated as well. As the ads generated from this feature do not align with target audience and brand, we recommend not using this setting.

Google will tout that dynamic search ads can show you profitable search terms you would never have known to try to bid for. And while its true that 15% of all google searches daily have never been seen before, if you do proper research and use the appropriate keyword types with a trusted partner these 15% of searches should not be a problem to capture.

If you have an hour a week of bandwidth to create and monitor the ads yourself, this is a much more cost effective method. If you do not have the bandwidth  google ads experts like Stories with Substance can create and monitor your ads for you.

No. The decision by google whether to show your ad or not and their order for bided keywords is a complicated algorithm. This partly depends on how much money you are bidding for the ads, but also how well your website functions, ad click through rates and the relevancy of your brand to the query. The score google uses to rank how likely your ad will be seen is called the “Ad Rank”. Learn More about Quality Score. Make sure you work with a trusted partner like Stories with Substance who understands the bidding process.

When looking to work with a keyword expert like Stories with Substance, make sure they can both use data to develop keywords and think like your customers would when they are looking for your products and services.

If you business goals are to get more visitors to your website, you should use more broad match terms. If your goals are to reach more customers who are ready to purchase, narrow match may be more effective.

“The broader match types (broad and broad match modifier) help you discover terms that you might not be aware of already, whereas exact match is good for those search terms you know your customers will be using when they’re searching for a product or service that you want to provide specific messaging for.”

These are the five match type options for keywords from broad to narrow:

• Default Setting
• Shows ads if a keyword or any variations like misspellings, synonyms or related searches are included in users search terms
• Good if you want to spend less time building exhaustive keyword lists
• Will teach people not necessarily searching for your specific brand or business – casting a wide net

• Adding a + sign in front of a keyword turns it into a board match modifier
• Ads appear only if keyword or close variables are part of the search term
• Certain concepts related to keywords must be present in searches to display ad

• Place quotes around the keywords makes it a phrase match.
• Ads appear only if the keywords within the quotes or close variations match a user’s search term.
• There cannot be any extra words between the user’s search terms.
• Extra words can appear before or after the phrase match

• place brackets around the keywords.
• Ads only show if search means the same thing as keyword.
• Includes close variations of keyword like misspellings, plurals and synonyms.
• There can’t be any extra words before or after search terms

• How to use match types so ads don’t show up on wrong searches
• Adding a minus sign in front of a keyword makes it a negative keyword meaning ads wont show if someone includes that negative keyword in their search