How To Advertise On Google (Steps To Get Started in 2024)
Advertising on Google through search, display, and video campaigns can help expand your business reach and attract qualified customers. But where do you start if you’ve never tried to advertise on Google?
We’ve put together this guide to walk you through the main steps of creating your first Google Ads campaign, from setting up your account to optimizing your first ads. Let’s get started!
Why Businesses Advertise on Google
Over 90% of online search happens on Google. So placing ads here gives you access to people already searching for products or information related to your business.
Other benefits of advertising on Google include:
Massive Reach: Over 3.5 billion Google searches occur globally every single day.
Qualified Traffic: You can target ads to people actively looking for specific products, services or local options.
Measurable Results: Google Ads provides data like cost-per-click, conversions, search impression share, helping optimize campaigns.
Flexible Budgets: Available for businesses of all sizes, you can start with as little as $100 per month.
For the greatest chance at reaching relevant customers, Google Ads is essential. Now let’s get into setting up your first campaigns...
Step 1: Sign Up for a Google Ads Account
The first step is to create your Google Ads account which allows you to build and manage advertising campaigns:
Go to ads.google.com and click Start Now to begin the sign up process.
You will need to verify and connect your:
Billing & Payment Method: Credit or debit card required. Campaign spend will be deducted from here.
Business Email Address: Use a main company email rather than personal.
Business Info: Official address, phone number and tax ID.
Agree to Google’s policies and terms for advertisers.
Consider setting up conversion tracking now too under Tools > Conversions. This tracks desired actions like sales. More on tracking later.
Once you’re done, feel free to explore the Google Ads dashboard and familiarize yourself with the layout.
Step 2: Establish Your Campaign Goals, Audience & Budget
Before creating your first campaign, you need to make a few strategic decisions:
Set Your Campaign Goals
Be specific about the results you want. Common options include:
Website Traffic: Get more visitors to specified pages.
Phone Calls: Generate more inbound calls.
Store Visits: Drive foot traffic to brick and mortar shops.
Service Signups: Get more users for an app, software or membership.
Product Sales: Directly increase online revenue.
Video Views: Increase YouTube subscribers and viewership.
Decide which 1-2 goals are most important so you can optimize ads accordingly.
Define Your Target Audience
Who exactly do you want your ads to reach? Think about:
Location
Age range
Gender
Specific interests / hobbies
Search history or browsing behavior
And more
The better you understand the audience, the more targeted (and effective) your ads can be.
Set Campaign Budgets
One of the first big decisions is: what can you reasonably afford to spend? When just starting out, aim lower to test the waters. Although small budgets can hinder a specialist’s ability to gather data, for beginners, it’s important to get to know the platform and formats before investing large amounts of money.
Some things to consider:
Single Campaign Launch Budget: For your first campaign, you can start as low as $100/month. Test what works on a small scale before increasing spend.
Cost Per Click (CPC): Be calculated about what you can afford per click in addition to overall budget. Average CPC varies widely by industry and competition levels, anywhere from $1 - $50+. You can check what to expected by using Google’s Keyword Planner tool located inside the Google Ads dashboard.
You can set automated Rules to help you avoid overspending or wasting budget. The Rules tab is located under Tools & Settings.
Budgets can be raised at any point once you’re satisfied with early performance results. If you want a more in-depth look at Google Ads costs, feel free to check out this article.
Step 3: Explore Google Ads Options
One great aspect of Google Ads is the variety available – you have multiple formats tailored to achieve different goals. Assess which 1-2 options align closest to your targets and priorities:
Google Search Ads
The most common type – search ads appear beside Google search engine results pages (SERPs) based on someone’s query. They work on an auction model, where advertisers bid for ad positioning.
Best for promoting products, services, brands people are actively seeking out. Excellent for local promotions too. Expect to pay more for popular commercial keywords that attract lots of advertiser competition.
Display Ads
Display ads place highly visual banners and videos across Google’s massive display network spanning:
Over 2 million+ websites and blogs
650,000+ mobile apps
YouTube videos
This format allows you to target based on topics, placements, audience categories, keywords and more.
Best for brand awareness and reach. Display works well for detailed product/service promotion too. You can use this format to retarget people who already visited your site to help convert customers.
Shopping Campaigns
Designed to highlight catalogs of products available for purchase directly on Google. Allows customers to explore features, compare pricing, and checkout faster.
Best for ecommerce brands, retail stores, or marketplaces selling directly online. Reach people during the middle funnel product research phase. Shopping also syndicates eligible products into Google Search and Display ads. Must have an online store connected via feed file. Use Google Merchant Center to take advantage of this format.
Video Ads
Short promotional videos appearing before, during or after YouTube clips and publisher content. Similar targeting and bidding model to display ads (although it does include a wider range of formats and optimization options).
Best for YouTube presence, brand awareness, product interest. You can expect higher CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and more manual work relating to “cleaning up” the placements where you ads appear (Google doesn’t do a great job
There are even more formats like app campaigns, Demand Gen (previously known as Discovery) and Performance Max. But most newcomers find success picking 1-3 formats closely matching goals.
Step 4: Set Up Conversion Tracking
Want to properly measure which ads drive desired actions accurately? Conversion tracking is an absolute must.
A conversion represents any desired outcome from your ads across three categories:
Leads / Micro Conversions
Newsletter sign ups
Contact form fills
Content downloads
Sales Conversions
Online purchases
Phone orders
Retail store transactions
Custom Conversions
App installs
In-app actions (tutorial completes, level ups)
Video views, post likes etc
When setting up tracking, tag key pages on your website that show when conversions occur:
Contact pages
Pricing / checkout pages
Registration / download forms
Thank you pages
The two main options that Google provides are Google Ads tags and Google Analytics. We recommend ensuring that both platforms track conversion separately as opposed to tracking via Google Analytics 4 and uploading the conversions into Google Ads. Setting up conversion tracking directly through the Google Ads tag allows you to utilize additional capabilities such as Enhanced Conversions.
Tagging forms and thank you pages allow seeing which ads result in conversions within your Google Ads or Analytics account. It connects the dots from click to the actual conversion, attributing value to your campaigns.
Step 4: Monitor Campaign Analytics & Optimize
Since the approach to choosing the right format and setting up campaigns can vary based on the situation, we’re just going to assume that you’ve finally done it. You’ve launched your first campaign! What now? Well… soon, data streams into your new Google Ads interface showing:
Impressions
Clicks
Average CPC
Conversions
Cost Per Conversion
Crunch this performance data to make informed decisions on optimizing daily. Common improvements include:
Adding new closely relevant keywords. Pause poor performers.
Expanding your Negative Keyword lists based on any irrelevant search terms you see in the reports.
Increasing or decreasing the budget as well as adjusting the bidding strategy if necessary.
Ensuring pages reinforce ad messaging and user experience after clicking. Add more context through page copy and visuals. Evaluate the effect of these changes using on-page statistics like Avg. Session Duration in Google Analytics.
Set email reports for daily, weekly or monthly recaps allowing you to spot trends. Overtime data shows what works – keep refining your Google Ads campaigns around the best opportunities.
Next Steps: Expanding Your Account
Once confident running your first campaign, it’s time to build out a robust Google Ads presence:
Launch search campaigns for other products, service categories and misspellings.
Explore display, shopping, performance max and more to diversify formats.
Create audiences from your existing website visitors and customers. Make ads hyper-relevant.
Explore different bidding strategies.
While the platform keeps evolving, the core goal remains converting customers with the right message at the optimal cost basis.
Conclusion
We hope that you can use this article to launch fully-functional Google Ads campaigns built to drive business growth as a first-time advertiser. While success doesn’t happen overnight, you could see returns in as little as 2-3 months by tracking real performance data and optimizing your campaigns. We always remind our clients that it’s not just the setup that matters. The optimizations that happen along the way are the real money-makers!
Stick to core fundamentals: specific targeting, direct response ad creative, landing pages informing users, and smart budget management. Overtime, results compound allowing you to scale campaigns further.
Remember Google Ads success relies on continuous testing. Keep improving campaigns and writing ad copy tailored to who your desired customers are.
If you need an extra hand setting up and optimizing Google Ads or want to discuss if paid search is right for your business, feel free to reach out to our team for a free consultation.
This article was written with the support of A.I. technology.
