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In this training, I’m going to give you a crash course tutorial on Google ads. We’re going to take a look at the Google ads dashboards that you’re comfortable navigating it. I’m going to show you how to set up Google ads conversion tracking, which is a very, very important step that’s required before you start running any campaigns. We’ll talk about how to set up your first campaign, what the campaign level is, what an ad set is, what an ad is. Now, I’m not going to cover everything in this tutorial. This is a crash course, but my goal is by the end of this tutorial, you’re going to be able to set up your first basic Google ads search campaign. Then in follow-up trainings, we’ll dive deeper into the details of how to actually manage those campaigns, optimize for results, manage an entire account for a company, and so on and so forth. Let’s go ahead and dive right in. We’re going to start here in the Google ads dashboard. I’m going to make the assumption that you are able to just follow Google’s very basic instructions on actually setting up and creating a Google ads account. Once you follow those step-by-step instructions, you will find yourself here inside of the Google ads dashboard. Now, sometimes Google ads, I can’t remember, specifically, but sometimes it goes right into trying to get you to create your first campaign.
0:01:15
If you can just skip that process and just get to the dashboard, that’s probably the best way to go. Then you’ll be able to pick up from the tutorial and go from there. If for some reason, it forces you into creating your first campaign, you can skip ahead to the campaign steps where I actually create the first campaign and you can follow along from there and then come back and watch this part, just do whatever you need to do. You can fast forward and rewind and all that good stuff, skip around in the video as needed. Okay, so this is your dashboard. We’re going to talk about these two columns in just a second once we start to get a first campaign rolling. But what I want to start with is this area up here and we’re going to click specifically on tools and settings. And remember, this is a crash course. So we’re going kind of straight to exactly what’s needed to get your first campaign off the ground. Conversion tracking is the number one thing to set up before you start doing anything else in Google ads. Because if you don’t have the campaign tracking setup, everything else is useless, right? So we have to get that setup first and it’s not exactly super straight forward. In fact, a lot of the UX involved with Google products is awful and I say this time and time again. So, you know, it really just helps to follow these crash course tutorials. So that you don’t have to figure this stuff out on your own. And I’m going to make it a point to just kind of go straight through this hitting all of the very important points and not really adding any fluff into this crash course. So we’re going to go right to under measurement conversions.
0:02:50
And you’re going to basically see this no active conversion actions. We’re going to create a new conversion action. And then you’re going to be met with these four options. We can track something on our website, in our app or phone calls or we can import stuff. We’re just going to keep it nice and basic and we’re going to do website. Next thing is we’re going to select our goal. And the campaign that I’m going to be setting up is actually for digital gravy, my agency. And I don’t have everything prepped like a custom landing page and all of that good stuff. But we’re just going to set up a basic campaign that sends traffic to my homepage, which is basically designed as a landing page to get web design clients and SEO. And we’ll talk about the actual campaign structure in just a minute and how we’re going to separate these things out. But we’re basically going to be sending traffic to my homepage to start out with. All right. So we’re going to and my goal, by the way, with a campaign like that is to get leads, right? So I’m going to come down into the leads categories. And I’m going to see what’s available to me. And it looks like submit lead form is probably the most obvious thing to choose. So I’m going to go ahead and submit lead form. Now you can click this little down arrow. You’re going to see add submit lead form to account default goals. Basically, that’s what I want to do. Conversion name is going to be I can say submit lead form or you can name this anything custom that you want here. I’ll just leave it as submit lead form for now. Or I’ll say main lead form. Okay. That’s that’s what we’ll do. Maybe I have other lead forms at some point in the future. And I want to be able to differentiate those. Even though they’re all going to be in the category of submit lead form, this gives me more granular details about which lead form was actually submitted. All right. And then and the actual goal lead form that I’m trying them to try to get them to submit, right? Which would be this one. So if they go to let’s talk and they switch over to form and they fill this out, that’s going to be the conversion that I’m tracking. Now I have it a little bit more complicated here because I also have a calendar that they can use to just straight away book a call and they never actually have to fill out the form. So I’m going to need to set up a separate conversion tracking for talent.
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However, we’re going to talk about that in a different tutorial because again, this is crash course. Most of you are not going to have this and you’re not going to have dual actions and things like that. I just want to keep it nice and simple. And we’re going to track to this form submission right here. Okay. So next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to come down to value. And I’m going to say to use the same value for every conversion because a lead as a lead as a lead as a lead and I don’t really know anything else about these people. So I don’t know how one could be valued more than the other. And I’m just going to put a value of let’s say 35 dollars. So I’m going to say that a lead is worth 35 dollars to me. Now you’re going to have to run numbers for the client that you’re working with and determine what is the actual lead value. And I’m just putting a random arbitrary number here. This is not anything that I’ve calculated. But what I would recommend is that you use a value. Don’t click. Don’t use a value. And it even says right there. This is not recommended. Right. If you put the value in here and it is an accurate value, you’re going to be able to look in your reports and get a more accurate picture of your row as like your return on ad spend and things like that. Okay. So now we’re going to come down and this is another important section where it’s asking, you know, when do you want to count a conversion? Is it every time somebody arrives on that conversion page that we’re going to be tracking or should you only count one of those visits? And for something like this that is a lead form, you definitely want to select one because if somebody refreshes that thank you page for some reason, I don’t know why they would, but let’s say they were frustrated over and over and over again, it’s going to track every single refreshes a conversion. You only want to select one visit from that person to that page as a conversion.
0:06:48
Now, if this was a product that you were selling, it’s like, well, we want to track that every time they come back and buy the product, we want to track that. But for leads, it’s only once that we want to track that. Next is the click through conversion window. I typically leave this at 30 days. I leave this at three days. And then the view through conversion window, I leave it at one day. And then the attribution model is there’s a few different things that you can choose here. So there’s data driven and it says this uses your accounts conversion data to calculate the actual contribution of each ad interaction across the conversion path. Or you can say last click. And let me see if it’s going to give us the, there we go. Last click gives all credit for the conversion to the last clicked ad. So if they see one ad one day and maybe they even click on an ad and come to your website and view around, but they don’t actually convert and then they see your ad again the next day, they click on it and then they convert. It’s going to attribute that to the last ad that was clicked. You can also attribute to the first ad that was clicked. I don’t like doing the first click conversion process because it doesn’t really tell you which ad was effective and actually driving the conversion. It only tells you which ad was most effective at first attracting the person to the brand or the page or whatever you’re, whatever you’re doing, right?
0:08:07
You can research all of these either use data driven or last click. For this one, I’m just going to make it very simple and choose last click. We’re going to create and continue this. Hopefully, create and continue this. Thank you, Google. All right. It’s going to take us to the next page and we have a few options here. We can install the tag ourselves. Let me dismiss this. Okay. We can install the tag yourself. We can email the tag or we can use Google tag manager. I would highly, highly, highly recommend that you use Google tag manager. Now, we also have Cloud Flares Zeraz, which is very new and I’m actually starting to migrate a lot of my sites over to Zeraz. I’m going to use Google tag manager in this Crash Course tutorial because it is the standard. I will do a separate training on how to install Google ads tracking using Zeraz. So we’re going to choose use Google tag manager and it’s going to give us this data right here. Now, this is where we have to hop over to Google Tag Manager. I already have an account created with Google Tag Manager. If you don’t, it’s as simple as going to TagManager.google.com. Follow the steps to create a new account and a container and you’re going to get your container as your website basically and you’re going to eventually arrive at this dashboard right here. I’m very confident that you can just follow the steps for Google Tag Manager and get to this part right here and this is where the hard part actually starts. So we’re not going to waste everybody’s time going through the, you know, click, click, click process of creating a Google Tag Manager account.
0:09:41
Now, if you’re an agency, by the way, you created a Tag Manager account for your agency and then you can put a bunch of different containers inside that account for all of your clients, okay? So that’s how I would recommend setting that up. All right, so here is Google Tag Manager, which this is going to have to be a Crash Course on Google Tag Manager as well. You have tags, triggers and variables. For the most part, you’re going to be using tags and triggers. Tags, you can basically think of as like code integrations. So if you take a code snippet or something and put it in WP code box or scripts organizer, that’s like a tag. Think of that as a tag. And then you have a trigger, which is like, when do we actually fire that tag? When do we actually fire that piece of code? That could be on a per page basis. It could be on a button click. It could be on a lot of different things. So that’s the difference between tags and triggers. The only real difference between this and WP code box, for example, or scripts organizer is you’re not always copying a code block and then inserting it, right? There’s a lot of pre-made tags that Google Tag Manager gives you access to. And that’s what we’re going to be using here. So I’m going to go ahead first and we’re going to go to admin. The Google Tag Manager is like, it’s you have to install it on your website. If you don’t install Google Tag Manager on the website, it can’t inject these tags dynamically. It can’t control your website from the Google Tag Manager container. So one of the steps in the process that I will show you is installing Google Tag Manager. You’re going to get to this part here. It’s basically like installing Google Analytics or a Facebook Pixel or anything like that, except there’s two different steps. So we’re going to, we have to install something in the head and we have to install something in the body. So I’m going to go ahead and grab this code that goes in the head. And I’m going to go into my dashboard on digital gravy and I’m going to bring up WP code box here and I’m going to call this snippet GTM head and I’m going to paste my code right. Actually, I’m going to switch this from PHP to HTML and I’m going to paste that Google Tag Manager code that’s supposed to go in the header. So there it is. I want this snippet to run everywhere and I’m going to go ahead and enable this code. Right. Let me save it first. Think you have to save. I’m new to WP code box. So I’m still getting the perfect workflow down here.
0:11:58
There we go. So once you save it, you can enable it. There’s also an upload to cloud feature. I wouldn’t recommend that for these types of code because this is unique to this website. Right. All right. So that is now installed in my header. I’m going to click on new snippet and I’m going to say GTM and this is going to be body. And the only difference here is I’m going to choose HTML but I’m going to choose the footer which is going to put it in my body. And then I’m going to go back and I’m going to grab this code, the body tag code and I’m going to paste that in. I’m going to go ahead and hit save. And then once that saves, we can enable it. Now it is enabled. So I have got my both code snippets running which means that my Google Tag Manager is installed and we’ll be able to verify this in just a minute. Okay. So the next, oh, you can see a bunch of containers here. All right. So we’re going to choose digital gravy and we’re back to where we were. So now Google Tag Manager is installed and we are ready to rock and roll. Okay. So now what we need to do is go to our tags section. The thing about triggers is that you can actually get to them through the tag installation process because Google knows, hey, if you’re adding a tag, we’re going to need a trigger. If you don’t have a trigger, we’re going to, we’ll let you create one. You can kind of do it all through the process of tags, which is kind of convenient. It’s one of the smarter things that they did, even though the screens start to become very inception like you’re going to, if you’ve ever seen the movie inception, you’re going to know exactly what I mean in just a second. It’s a little annoying.
0:13:27
So I’m going to go under tags. You’re going to see this container has no tags. Click the new button to create one. So we’re going to hit new and you’re just, you’re just met with a bunch of these different blank boxes. It doesn’t really give you any, what do I do here? What am I supposed to do with this? So I think you’re going to find this crash course very helpful. First thing I need to do is give this a title. I give this a name. So I’m going to call this Google ads tracking. And then I’m going to click on the tag configuration box. Why is it a giant box? I don’t know why it’s a giant box, honestly, but I’m going to click on it. And then I’m going to come over here and we’re going to say Google ads. Let’s see, where are we? Google Analytics for Google ads conversion tracking. Sorry, it was right there in front of my face. So Google ads conversion tracking is what I’m choosing. Remember I said, instead of copying and pasting code snippets, you’re basically using a preset for this conversion integration. So now what I’m going to do is hop back to the Google ads dashboard and see that data that it was giving me. And there’s two really important things that I need. One is the conversion ID. I’m going to copy that. Now I’m going to go to tag manager and paste that conversion ID in. I’m going to go back and I’m going to grab the conversion label. And I’m going to hop over and paste that in. Very, very important. You can put your conversion value in here. I don’t think it actually matters. I think it pulls this from over there where we set it up before based on the ID and the conversion label. But I’m pretty much done here with my tag configuration. So now I’m going to use the triggering box. We don’t want to just say, even say, hey, we’re done here. We haven’t actually triggered this conversion code anywhere on our website yet. So I’m going to go to triggering. And here’s where we have a preset. You’re always going to have all pages here. What I really need though is I need to go back and figure out where my lead form takes people when they’re done. So I’m going to go into WS form. I’m going to click on the inquiry form. That’s the one that we’re trying to track here. And I’m going to go up to conversion actions. And I’ve man, I got alarms going off everywhere, right? I wish they wouldn’t interrupt me.
0:15:42
All right. So we’re going to look at we have save submission, show message, send email. Wow, we don’t even have a thank you page yet. And sometimes you’ll find this out, right? Because this uses Ajax to basically say, thanks, your form was submitted. Yada, yada, yada. But it doesn’t actually take them anywhere. So that’s a huge problem. So I’m going to add a conversion step here or a an action step at the end of my form. And this is going to be to redirect. And I actually want to see what my flow is like. It’s going to be inquiry. And then thank you. Or oh, there is a page. It’s just not set to take people there. You’re all set. We received your inquiry. Okay, great. So it does exist. All I have to do is in my form, I have to take people there. So yeah, there we go. We’re going to take them there when they fill out the form. So we’re going to go ahead and publish. And now I have my URL as well. So I can go back into tag manager. And what I want to do is track a custom page. I want to fire this only on one page of my website, which is that thank you page that we just found conveniently. It was already there for us. But you’re arriving to a page like this and you’re like, what do I do? I can only choose these options. Well, no. Google decided that the best UX for this screen was to put a tiny little blue plus sign in the top right hand corner where you’re not looking. Right? You’re looking everywhere for what do I do next? And it’s up here in the right hand corner next to search, by the way. Don’t even know why I’d want to search because I haven’t really created much of anything yet. But here it is. So I’m going to go ahead and create the or click the plus sign to create a trigger. And then I’m going to name this trigger. And this is going to be my lead main lead form. Thank you page. Okay. So main lead form. Thank you page.
0:17:25
I called it my main lead form in Google ads. So I’m going to call it the main lead form. Thank you page here. And then I’m going to click the giant white box again. And I’m going to choose page view. And then after I choose page view, another kind of, you know, great little hidden UX is I have to click on, well, some page views instead of all page views. I click on some. And then instead of the host name, because who wants that, I’m going to choose page path. And I’m going to do page path contains. And by the way, it gives me an error, right? I’m just trying to do the thing, but it’s telling me there’s an error is because I haven’t put anything in yet. So I am going to take out my domain. And I’m just going to say if the page contains inquiry, thanks, then it’s going to fire this, it’s going to trigger this tag, which is the conversion tracking tag. Okay. So here’s important thing. I wouldn’t put a forward slash at the end, because sometimes you use UTMs. They’re going to end like this. And if it has to contain another forward slash, it’s actually not going to track. So leave this open ended. That would be my appeal to you right here, because if there’s other characters and things like that, we still want it to be able to track. Okay. So this is inquiry slash thanks. Page path contains inquiry slash thanks mainly form. Thank you. Everything looks good. I’m going to go ahead and hit save. And now you can kind of see an overview of what we’ve accomplished here. Here’s my conversion ad tracking with my ID in my label. That’s unique to this particular conversion that I’m asking Google ads to track. And then it’s triggering on the main lead form.
0:18:59
Thank you, page. And I’m going to go ahead and hit save now. Now believe it or not, we are not done. There is another step that nobody tells you about unless you follow tutorials like this or you do a lot of reading or what have you, you have to add another tag. So we’re going to hit new. And we’re going to call this the Google ads conversion linker. And then under tag configuration, we’re going to choose conversion linker and enable linking on all page URLs, enable linking across domains. Now we don’t really need to worry about that right now. And then the triggering is going to be all pages. So the conversion linker, which is required to make conversion tracking work, needs to be available to us on all pages. It doesn’t mean we’re going to fire a conversion on all pages. It just means the conversion linker is available to us on all pages, which by default, whenever we create a custom thank you page or something that we’re tracking, it’s going to be there as well, right? So I’m going to go ahead and hit save. And you should have this. You should have the Google ads conversion linker and you should have the Google ads tracking code that you just installed. Note that when you do this through Google tag manager, you don’t need a global site code for Google ads like you do for Google analytics and things like that. It’s all happens. All the magic happens through the conversion linker and the Google ads tracking code that you’re installing, which is only firing on that one page you’re tracking conversions on. When you are done here, you’re going to click the blue submit button. And you’re going to see this screen right here. And this is another screen that just scares people. They’re like, I have no idea what’s about to happen.
0:20:35
Basically, nothing is published onto our site yet. I’ve created all of these things, but we haven’t pushed any of these changes to our actual website. This is the area where you’re doing this. So you can give every push a version name. So in case you push some sort of code to your website that blows things up, you can always come back and undo them. And you know exactly what broke. And if you’re working in Teams, this is very valuable because you might have multiple people in here adding and removing things. And you want basically a change log or a history of what’s going on inside the account. So I’m just going to say added Google ads tracking. And you can make descriptions if you want to, but it’s not really necessary for right now. I’m going to go ahead and hit publish. And there you go. You get a little version somewhere. You’ve added two tags, one trigger, five variables. All right. And a bunch of other nonsense that you don’t need. Now if you need to go back, you can just click on the workspace tab, right? Like it kind of, you have to see that there’s tabs here for admin and versions and workspace. You want to do all of your tags set up and all of that in your workspace. Okay. And then if you see an overview, it’s like, oh, I still don’t see anything. I don’t know what’s going on. Well, it’s under tags. I can see the tags I added under triggers. I can see the triggers I added. Again, lots of UX problems with Google stuff, but we’re working through it. And you have somebody like me showing you the way with these crash course tutorials. So you don’t have to beat yourself over the head like I did. I’ve got a lot of bruises and brain damage from working with Google products. So all right. Anyway, we’re set up basically, right? Now, can we test these things out? Can we see if stuff is working? And the answer is yes. So what I’m going to do is go to, I’m going to have you go. And this is another kind of hidden tool. They don’t really just make this obvious for you, but you can go to tagassistant.google.com.
0:22:26
And you’re going to add your domain where we just added Google tag manager and all that good stuff. Now, the only thing I may need to do is in the back end, before we do this, I want to make sure that my caches are cleared, all that good stuff. So I’m going to flush the object cache. I’m going to purge my caches. And this all hooks up to grid pain. So it’s doing, I don’t have to log into grid pain to do all this stuff. Okay. So now the caches should be cleared. I’m going to add a domain. This is going to be digital gravy.co. And I’m going to connect. And here we go. Look. So basically, what it does is it pulls up your website with a tag assistant overlay. And it’s very conveniently telling you, and if you flip back to this screen, you can hit continue. And I’m going to say debug live version. Let’s see. Okay. So let me go back here. Tagassistant connected. And then it’s going to give you a log. There we go. So it’s firing the Google ads conversion linker. And it’s saying tags not fired is Google ads tracking. Now, and it’s saying that this conversion linker fired one time. Why isn’t the Google ads conversion tracking firing? Because we’re not yet viewing the page that has the tracking code on it. Remember, we’re only tracking conversions on one important page. So I’m going to go to inquiry. And you can just actually jump out of here. You don’t even need to like go through the process that people would go to. You can just do inquiry. Thanks. And I’ll put a forward slash just to see if it actually tracks and we’ll go to view that page. And all right, so we’re on the thank you page. And what I’m going to do is hop back here. And now you can see in this window, tags fired Google ads tracking, Google ads conversion linker. So this is now both of them are firing the Google ads tracking fired one time. The conversion linker is now fired two times for this visitor. This is a really important tool for verifying that your tracking is actually working. But we’ve done our job. We’ve we’ve added Google ads conversion tracking. So one of the biggest hurdles for setting up Google ads and getting Google ads running is now done. Now if you’re coming into an existing Google ads account, you’re like, oh, somebody else set up the tracking. And I don’t know if it was set up properly. No problem. You’ve got the handy tag assistant tool tagassistons.google.com fire up the website and that and go navigate to the goal conversion pages and see if they did their setup properly. And you can verify that it’s working before you dive in and actually start running ads. Okay. So I know I’m confident we’ve got that all setup. I can actually close Google tag manager now. And I’m just going to leave up my website. We’re going to go back into Google ads. And I’m going to hit next on this. And it says you’ve set up your main lead form conversion action. All right. So we’re going to hit done. And then you’re going to see that conversion action right there. Okay. I’m going to close this nice help window. And then we’re going to go back. Okay. Now it’s time to really get started. So I’m going to create my first campaign. We’re going to go immediately to the campaign dashboard. And then I’m going to click the plus sign.
0:25:30
Very important that you know the plus sign is here because this thing won’t be here once there’s a campaign there. We’re going to hit new campaign. And then we’re just going to follow the steps. Now what did I set up lead conversion tracking through a main lead form? So obviously I want leads. You’re going to see a lot of different options here. This is a crash course on getting leads on Google ads because that is what most people want to do. I don’t do a lot of e-commerce sites. So we’re not going to be doing sales and things like that. But I made due tutorials on that in the future. But if you want to get leads for clients, then this is where you want to be. So we’re going to click on leads. We’re going to come down and you’re going to see use these conversion goals to improve leads. It already knows yes, submit lead forms. Remember we put our conversion in the submit lead forms category. And it’s showing you there’s one action there main lead form unverified value $35. Now it says unverified because nobody’s actually been there to fire it off yet. But we have tested it is working. So we’re good to go. So I’m going to click continue. And then it’s going to ask you to select your campaign type. We can do search performance max, which is brand new display. That’s the Google display ads. You go to another website and someone’s running ad sense and you see a little picture of an ad there. That’s display ads. Then they’re shopping ads, video ads, discovery ads, ignore all of that and just click on search. This is primarily what we want to be running. Select the ways you’d like to reach your goal website visits phone calls, store visits, app downloads, a lead form submission. That’s what I want to be tracking. So I’m going to grab that.
0:27:01
And then I’m going to name this campaign. Now what I would recommend for a service company like digital gravy, right? We have a bunch of services web design, web development, maybe website maintenance perhaps. That’s kind of how I want to organize my campaigns. So this very first campaign is going to be people looking for web design in my area, right? So I’m going to name this web design. And then I’m going to hit continue here. Okay. And then what do you want to focus on? Well, hey, I want to focus on conversions. Okay. Now you can set a target cost per action. This is optional. And basically the way this works is once it has a lot of data, it can be helpful to set this. And you can basically say, I want you to try to get me leads for 50 bucks each. I’ll pay 50 bucks for a lead. And then it does its algorithm thing and it tries to bid on certain visitors and search terms and things like that to make sure that that cost per acquisition stays around $50. But if you don’t have a lot of data, you don’t really know what’s, you know, what should be here in this box, what’s realistic. Because if you put an unrealistic number, it can kind of ruin your campaign. So you really want to know what you’re doing in when you set a value in this box. So I would leave it off at first. After you’ve collected a whole bunch of data and you kind of know what your targets are, then you can use this and it actually can be very helpful. You can select a different bid strategy other than maximize conversions, right? You can maximize clicks. You can do a target impression share, manual cost per click. I just recommend definitely just maximize conversions, okay?
0:28:37
And that’s what it is by default. It says that right there that it’s going to use maximize conversions. Now, I don’t want to be included in the search network. I don’t want to be included in the display network. I just want this for people searching on Google to see my ads, all right? And this is ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for terms that are relevant to your keywords. Basically, this is including search partners, right? But I don’t want to be on partner sites. I want to be on Google and just Google alone. All right. So we’re going to come down to locations. Now, I don’t want all countries and territories, which is the default. It’s just like, why is that the default? I don’t know. I don’t know. Not many companies that I work with run worldwide ads. United States and Canada, no, United States, no. We need to enter another location. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to target the greater Atlanta area, like Metro Atlanta, right? So I’m going to choose Atlanta, Georgia, United States. And we’re going to be able to see a map in just a little bit where I can actually dial this in. And when I do a separate training on Google ads optimization, you’re going to see the insane optimization potential of these campaigns. It’s such a granular level. It’s very, very, very powerful stuff. And you will be a Google ads management guru. If you know all of the intricacies of granular bid optimizations and things like that, but we’re not doing that in the crash course.
0:30:03
We’re just getting this thing set up because honestly, you can’t really do any of that stuff effectively until you have a lot of data to work with, all right? Or at least some data to work with. All right. So enter another location. We’re just starting with Atlanta, Georgia, United States. And if you do have a list of zip codes or something like that, a client’s giving you, you can add locations in bulk, but that’s pretty self-explanatory. Well, there’s some UX issues there too. We’ll get there in a different tutorial. Don’t worry. Okay. So location options, very important. This is kind of like on Facebook where it defaults to something you actually don’t necessarily want, right? It defaults to presence or interest in this location. Like if somebody has an interest in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s going to show me ads, but they’re not actually necessarily in Atlanta, Georgia. They don’t have a business in Atlanta, Georgia. So I actually need to change this to presence. People in or regularly in your target locations, all right? And not people searching my target location. I don’t care if they’re in Washington searching Atlanta. They may not, they probably don’t have a business here, right? So I want to be presence. People in or regularly in your target location. And then there’s some exclusions that you can take a look at as well. But I’m and this is for excluded locations, not for this location you just chose here. Okay. So language is, it’s English by default.
0:31:25
Thank you for you finally one of the defaults has made sense. So we’re going to leave this on English and then audience segments. This is kind of optional, but this is a kin to Facebook like audience targeting where you’re like, I want to target homeowners or I want to target by this income level or something like that. I’m going to leave this off for now because again, this is a crash course and you can come in and add audience segments at any time. And you can play around with them and you can, this is a good thing for ad sets a lot of times. But we’re just going to move right through this, leave it on observation and actually I haven’t chosen anything so it actually doesn’t matter. More settings, some of this stuff can be in the optimization stage. You don’t really need this to just kind of get rolling, right? So I’m going to go ahead and click next. All right. So now we’re at the keyword suggestions and one important thing about this is I actually haven’t done, oh, and look at this. It’s going to get started to give me warnings because I’m getting a campaign going and even though I’ve finished the process, it’s like, hey, none of your ads are running. Well, no shit Sherlock. I haven’t finished the process you’re walking me through, right? Good old Google UX again. But very important here. I’m just going so much salt into this tutorial because I hate Google UX on pretty much every product that they offer.
0:32:44
All right. Very important. I haven’t done any keyword research. I have no idea what I’m going to be targeting. And the good news is you don’t really have to because of the tremendous amount of data that Google is going to give back to you as long as you are actively managing your Google ads accounts, the way that I’m going to show you is a great way to get started for any client really. And in fact, you can actually kind of, you can try to get too detailed with your keyword targeting in the beginning and not getting enough data back or any results because of how you’ve done things. I like to start out very broad, very generic, get the data that’s Google’s giving me and then start to hone it in and dial it in to a winning campaign. So that is Nikavia. If you’re trying to create a set it and forget it kind of campaign, which I would never recommend anyway, you need to be a lot more specific and granular and focused and you need to do research and all that good stuff. But if you’re going to be an active manager of these campaigns and you’re going to be in there, I’m talking like at least every week tweaking and dialing things in, then you can do it exactly the way I’m doing it now. And that’s the way I would recommend that you do it. All right. So keyword suggestion URL. So I’m going to give this my URL digital gravy.co. And it’s going to scan this website and looking for keywords and things like that. But I’m going to now enter a service name. Remember my campaign was web design. So I’m going to say web design.
0:34:19
And I’m going to say, oops, I want to put a comma web design, inner web designer, website design, I’m going to give it some different variations here. Website designer, website design company. I’m just like rattling things off the top of my head that are obvious, broad generic web design company. Web design agency, website design company. I mean, these are so close that Google already knows they’re related website design agency. All right. And we’re going to leave it at that. All right. Now a lot of people think about web design and development and like this, it’s the same service, right? Like it’s much more often that somebody needs design and development versus they’re only looking for design and somebody else is going to do development. But I still like to break them up. So you notice I’m not putting any web development terms in here because I want data that shows, hey, when we do, you know, this term, this family of terms web design, it converts a lot better than this other family of terms called web development, right? Or maybe they end up converting it pretty much the same CPA. So that would be good too. But I’m going to just for data purposes and cleanliness, I’m going to keep them separate. All right. So keyword suggestions is there and then enter keywords. So let’s see. Oh, wait, hold on. Sorry. I did this wrong. I meant to put these down here in this box because I was talking.
0:35:56
Okay. So my product, my service is website design. Now down here, I’m going to do like all those variations. So sorry about that. Website design, web site design agency, web design agency. I’m also going to do and by the way, it’s already creating like an ad set for me here. It’s the structure, the way that you see it once you’ve created it is not how you see it when you’re actually creating it, which is another big UX nightmare. But I’ll explain it when I get there. I do want you to notice down here where it says, if you just put in the keyword, it’s going to do a broad match, which basically means it’s going to take that as a theme and find all these different ideas and variations around that theme. And then in the, if you put quotes around it, it’ll match the phrase of the keyword. And then if you put brackets around it, it’ll only bid on that exact variation of the keyword. Okay. All right. So I, again, I like to start very broad, which is a terrible strategy if you’re not going to actively manage the campaign. But if you are actively managing the campaign, I actually like this better. Because instead of me doing all this research, Google is going to do all the research for me, pile it in to my data. And I’m going to spend some money to do that. But at the end of the day, I’m going to get to exactly where I want to be a need to be. All right. So web design, website design, website design agency, web design agency, web design company, website design company. Do I need that? That’s pretty much all I think I need for right now. Okay. So notice that this keyword kind of grouping is in the same step as like creating an ad, which is kind of odd, right? Because you’re going to see when we actually start managing ads, the things work a little bit differently. All right. So the final URL is basically the URL I want people to be taken to when they click on the ads. I actually just want them taken to my homepage, which is almost always not the right thing to do. But because we’re doing a crash course and I’m not going to create a custom landing page and all that stuff, this is where we’re going. But typically, it would be to a landing page that you would want to be doing this. Okay. And then you would put extra paths in the display. This doesn’t actually control the URL. It just controls what people see.
0:38:12
Why is that there? Honestly, I don’t know because if somebody actually saw it and tried to directly type it in, it would land on a 404 error page. But again, hey, it’s Google. And so they do a lot of things that we don’t know why they do them. But there you go. So final URL is just digital gravy.co. And now headlines, you’re going to notice that it’s starting to give me suggestions. But, and if I click on more ideas, it’s going to start to expand. But it hasn’t given me a lot of data yet because this is a brand new campaign. So I have to start thinking for myself what would make a good ad. And the way that these ads work, if we come down, there’s a bunch of headlines. These are called responsive search ads. Bunch of headlines. There’s a bunch of descriptions. And then you can also add some tracking stuff to the URLs, which we’re not going to talk about right now. We’re going to do at URL tracking in a different tutorial. Again, this is Crash Course. Let’s just get up and running, right? Okay, so because you can change all this stuff later, nothing is set in stone. That’s the good thing about Google ads. All right. So what I want to do is craft some headlines. And what it’s going to do, I’m going to give it so many different options. And you can think of these as just typical marketing sales headlines you would see like free proposal. Like it doesn’t have to be exactly geared towards web design, but you do want those variations in there as well. Because what Google is going to do is it’s going to play with all of these headlines that you give it. And it’s going to find the combinations of headlines that work for you and that get you the cost, get you that conversion action that you wanted, which is people submitting your lead form. So I’m going to say web design and I know I’m running this in Atlanta. So I’m going to say Atlanta web design company. And I hate writing these things on the fly while people are watching. So these are going to probably be awful digital marketing agency is one. It’s going to start suggesting a few online appointments available.
0:40:09
I like to capitalize the first letter. Now if you if you try to get like ridiculous with it, where you’re like online appointments, you actually can’t like do all caps for anything. Even if you did online appointments of it, like that’s going to reject your ads, right? So just stay nice and easy with it. So online appointments available. And it’s going to show you like a preview over here of what this is going to look like where it’s like right now it’s showing me that that would come first. But that’s not always going to come first. See there’s another one where digital marketing agency came first. What it’s going to do, like I said, is play with these and figure out the combinations that work. So you should feed it like as many different options as you possibly can. So I’ll feed it my brand name as one of them. We’ll do web affordable web design. Now here’s another thing you got to think about, right? Are you relatively afford are you considered affordable in this market? Like affordable as a classic sales term, but like does it fit your actual service? What might fit better here is 100% custom web design. I can see web design and development because I do want people to maybe know that we also do the development even though they search for web design, right? Web design and development. We can do three strategy call, something like that as like a call to action. So you could see that it could possibly say Atlanta web design company digital gravy free strategy call. Like that’s what the person’s kind of seeing. They’re like, wow, I like all those things. I like how all those things sound. Let me click on that, get to the landing page and then boom, suddenly they’re converting, right? Now you can click on this pin and say, hey, for like my brand name, always show that one in position number one, right? Only show that in position number one when you show that one and it’ll pin it there. But notice that it’s a show in any unpinned position recommended. I’m, oops, I don’t want to open Lightroom. Yes, I recommend the same thing.
0:42:15
I do not recommend, even though it seems like, oh gosh, I really don’t want that anywhere else, but just let it do its thing. Let the algorithm do its thing. Let Google decide where these things go. If Google does one thing correctly, aside from some other drama that I won’t get into, it does this very well. Just figuring out how these ads work best. And you could continue adding, there is a limit, but you, I would say try to hit the limit. I’m not going to do that for this, because it’s beyond the scope and point of this. I’m going to come back in and actually make these really good. They’re just super not great right now. But we’ll get there. And I’ll publish a guide on what makes a good headline for Google ads and things like that. I’m just not going to try to do that kind of stuff on the fly. So for description down here, kind of the same thing. One of the biggest headaches about this part of it is these text length limitations. You’ve really got to get concise. We specialize in web design, responsive development, SEO and digital advertising. We create a clean responsive website that’s built to sell. I’ll do this. I think these have maybe ones I did in the past. I don’t know. So get a, I’m going to, instead of create, I’m going to say, get a clean responsive website that’s built to sell. And I’ll say, schedule your free strategy call today. Oh god, I can’t get it. Oh, it cut me off. See, schedule A, I’ll just say, instead of your, I’ll say schedule a free strategy call today. I don’t know if you can use exclamation marks. I’m just not going to because I don’t want these things to get rejected. All right.
0:43:57
Get a clean responsive website that’s built to sell schedule a free strategy call today. What else can I say? We’ll put this in here as well. 100% custom website design and development for service based businesses. Right. So I can kind of use my copy here to let people know, hey, if you’re not a service based business, then, uh, and in fact, I can call that out in a headline as well. Web design for service. I’m not going to be able to fit it. So service businesses. Oh, I can’t even fit that. Web design for service. Yeah, geez. Um, see, that’s what’s tough, man. You’re very restricted on line length for these things. All right. I’ll, again, I’ll come back and think of better ones later. Okay. So we’ve got two out of our four descriptions. We’ve got our headlines. Notice it tells me how many descriptions I can have, but it doesn’t tell me how many headlines I can have. Good job, Google. All right. Another, another check of the box for Google UX. All right. We’re going to hit, uh, done here. And you’re going to see that there is my ad. Now, can you create additional ads? Yeah. And that used to be very important before the advent of responsive ads. I have very, very good success with just running one responsive ad inside of my ad set. And I’m good to go. So I’m going to go ahead and hit next. Next, we get to this thing called site link extensions, right? I’ll do free strategy call. Right. Get a free strategy call for web design. Now, can you even can, can you even write that? Get a free strategy call? Uh, yes. Okay. And then I don’t need a description to. I do need to spell strategy correctly. And then the final URL is actually going to be my let’s talk page. So my inquiry page. Okay. Bam, just like that. And I can also show services maybe, right? So I’ll do web design services. And my final URL will be my what we do page, which is my services page. So there you go. View our web design and, uh, see, I’ll just do web, design and development services. Okay. It all fit. Does it fit with the space? Okay. Great.
0:46:19
So I’ve got two site links. I’m just going to go with those for now. So I’m going to go ahead and hit save. Oh, it’s going to. Oh, good. More, more Google UX. Look at this. To use site link descriptions, add both a description line one and line two, but it just says recommended here. It doesn’t say required. Okay. Get a free strategy call. Uh, can I get a preview of what this is going to look like? No, I can’t get that either. Web design. Uh, let’s talk web design. I don’t know. I got to come back and think of good things to put here. Web design and development services, view our, uh, view all services. And it’s got to be certain length. No. Can I save? Okay. Good. Preview. All right. So free strategy call and web design services. So you see here’s like going to be your ad and then there’s going to be links down below. So they can click on web design services. They can click on free strategy call. Good to go. So that’s below your ad. All right. You can do, um, call out extensions as well. So an example could be like 100%, um, custom. Now the thing is, is are you going to be using these campaign wide, uh, or account wide, right? Or just for an ad set, you can set them up in different ways. But this would be, um, like if you were a, the easiest way to do is like an e-commerce business, you would put like free shipping, free returns and exchanges, those kinds of things are call outs that can just like we be put right below your ad. People can’t click on them or anything like that, but it’s additional information. I’m not going to worry about setting them up right now. Um, and then you can also add call extensions. If you do want to have people, uh, calling you, you could potentially put this here. I actually don’t want that right now. I may want that in the future, but I’m going to skip that for right now. So I’m going to go ahead and hit next and then it says, set your average daily budget for this campaign. Now with Google ads, you can do forecasting, which I’ll do a tutorial on forecasting. But for right now, I’m just going to say that, Hey, we’re going to run this at $25 a day and we’re going to see what happens.
0:48:29
Okay. So we’re going to hit next and it’s going to say review your campaign. Notice it’s still warning me that not of my ads are running. I wonder why that would be because maybe it’s my first one Google. Okay. So I can quickly just see a bunch of details and then I can hit publish campaign. And again, not that this really matters because you can change anything at any time. And this is what I hate about their setup process, right? It had me create a web design campaign, but it didn’t never let me, it wanted it and tell me I was creating an ad group and it didn’t let me name my ad group, right? So now I have to go into my ad group, which if I click on it, I’m like, how do I, how do I change the name of it? Well, it’s actually easier if you click on the campaign and then click on ad groups. And now you can actually see your ad groups right here. Now what would you name this ad group? Well, let’s think about some things that I was targeting. Like am I targeting a specific audience? I might want to name it after the audience that I’m targeting. Ad groups are best for groups of keywords, right? So I’m doing this web design keywords. I could do instead of creating a web development campaign, I could create another ad group called web development. So it’s under the umbrella of web design, right? It’s not SEO though. That would be a totally different thing. But I can let’s do this. I’m going to go to web design. I’m going to go to ad groups. I’m going to go to this little pencil. And I’m going to call this web design, okay? Web design service like that because it’s advertising web design services because if you look at the ad set level right here, this is where my keyword targeting is done, right? This is where my audience targeting is done. So I can do a bunch of audience targeting in here. You can change your devices in here like and bid up desktop bid down mobile bid up mobile bid down desktop. You can do a lot of different stuff in here.
0:50:25
You can change that on an ad set by ad set basis, right? And then notice I can’t see my ads here either, which is like where are my ads, dude? You got to click on an ad set, then click on ads and extensions, and now you can see your response to that. And you’re going to see the status right here is pending under review. So it’s going to go through a review process before it goes live. Now what I could do here is create a new ad set, right? And notice that again, Google UX and this is so confusing. This is a campaign. I would think that if I clicked on the campaign, I could manage the campaign in this window. But no, it’s I’m still on ads in here. So really what you’re doing is you’re in under your campaign, you can be an ad groups. And now you’ll see your ad groups, your ad sets, under, let’s say ads and extensions, you’re going to see all of the ads for this campaign. If you click on an ad set or an ad group, you’re only going to see the ads for that ad set. So it’s just very like, I hate this. I absolutely hate it. Another thing you need to know is under this three dots, you can choose what you’re seeing. So if you have some ad sets paused or some ads paused and you have this filter set to all enabled, which is kind of like hidden up here behind these three dots, you might be like, where am I paused campaigns? Where am I paused ad sets? Where am I paused as? I can’t find them. We have to come up here and set this to all or all but removed. The same thing is if you remove something like you’ve deleted it, it’s not actually gone, it’s just hidden. But it’s only hidden if you choose all enabled or all but removed.
0:52:10
Because if you hit all, then you can see stuff that was actually removed at some point or hidden. So just know that these filters are here and be aware that if you have all enabled chosen for campaigns, you’ll only see enabled campaigns. You won’t see any pause campaigns. You’ll be like, where did they go? I don’t know how do I find them. Same thing with ad groups, all enabled will only show you enabled, all will show you everything and then all but removed will show you active and paused but not removed. So I typically set it on all but removed and leave it like that. That way, I can see paused and active. So now if I wanted to change my keyword targeting and go after web development services, instead of creating a new campaign, I could actually create a new ad set called web development service, put different keywords in there, get all of that going. Now, the only bad thing about that is those ads that are going to share my campaign budget. If I want things to be completely separate, I can just create a new campaign for web development. Maybe eventually I create a new campaign for SEO. Maybe I create a campaign for website management services. You can do it a few different ways but this is the crash course on how to get this started. We have one campaign, we have one ad set and then we have one ad inside of that ad set and that’s that three layer approach campaign ad set ad and I’ll publish more details on exactly what can be controlled. What I would recommend though is you jump in here and you start looking around and see what can I do at the campaign level. I have my locations here at the campaign level. You have ad scheduling that you can do at the campaign level. Then you click on ad set and you can see things like well, there’s devices that I can manage here. If we click on settings, you can see all of your settings for the ad set which there’s not much to do here. Your audience segments and targeting is happening here. It’s similar to Facebook if you’re familiar at all with Facebook advertising but it’s a little bit different in the same vein. You’ll get used to it fairly quickly once you get over all of the UX hurdles. Basically what we’ve done is we’ve gone in and we’ve created our first campaign. What’s going to happen next is once it gets approved, let me go to, well now I’ll stay here because I’ve got to show you something in just a second.
0:54:42
Once this gets approved, it’s going to start running and the algorithm is going to start learning. It’s going to be in a learning phase. Probably for about a week it’ll be in the learning phase. Then you’re going to start collecting all this data. You’re going to be getting clicks. Hopefully you’re getting some conversions but you’re going to start to get data back and once you actually do start landing some conversions and this is why I like to start very broad. I let Google’s algorithm do all the heavy lifting and we have to look at this under our ad set. We’re going to go under key words. There’s a tab called search keywords and there’s a tab called search terms and you would think like what in the world is going on here will under keywords you can see what you are actually bidding on. You can see the keywords you’re targeting. Under search terms you’re going to see things that people are literally searching for before they click on your ads. So when I go really broad what you’re going to see here is some really good things and some really bad things. I don’t want the bad things. So what we have to do and this is why I said your campaigns have to be actively managed. You want to keep all the good but you want to take the bad and create what’s called a negative key words list that excludes those variations and so you’re getting what rid of all the trash that comes in through our broad targeting and that is a really really important one of the most critical aspects of Google ad management. When we do the training on Google ads optimization we’ll get there but this is the process that you have to know is going to be happening eventually like a week from now two weeks from now three weeks from now etc. Same thing with your audience same thing with your locations at the campaign level. So you can actually go in here and you can start dividing this up into different areas. You can get lists of zip codes and when you do a big city like Atlanta Georgia you’re a little bit limited but when you and what I would recommend and what I do for most of my clients is we get lists of zip codes for a city and then we put those in and instead of seeing one item here you might see 12 items 12 different zip codes and it’ll actually tell me where are my conversions coming from what are the best performing zip codes versus just targeting a giant city. I can actually target the individual zip codes that actually have favorable costs per click favorable conversion acquisition costs all of that good stuff so you can leverage your data you can do the same thing with devices right it’ll tell you hey computers is people on desktop are are converting it $30 a lead people on mobile are $70 a lead or vice versa right and you can bid a just up or down to really dial in the best results for your campaign. You can do this with men versus women you can do this with different audience segments like business owners if I could find those or different income levels then you can get into days of the week on Mondays it’s going to tell me hey your ads are banging on Mondays right so you bid up adjust your Mondays and it’s saying hey on Sundays you’re it sucks right you’re paying $800 a lead on Sundays okay cut Sundays off right this is the management process all this data is going to get fed back to you and this is why I start really broad I don’t say to only target men only go on Mondays do these specific terms I’m just like nope here’s your broad match give me everything you got and then I will do the work of dialing this in using the data that you feed back to me right very very important that’s my process that might not be everybody’s process but that’s my process and it’s been super effective for myself for clients okay so I think it’s really going to work well for you also is long as by the way you have a good offer you have a good this is not magic right it can’t sell a pile of shit but if you have something really good to sell and you’re good at marketing it it’s going to work for you it’s this this is how it works because literally people are searching for exactly what you offer so if you offer a good thing and you put it in front of people who are searching for what you have to offer it’s going to work right if it’s not working there’s something wrong typically with your offer your landing page all of that could stop that’s probably what’s mostly going wrong if the numbers just don’t look good it’s probably because you’re not managing the account well like if you’re getting conversions but the numbers just don’t look great you’ve got some account management work to do but there also could be stuff on the conversion optimization side of things on the landing page with the offer so on and so forth so this is all you need to know to get up and running with Google ads now my job is to do more Google ads tutorials because we do have to go into a lot more detail on how to optimize these campaigns how to manage these campaigns other best practices coming in to a client’s already got an account all set up and there’s ads and ads sets and stuff everywhere how do we audit this and see what needs to be changed how do we not blow it up right a lot of good content is to come so if you like these tutorials on Google ads type stuff I know it’s different from the oxygen the bricks the CSS world but if you love this stuff if you want more of it definitely let me know down below in the comments you got to kind of vote on this stuff but I will definitely give you more if more is what you want all right guys that’s it for this crash course tutorial I hope you found it useful I hope you learned a lot I hope you got enough to get up and running that’s it from me peace
