Google Ads for beginners: all you need to know to start with paid searches

Planning your budget? Read our guide to Google Ads costs, with worked examples for advertising spend and agency fees.

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is one of the most important processes you can work with to make your business visible to potential customers. The results of this work are among the most profitable when you achieve free traffic from those interested in your products. It is not, however, to go under the chair that SEO may be a far-reaching process. Google Ads, former AdWords, is a channel that provides instant results and makes sure you are “always” visible. For the sake of order, it is not about either or when it comes to paid and organic traffic, but yes, thank you both!

Is Google Ads new to you or you need to refresh the basic principles of how to set up and maintain a Google Ads campaign? In this article we provide a basic but thorough introduction to how you can succeed in advertising searches using Google Ads. We'll take you through all the phases from start to finish, and share our most important knowledge with you along the way.

How does Google Ads work?

Let's start with the basics. In the screenshot below you will see what the Google Ads user interface looks like at the campaign level. Getting familiar with the user interface requires some time, but the way it is set and organised is basically both logical and transparent.

To understand how Google Ads works, it is important that you have understood the basic concepts. So we're going to get you through them quickly:

In Google Ads, you offer certain “keywords”. When someone writes this search term into Google, they will be able to see your ad. The advertisements and search terms are organised in different advertising groups that are divided into different campaigns. More about this later.

How many people have threged your ad appear as the number “impressions”. Every time some of the people who have seen your ad click on the ad, you are charged with the cost of a click. This cost depends on the max bid you have set and the competition from others who offer the same search term you have chosen. The average cost per click is in the column entitled “Avg.CPC”. The percentage of people who click on your ad after having triggered it is shown in the column called “CTR”. If this number is 6%, then 6% of those who have seen your ad have clicked on it to find out more. Avg.pos represents the average location and refers to the position you see on average in the search results. If the number you get is between 1-4, this means you are displayed on the first page of the search results.

Every time your ad is displayed, you are part of an auction. Therefore, you have to set a budget (for each campaign) and a bid (for each keyword). These commandments say something about how much you are willing to pay per click. If your max bid is 5.00 kr, Google will only show your ad if no one else offers more than you, provided that all advertisers have equal quality scores/quality scores. If all your competitors offer less than you, you will be at the top of the search result. At the same time, you will only pay what you have to pay to beat your competitors – not necessarily your full maxb. Consider the following:

You bid 5.00 kroner

Your competitor will offer you a price of SEK 4.00

Your ad will appear and you will pay only 4.01 kr for a click.

But does this mean that you can pay yourself to a first place? No, no, no.

Google's living is delivering relevance to its users. Therefore, it is not worth Google to show only those advertisers who pay the most. Although Google would earn more on it clicked itself, the quality of the user search engine would fall and lead to fewer users and clicks in the long run. Therefore, Google gives all its advertisers a Quality Score.

Quality Score (QS) says something about how relevant your keywords, landing pages and ad texts are to each other. QS is calculated on a scale from 1-10 where 10 is highest. In the picture above, you can see an example from Google Ads user interface. These search terms have relatively good quality scores, but we see that most people have improvement potential. The top search term has a QS of 8/10. Both the expected click rate and the ad’s relevance are above average good, but the experience of the landing side is only average. Here we know that if we want to improve QS, it's the landing side we have to work with. However, in one of the other search terms, we see that the potential for improvement is in the relevance of the advertisement as it is considered below the average.

Here you can read more about the various components of quality scores.

Now we know that Google wants to make money, but also to be as relevant to its users. The calculation that determines which position in the search results your ad gets is therefore as follows:

Bud x Quality Score = Ad Rank.

In the picture above you can see how an auction works in practice with the information you have just read. Sue has the second lowest bid, but high quality score. This results in the auction's highest Ad Rank. Sue therefore makes the search results at the top. We also see that Bob offers higher than all the other advertisers, but has so low QS that he is not shown.

How should you structure your Google Ads account?

Now you've learned that relevance is an important factor for Google. It is therefore absolutely essential that you as an advertiser have heavy right in your mouth when you choose the structure of your account.

A Google Ads account consists of campaigns with associated advertising groups. In the advertising groups you create ad texts and keywords. At the campaign level, you set daily budgets and select the type of campaign, the targeting and the bidding strategies. In the advertising groups, you create the ad, add the search terms and set your maximum bids.

But how to organize the account as best as possible? A good starting point is often to follow the structure you have on your website to some extent. If you have a big dress shop, it might be most appropriate to have a own campaign for jackets, one for shoes and one for dresses. Perhaps you also have a special campaign for the brands you are carrying, as you want to show that you are offering products from these brands.

Let's start with your campaign with jackets. Here you should again divide into ad groups with subcategories. If you are unsure how to divide your selection further into ad groups, a good rule of thumb is to think that:

1. the content of the advertisement shall be as relevant as possible;
2. The advertisements shall be able to send to a page as relevant as possible:

With these two rules in mind, it goes without saying that the person seeking “blazer” and the person seeking “blobbjakke” not looking for the same suit. Instead of collecting all the keywords in an ad group, all these applicants should display the same message and send them to the same landing page, each of the keywords should have its own ad group.

The ad group for blazers should trig on the keyword “blazer”, show an ad with the keyword “blazer” in itself and, not least, send to a landing page showing only blazers. The trick is to make it as easy as possible for the person seeking to get to the site in your online store that can best meet their needs.

A simplification of an account overview may therefore look something like this:

How do I make a Google Ads campaign?

Now you know how best to structure your search campaigns, but let's look at how to create your own Google Ads campaign and what steps to take. When you choose to create a Google Ads campaign, you will get a number of choices for which type of campaign you want to create.

A Display campaign lets you be visible with banner ads on pages in Google's network, such as blogs or web newspapers. Video campaigns allow you to display video ads before, during and after movies on YouTube or on pages in Google's network. Universal App campaign lets you advertise your application using video, banner and cross- Google network but only on mobile.

A shopping campaign will be visible with pictures and price of your products. These ads will appear in the search results, as well as image search and during Google shopping. If you want to learn more about how to structure a shopping campaign, you can read about it here.

In this case, we choose a search campaign because we want to be visible when someone is looking for us in Google.

Choose name for your campaign

The next step you need to make your campaign is to choose a name. If we follow the example of the dress shop further, this campaign name will be “SØK – Jackets”. In an account with many different types of promotions (shoping, display, video and app), it may be advisable to indicate the type of promotion in the name. Therefore, we illustrate the word “SEE”. Similarly, we would call it “SHOPPING – Jackets” if this was a shopping campaign with all our jackets.

Select Network

The next step is to select a network. A search campaign will always show ads in Google's search engine, but may also show ads on other partner pages where potential customers are looking for them. By including search partners, you cover a potentially larger audience than just those who use Google when applying.

By default, the display network will also be disabled when you create a search campaign. We recommend, however, that we usually eliminate visibility here. In some cases, a combination of the display and search networks may be profitable, but in most cases it is only confusing. Search and display should be kept separate as these ads often deliver widely different results and have different objectives. So remember to remove the dehuking in this box before proceeding.

Choose Where You Will See

Furthermore, you need to decide which areas you want to target your campaign against. If you deliver to the whole country, your campaign should also target itself to the whole country. If your clothing store delivers clothes to more countries than Norway alone, you can choose more countries here. In many cases, however, where users are wanted to reach cross-border, it may be advisable to set up separate campaigns (or accounts) to adapt the language of the advertisements.

If you want to target the whole of Norway, you can still choose each of the countries instead of the whole country. You're still targeting the same people, but this will give you more segmented data on where in the country you get the most traffic or sales from. Maybe you want to turn the bids up in some parts of the country because you see that these states are more profitable for you.

If you have physical stores in addition to your online store, you can add the postal code to these as well. This allows you to later bid-just up at these locations so that you are sure to feel for those who are looking for your product when they are near your store.

Select Language

If you have already chosen to be visible in Norway only, it may be close to thinking that you also want to be visible in Norwegian only. It may be a good idea to get rid of “all languages”. You who read this article probably speak Norwegian, but what language do you have in your browser? Is it Norwegian, English, Russian or maybe Pakistani? Remember that many speak up to several languages in addition to Norwegian and therefore may have a browser in a different language than Norwegian.

By default the language is set to English. So be careful to change this, if you cannot limit the audience of your ads dramatically.

Select Budget

Select the budget for the campaign here. The budget you put here will be your average daily budget. This budget is flexible and a few days it might be more search volume and Google will therefore use more than your daily budget. Other days the volume might be smaller and then you will use less than your daily budget. All in all, the monthly budget will end up being the same.

How to determine what is the correct budget is often a test question. Search word analyses can be done and average volume, and click prices, but the actual cost is only given when you test. Remember, there are many things that play into what you end up paying as Google and various third party tools cannot take into account when they give you the estimates.

Choose the bidding strategy

Google is increasingly investing and facilitating various automated solutions, including smart bidding. Therefore, by default you will be given the option of choosing whether you want to focus on conversions, conversion value or clicks and based on this, you will get a proposed automated bidding strategy. However, if you select “Select a bid strategy directly” you can choose between all the different bidding strategies. So it would look like this:

There's simply a small ocean of options to choose from. The top strategies are automated and do most of your job, based on the data of the account. To be able to make a fair value out of these strategies, the account should have some volume to go on and it is only after a while that they, if necessary, will be able to refer to results.

A great advantage of automated bidding strategies is that they are time-saving and data-driven. However, the disadvantage is that you have to give up some of the control. You cannot adjust yourself what bids you want to set for the individual keyword. If you want to learn more about the automated bidding strategies, read this overview from GoogleSo let's say that this is the same thing as that.

But is the time savings in itself enough? It must assess the individual itself and: test in Google Ads- What?

Experience shows that it is often worthwhile to start with the manual bidding. There are several reasons for this. As mentioned, automated strategies are based on data and a new campaign has no data. Secondly, it is a good way to get to know the industry in which you advertise and collect ‘binchmark’ data for later tests.

However, check the enhanced CPC even if you select the manual CPC. This gives you a helping hand from Google by using the history of the keyword to make computer-driven decisions about whether to offer over or during your maximum bid in each auction. This, like the flexible budget, makes you have a little more to run with when needed and “save” where you are already well at work. The total price is going to be the same.

Furthermore, there are a number of tools you can complement your manual bidding strategy with. For example, automatic rules or script. Here you can read about 4 useful scripts that help you to bid adjust smarter

Select the audience

Select the audience at the next point. Here it is important that you keep your tongue straight in your mouth when it comes to the two methods of correction for the campaign. You can choose between “Observation” and “target”. What they mean is probably obvious from the naming process, but an audience on the setting of the target will mean that it only This is the audience that sees your ads. If you choose to add the audience to the observation will continue all searching for the search terms you have chosen to see your ad. The difference is that you can now separate the data on how the people in the chosen audience interact with your ad. Do they click more often? Do they convert more often? In this case, you may also choose to adjust the bids up or down then on a later basis.

In other words, an audience should usually be in the room for observation. This is also the default setting from Google. There are, however, a number of good exceptions. Perhaps we want to add a remarketing audience to those who have put goods in the shopping basket without completing the purchase? Maybe we want to give these a discount code in the ad to motivate them to complete the purchase next time they visit us? In that case, we just want this audience to see the discount code and therefore we have to choose the “target” method.

The different audiences you can choose from are essentially these three:

1. In-market audiences
2. Remarketing audiences
3. Similar audiences

An In-market auditory is an audience consisting of those who actively seek certain services or themes online. There are a wide range of wider and more appropriate interests to choose from. If you sell cars, you might want to add the audience “Autos & Vehicles”. But if you have a dress shop, like our example, it would be most profitable for you to choose those who are actively looking for things in the category “Appaprel & Accessories” – including their subcategories.

As a test it may be interesting to add all the In-market audits to the observation (without making any bid adjustments). Perhaps you see that one of these audiences is converting surprisingly well for you, despite that they don't really seem to be related to your service? You can then choose to turn up the bids then. An example of this can be an online store selling tickets for various events and sees that the audience who actively searches for “Baby & Children’s Products” converts well for them. For example, parents with young children may also have an interest in tickets for child-friendly events such as the zoo, the dog frog, the farm summer country and the like.

One remarketing audit is an audience who has had an interaction with your since before. This audience may consist of anyone who has visited your site, anyone who has visited a specific product or anyone who has put something in the shopping cart without converting. It could also be the ones who have converted on your page already. We look at the numbers in the graph below, there is no doubt that it is profitable to spend time setting up remarketing lists for your online store

If you want to learn more about how to make unique remarketing lists, read this article.

A similion audience is, as the name suggests, an audience that looks like one of your other audience. Google finds similarities among its users and these are people who have similarities with those who like your online store! These may be those who are similar to those who have acted with you before or those who are similar to those who have done a specific action on your page. Using this type of audience is a good way to gather information and ensure high enough bids for those we think have an increased chance of converting.

Select Extensions

The last step is to choose extensions - and here Google gives you a lot of opportunities. Often it is good to add all the relevant extensions as these are helping to increase CTR, potentially improve QS and, in particular, separate you from your competitors. In addition, they take up extra space in the search results, that is, more of you and your message!

An extension is briefly told extra information that can be displayed in addition to your ad text.

Here's a list of extensions you can use in Google Ads:

• Sitelink: A site link is an extra text with links to other pages on your website. A perfect way to simplify navigation.
• Callout: A callout is an extra part of text – a kind of bully point that appears during the ad. This extension can be used to highlight unique sales arguments – why should the applicant trade with you?
• Call: Do you have a telephone number you want the customer to contact you at? Get it in the ad!
• Structured snappets: Structured clippings are “upcoming” of various things, for example services you provide, models you offer etc.
• App- Do you have an application? Get it in the ad.
• Message: Can your customers contact you directly by sending a message? Let them easily do it using a click from the ad.
• Location: Are you at Google My Business (you should be). Connect up to your Google Ads account so your nearest physical store will be visible to those who are looking for your products.
• Promotion: Do you have a special offer this week? A discount code, a percentage discount or a reduced price? This should be added as an extra line in your ad with link to the offer.
• Price: Display your price level.
• Image path:Disc Image: View images of your product or service

Remember that when you create ad extensions while you create a campaign, these will be displayed for all the ads in the campaign. As part of the further optimisation work, we recommend making extensions at ad-group level to ensure, once again, the highest possible relevance.

Ad extension is definitely a chapter for yourself and you will learn everything you need to know about extensions in detail, we recommend The Complete Guide to AdWords Ad Extensions by Bobby Stamper.

Select an advertisement notation

When it comes to the display of your ads, you have to decide whether you want a helping hand from Google by favouring the ads that have historically delivered the best results, or whether you want to show all the ads the same amount. Independent of performance. One case where it is advisable to select the latter, “do not optimize” is when you want to test your adverts and want them to appear as much as possible so that the data is more comparable.

Select Advertising Planning

When do you want your ad to be trig in the search results? All day? It is probably the best option for you who run a online store. However, if you provide services that can only be ordered or delivered within a specified timeframe, it may be beneficial to be visible only within these times.

In this article you can read about a script that lets you bid-just based on the ad planner 24 hours a day, every day of the week.

Configure your first ad group

If you have followed the steps in this article, you have now set up your first campaign and are ready for the next level – namely the advertising groups.

It'll look like this:

Name the ad group

Here you have to choose the name of your ad group first. By default, Google Ads will name new advertising groups “Ad Group #” and their associated numbers. The name of the ad group has nothing to say for your ad results, but an account full of ad groups named by arbitrary numbers is not very transparent. Please name the advertising groups according to the keyword they contain. If we follow our example further, it is natural to call this advertising group “Blazere”

Select a bid

Provided you have selected a manual bidding strategy, you must now select a bid. The maksbud can, and should, you change for each search term on a later occasion. However, when setting up an advertising group, a standard offer must be provided, which is set as a maximum for all search terms in the advertising group.

Select Search Term

If we continue to play our example with jackets and blazers, it should now be obvious that the keyword in this ad group should be “blaze”.

But provided you didn't know what keywords you should choose to advertise for in the different advertising groups of yours. What should you do?

Visit Google Keywords Planner!

Here you will get two options: to find new search terms or to get an overview of the search volume and forecasts. We want inspiration to find new keywords based on our jacket campaign and therefore choose “find keywords”.

Furthermore, you type in a keyword relevant to the campaign, or links to a landing page for the campaign. Here you can either select “jackets” as a keyword or post the online store’s jacket landing page. Then you will get a similar result as in the picture below:

Here we quickly see that the search term winter jacket, and variations of it, have high search volume. Based on this, you should consider creating your own advertising groups with keywords and associated landing pages for “winter jacket”, “winter jacket gentleman”, and “winter jacket lady”.

There are a number of other tools you can use to get ideas for new keywords for your ad groups. Examples of good tools are: Moz Pro Keywords Explorer , Keywordtool.io or Ségerush Keywords ResearchSo let's say that this is the same thing as that.

Now you've learned a little about how to find new keywords and find out that the list of keywords that should have a separate ad group is already long. We're still going to keep dealing with our blazer example on in the guide. Therefore, we know that the keyword for this campaign should be “blazer”. But what kind of conformity should we choose?

Select type of conformity

A type of conformity is a character you use in combination with your keyword to tell you which search should be used to trigger your ad. These vary from very open and flexible to completely closed – the question here is how hard you want to be. How much like the search to be your keywords to be used for the ad?

So first let's just think about the different types of conformity:

...But which one should you choose?

The advantage of a flexible conformity Is of course that we get good drag help in finding new search terms we hadn't thought of ourselves. On the other hand, this type of compliance gives little control to you as an advertiser and makes you depend on following closely the search term report and excluding irrelevant search terms frequently. Using a wide-ranging consistency can be profitable if you advertise a product or service that is generally low in volume with a more closed type of conformity.

Conformity of seats is the golden mean between the too wide and the far too closed. This type of conformity provides more certainty as it can only trigger search terms that have the same: importance as the search term you choose.

Exact compliance used to be just what it sounds like -- that keyword contains and nothing else. However, this has changed slightly after a little while and in September 2018, the exact match again expanded to trinise on searches with the same intention as your keyword.

Which type of match you choose is therefore a scale-to-control balance.

Create your ad text

The “last” step is to create an advertisement text. In the summer of 2022, it is no longer possible to create new extended search ads and we therefore recommend that you create a good responsive search advertisement (RSA). When you create a RSA, you can enter up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptors in your ad. This allows you (or rather Google) to test and find the best ad text for the different applicants. Be aware that the ads you are making now, you will probably (hopefully) change several times later to optimize.

Below you see the “scarve” of a Google Ads RSA ad. The advertisement consists of a link to the landing side and 15 potential headings of 30 characters. You can also add up to 4 descriptions of up to 80 characters to your ad.

A great advantage of achieving high relevance in the advertisement, and then a good QS, is to use the keyword clearly in the title. This means that the word Blazer, as a minimum, must be in a heading, but preferably also in display path.

Furthermore, you should always be concerned about encouraging those who see your ad to click on it and visit your page. If we sell blazers, it could be “Create your next blazer here!” to finish the description or perhaps “See our selection of blazers”. What triggers those who seek to click, you do not know until you have tested. Therefore, create different versions and continue testing as results arrive.

Also, always remember to include it in your ad if there are special reasons why the potential customer should choose you rather than your competitors. Previously we mentioned that callout extensions are perfect for this, but remember to mention the most important thing in the ad text as the extensions are not always displayed. Do you have free shipping, the largest selection or a big sale on the blazers this weekend? Make sure you highlight this in the advertisement text.

While writing the ad text, you can follow the Ad Strength. This goal gives an indication of how good (relevant) Google thinks your ad is how many combinations they can make with the asss you've made.

Customize your ad as best you can. A good tool here is to use: Ad Customizers and IF functionsSo let's say that this is the same thing as that. Here you can customize the ad text based on who sees your ad. Perhaps you want to show a different description in the ad to those who are mobile versus those who see the ad on desktop? Or maybe you want to customize the message if those who see your ad are in one of the publications you have previously set up? IF-functions allow you to do just this using a small code piece.

Road on

Now you've set up your first campaign, so what now?

From here you can only start with. More campaigns. More advertising groups. Build out your visibility as best you can. Maybe you want to set up a shopping campaign? Or maybe you need a DSA campaign to cover all of your individual products in your range better?

The short answer is therefore work on and wait. Let it go a few days before the results come in and you can start optimising your campaigns.

Target results

Before you lean back and wait for the results to come, there's one last thing you absolutely have to do. Conversion tracking. To work on your account and optimize your ads, keywords and audience, you are completely dependent on knowing what works or not.

You therefore need to configure conversion tracking. So you do that:

Select “Tools” at the top right corner and select “Conversions”. Here you click on the new conversion.

Here you get several options to add conversions. If you have already configured conversion tracking through Google Analytics, for example, you can import these directly into Google Ads. In many ways this might be the easiest way to do it.

If you do not have the desired import destination, select “Website”.

Here you have to fill in the information about the name, the category of the conversion and its value. In this case, we want to measure the number of sales. The value of what we sell varies because we have a clothing store where the price varies from good to good.

The conversion window will vary greatly according to what you sell. For some industries, 90 days may be between clicks and purchases, while in other industries, on average, 1 day. How long is the purchase process on a blazer? 30 days is probably far enough for most people. Also remember to choose the attribution model that you think best fits. If you want to learn more about which attribution model you should choose, you should read this article from Google.

Once you have filled in this information, you will get the choice of how you want to implement conversion tracking on your page. You can choose to add a code bit to the web page yourself, send the code to your developers or use Google Tag Manager.

Optimize relevance

In time, an important part of Google Ads account work is to optimise for relevance. We do this by reviewing the search term report for a keyword – let's say “blazer”. You see that “blazer” has many impressions, but not quite as many clicks as you had hoped. There are also relatively few who click on the ad that ends up buying. This is despite the fact that they have searched for a blazer and land on a landing side with blazers.

Why is that?

1. The advertisement and landing page are not relevant enough for the search term
2. The search term is not relevant to what you offer

The search term report shows you a selection of what you have actually seen your ad looking for. Therefore, you can quickly find out what is why the keyword does not perform as you had hoped. When you go through the search terms, you have the following options:

1. Leave them alone
2. Put them as negative keywords
3. Put them as negative keywords and create a new ad group for them

Perhaps you see that many people are looking for “blazer for children” and get your ad? You know you don't sell baby clothing in your store. Therefore, it will be only waste money to be visible on this search term if someone should click on your ad. Therefore, you should add “blazer to children” and “children” as a negative keyword.

You may also find that many people are looking for “blazer man” and “blazer green”. These are products you sell, but from the ad and the landing page it does not necessarily well affect the visitor. To increase relevance, you can create new ad groups. Make one with “blazer man” as a keyword and one with “blazer green” as a keyword. Once you have created new ad groups, you can add the current terms as negative keywords in the original ad group.

By working down in the shopping area in this way, we make it cheaper for ourselves because we increase relevance. As mentioned earlier, an increased Quality Score will result in lower click prices. Furthermore, we increase the chance that applicants will experience us as a solution to what they are looking for. The more specific keywords, the further down in the purchase area, we can assume that we are.

Perform Google Ads audit

One of the biggest sins of your Google Ads account is that you see done with it. We who work with Google Ads daily, and across different customers, know that the work with an account is never done. The landscape we're moving in changes too often and too quickly to allow us to look at an account that is fully optimized – no matter how much work we have put in it. Therefore, it is important that you regularly conduct audits where you go through the critically glanced account and note improvement actions along the way. An account can quickly become large and unrespective and it is therefore good to know what to look for.

As a starting point, you should follow this list:

1. Convertion Tracking
2. Account Structure
3. Promotion Settings
4. Search term
5. Ads
6. Extensions
7. Audience
8. Documentation and reporting

We've already created the ultimate Google Ads audit implementation guideSo let's say that this is the same thing as that. Here we'll take you through each of these points and what you should look for.

Keep up to date

Keep up to date by reading professional blogs, Google notices and participating in discussions.

If you want to ask questions and exchange experiences, you should sign up for Google Ads Norway Facebook GroupSo let's say that this is the same thing as that.

Do you have any further questions, will you arrange a course or need help to configure and operate your Google Ads account? Do not hesitate to contact us!