Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners to Profitable PPC Ads Campaigns

You are here because you are either thinking about starting some PPC Ads campaigns for your business, or you want to get some tips on how to improve and refine your existing campaigns.

Well! You are in luck because in this article we have something for everyone. We’re going to take you by hand through the nitty-gritty details, from setting up your Google Ads account, right through to setting up your first profitable Google ads campaign.

Keep reading on, we promise there’s lots more good stuff coming up too.

Why Do You Need to Promote Your Business Using Google Ads?

Google Ads is the most powerful marketing tool to appear in the last 15 years. So powerful it drove Google’s annual revenue to over $161 billion in 2019. And Google ads alone account for over 134 billion of total Google revenue in 2019.

You can quickly use Google Ads power to sell your products and services to the world. Within an hour of opening a Google account, you can place your ads on Google search results pages.

Just start with a business idea, research it, plan, and set up a Google Ads campaign; then optimize your campaign so that you only invest in areas where you’re making money — in other words where you can make more money, and stop wasting ads budget.

What Is PPC ?

PPC Ad is short for pay-per-click advertising, an online advertising method that allows marketers to place ads on Google, get their message out to a vast audience of people, and pay every time their ad is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying online traffic to your website, rather than attempting to “earn” this traffic organically.

Google Ads, previously known as Google Adwords, is the most popular PPC advertising system in the world. The Google Ads platform enables advertisers to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties such as YouTube.

Using PPC Ads is often faster and gives you more control over the appearance of your listing in the Google search engine result pages. For example, if you’re selling office furniture and using PPC ads to promote it, you’ll have a real advantage over the competition that is only using SEO. Take a look at the below examples:

The Power of Pay Per Click: 4 Benefits of Using PPC Ads

PPC can have a powerful, and major positive, impact on most brands and businesses. If you aren’t doing any PPC marketing campaigns, you’re likely losing out on valuable revenue and traffic. Here are five reasons why you should use PPC ads to promote your business.

1. A Powerful Marketing Tool to Reach Your Business Goals

Regardless of the set of your business identified goals, PPC ads have the ability to help you achieve a wide variety of your business and marketing goals. These goals range from improving brand exposure and increasing brand awareness to boosting lead submission and maximizing eCommerce sales.

PPC also supports achieving many goals such as increasing content downloads, newsletter signups, contest entries, or pushing for app downloads. Moreover, PPC ads can support your goals along the sales funnel and the path that your potential customers take from awareness to becoming real customers.

2. A Measurable and Trackable Marketing Tool

This is often the most common reason to use PPC Ads — results are easy to be measured and tracked.

How?

Just use Google Ads along with Google Analytics. This enables you to get free access to high-level performance details including everything you need to know about the performance of your campaigns. Getting reports from Google Analytics enables you to clearly see how much money you spent and what it drove in terms of your end goals.

3. A Flexible and Quick Marketing Tool

A major benefit of PPC advertising run through Google Ads is that it’s flexible, easy-to-use, and quick. For example, if you have a new piece of content an ad can go up today. Unlike SEO, which often takes a lot of time, effort, and attention to get good positioning and traffic that Google Ads offers within a blink of an eye.

Compared to other marketing channels like social media and email, PPC allows you to quickly cast a wide net to find new prospects and customers so you have the advantage of targeting people outside of your existing followers or customer lists or those who are already aware of your brand.

Using PPC advertising with Google Ads offers you a lot of budget flexibility. You can set your own advertising budget and bids and start with a small amount, and if you’re seeing positive results, you can scale up immediately. Also, you can always pause and stop your ads spend right away.

Moreover, with PPC ads you ultimately have control over a wide range of options for how you want to reach your prospects and potential customers.

4. A Variety of Incredible Targeting Options

There is a wide range of targeting options available when using Google search engine ads. This ranges from targeting keywords through search text ads to audience targeting, business targeting, and running ads through remarketing campaigns based on your potential customers’ past behaviors.

Ultimately, the most compelling benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that it gives you the ability to reach people who aren’t already in your audience or aren’t aware of your brand.

How PPC Ads or Paid Search Works?

Google Ads operates on a pay-per-click model with real-time bidding (RTB) system, in which users bid on keywords that are sold in a private automated auction using real-time data.

Every time a user initiates a search on Google, the platform chooses a set of advertisers to appear in the limited valuable ad space on its search results pages. Choosing those advertisers is based on a blend of factors, including the quality of their ads, the relevancy of their keywords, as well as the bid amount.

Now, let’s take a deep dive into the key factors affecting showing ads in the top spot of the Google SERPs.

Factors Affecting Google Ads Auction Work

1. Keywords

Google is a place where people go to search for things. So, keywords are the heart of Google PPC ads. Keywords work as generalized abstractions search of queries that users type into the search box to find results.

Choosing your ad keywords carefully to match search queries plays a great role in winning the Google bidding race.

2. Ad Quality

Along with selecting your keywords, you need to prepare quality ads in your campaigns. Ads are what the users will see if you won the auction, so they’re very important to get set right. Google also offers to add ad extensions to increase your ad visibility by making them more engaging to users.

There are two common types of Google ads extensions — “Call Extension” that enables advertisers to add a phone number and “Sitelink Extension” that enables advertisers to add more links to different pages on a site.

3. Ad Rank

It’s another factor that Google depends on to decide which ads should be chosen to be at the top and most valuable spot. Google operates the ad quality by using “Quality Score,” a metric that measures ad relevance. The quality score includes historical CTR, landing page quality, and the relevance of the keyword to the ad and the search query.

The higher the quality score your ad takes, the lower the CPC will be.

4. Budgets & Bids

Budgets are set only on a daily basis, not monthly, and at the campaign level. Regarding bids, PPC Ads operates with real-time bidding (RTB) system, so in order to participate in the auction, you need to decide how much money you are willing to spend on a given keyword.

All Google ad groups must have bids, and the actual amount of money paid by an advertiser is dependent on competitors’ activities and ad rank, not just the maximum bid you’ve set.

5. Targeting

Besides using keywords as a targeting way, there are other valuable targeting ways to optimize your PPC ads campaigns, including:

• Demographics
• Location
• Device
• Day and time

You can also use remarketing tools to run remarketing campaigns to target or exclude your past visitors to a website.

6. Conversions

There is no point in all this effort if it does not ultimately lead to conversions. Conversions, in its simplest sense, are the actions that advertisers want their users to take after clicking on an ad, whether they’re purchasing a product, registering in an event, signing up for a newsletter, etc.

It’s incredibly important to track conversions to know whether your PPC campaign is doing well or not. To collect conversion data, you can use a snippet of code that is placed into the source code of your conversion page which is reached after conversion, like a thank you page.

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What Are the Key Types of Google Ads Campaigns?

• Search Campaign — It allows you to show text ads on the search engine result pages only, driving sales, leads, or traffic to your website.
• Display Campaign — It’s also known for displaying image ads. It lets you reach people with visually engaging ads as they browse across millions of websites and apps.
• Video Campaigns — Simply, they’re video ads that appear on YouTube and other websites.
• Shopping Campaign — It the best choice for retailers, enabling them to promote products from their eCommerce store. Shopping ads appear on Google search results and the Google Shopping tab.
• App Campaign — It helps you to increase app installs and increase sales within your app. You can promote your app across Search, YouTube, Play, Discover, and 3+ million websites and apps.
• Local Campaign — This kind of ads helps you bring people to your physical stores and venues, using ads that appear across Search, Google Maps, and YouTube.
• Smart Campaign — It’s the easiest way to run your Google ads. Google recommends the best settings and targeting options to get you the most for your time and money.

How to Set a Google Ads Account and Run a Google Ads Campaign?

Phase 1: Sign Up Steps

To create a Google Ads account, follow these steps:

• Visit Google Ads
• Hit “Start Now”
• Type your email and password to sign in. It must be a “Gmail.”
• Once you sign in, you’ll face the below page. Ignore all options and click on “Switch to Expert Mode.” But Why?

Well! This step will exempt you from adding your billing information initially. So, if your financial information is not ready or you don’t have a credit card available for use now, you can follow this method and set your ad until preparing your billing info or credit card.

• After that, the below page will appear. Ignore all the options and click on “Create an account without a campaign”.

• In this step, you need to confirm your business information — your existing billing country, your time zone, and your preferred currency to pay for your ads. Keep or change this information as it suits your business. But be careful when selecting this information as you cannot change it later.
• Hit “Submit”.

• Congrats! You’re all done… Now, hit “Explore your account”.

• Now, you’ve reached the overview page. No action is needed to be taken here.
• Click on “Campaigns” where you’ll be able to set your Google ads campaigns.

• Tada! It’s empty. Sure, it’s a fresh account.
• Let’s set up your first Google Ads Campaign. Hit the ➕ icon and then choose “New campaign.”

• The first thing you’ll be asked for is to select your campaign goal. Whatever your campaign goal is, Google will give you recommended guidance to make the most of your Google Ads campaigns; for example, if you’re an online store and you want to increase sales, once you click on the “Sales” goal, Google will take you to the best practices to achieve this goal successfully without building your campaign alone from scratch.
• As a beginner and to explore all available options, it’s better to start with no guidance to create your campaign step by step.

• Once you select this option, 7 campaign types will appear immediately to choose from.
• Let’s start with the most common type for most of the businesses — “Search Campaign.”
• Select “Search,” then hit “Continue,” ignoring any other options.

Phase 2: How to Set Your Google Ad Campaign?

• Now, it’s time to select your campaign settings.
• Give it a name.
• Select “Networks” or where do you want your ad to appear? It’s recommended to remove the selection already made by Google on “Display Networks” to avoid wasting your ads budget on showing your ads on non-effective places. Make it a rule! Keep your campaigns as search only.
  And in case you need to select “Display Networks,” it’s better to create a separate campaign to choose exactly which websites you need to display your ads on. Don’t let everything to Google to make sure you get the most out of your budget.

• Click on “Show more settings.”
• Select your campaign start and end dates.
• If you are using software to track your ad performance, click on “Campaign URL options” to add it.
• If you are an eCommerce website and you want to generate ads for each product you have, click on “Dynamic Search Ads setting” to add your website domain, and choose the desired language. Remember, this option is perfect for eCommerce websites ONLY.

• We’ve reached targeting and audiences setting options. They’re 4 main options — locations, languages, audiences, and keywords.
• Regarding locations, it means where the search takes place. Choose the locations where your customers will make a search on a specific product or keyword. Make sure to choose locations that you can reach and deliver your products.
• And regarding languages, it’s the language of google interface the users set. It’s better to choose “All languages.”
• Ignore setting Audiences options for a while.
• Setting the budget of Google Ads campaigns is very simple. Just type how much money you are willing to pay per day. Remember! The more you keep your search ad working, the more good results you can get.
• Regarding bidding options, our experts recommend choosing the “Manual CPC” option to be able to set your own maximum cost-per-click (CPC) for your ads. Click on “Select a bid strategy directly” and then choose “Manual CPC” from the drop-down menu.

• Ignore all the other options and hit “Save and continue.”
• We’ve moved to the third phase of running your Google Ads Campaign, which is “Setting up your ad groups.”

Phase 3: How to Set Your Google Ad Groups?

• Name your ad group.
• Set your ad group default bid — it’s the maximum cost per click you’re willing to pay. It depends on how competitive your market is. If you have no idea how much you should bid to get the best results, start with the least amount of money (e.g., 1 EGP or $1 USD) and Google will tell you if it’s okay or you have to increase it.
• The next step is to enter the keywords you’re targeting. Use Keyword Planner to choose your keywords. Write as much keywords as you can. There is no limitation. The more keywords you enter, the better results you get. but keep in mind that these keywords are relevant to your ad and product/service you promote.
• Hit “Save and continue.”

The question now is how can you choose your keywords?

Well! You need to understand your product, market, and audience. You need also to figure out how do your customers search for your products and which keywords do they use to search for you.

There are two main factors to consider when choosing your keywords:

• Don’t combine two languages in one ad group (e.g., use Arabic only or English only Keywords).
• Use keywords that people use when they are about to make a purchase decision (the bottom of the funnel).

Phase 4: How to Create Your Google Ads?

This phase is about writing your ad copy that will appear to your users. It includes 7 main things:

1. Final URL
2. Headline 1
3. Headline 2
4. Headline 3
5. Display path
6. Description 1
7. Description 2

Let’s explain each one in detail…

• Type the final URL or the link of your landing page (e.g., product page).
• Your Headline is the most super powerful sentence you write about your main selling point to attract your potential customers. You have only 30 characters for each headline, so make sure to pick them carefully.
• The same is for your ad descriptions but in more detail. you have 90 characters for each description.
• Your display path is a part of the display URL in your expanded text ads. It’s displayed in green text below the ad headline and above the ad description. You can add, for example, a CTA (e.g., buy now). It has no effect on the URL. Once your potential customers click on your ad they’ll land on the final URL that you’ve typed before.

Take a look at the below example of an ad selling office furniture:

• If you want to write another ad click on “Done and create next ad.”
• If you don’t want to, hit “Save and continue.”
• You will then be taken to the confirmation page.
• Hit “Continue to campaign” and you will be taken to your ad group page.
• Add your payment info, and then run your PPC ads campaign.

Now, you need to add your payment information to be able to run your PPC ads successfully.

How to Add Your Payment Information?

• Click on “Tools” > “Billing” > “Settings”

• Fill your payment information
• Hit “Submit”

Note: Regarding the account type, it’s better to make it “Individual” to avoid adding too much info in case of choosing the “Business” option.

Final Note

After reading this article, you should have a good understanding of how to get started with PPC ads. Lastly, check the below important takeaways.

• Your Google Ads account structure is critical. Take your time to organize your campaigns, ad groups, targeting keywords, and ad copy appropriately.
• Keep your eyes on getting high-quality scores for your ads to increase performance and reduce costs.
• Study, study, and study again your market and your audience.
• Figure out what keywords are directing traffic to your website from organic search results, and use these to drive your choice of keywords for paid search ads.
• Always keep optimizing your campaigns so you can drive your performance up and your cost down.

We hope you get lots out of this article. If you have any questions or feedback, just drop us a line.

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