Setting Up A Google Ads Campaign For Small Businesses – Part I

Generally, most Ads campaign targeting errors are unfortunately happening to small businesses who need a budget allocation as accurate as possible and the highest performance in terms of the invested amount/income earned.

These small local businesses are most prone to misplacing your budget or falling into the hands of someone who does not have the necessary skills to set up a high-performing Google AdWords campaign.

Therefore in this post we will explain step by step, what you need to do in order to set up a Google AdWords campaign and get the minimum efficiency with minimum budget.

Billing set up

Google offers two ways to pay for your campaign

– pre-pay or manual payment is a payment setting in AdWords that allows you to make payments before your ads run

– automatic payment – using this setting, you first accrue advertising costs, then have those costs automatically charged to your primary payment method

Google bills are issued once a month, generally on the 2-3th day, and this might be required for accounting. At each payment by clicking on the payment report you will open a page in which you receive a receipt – the so-called Payment Receipt.

In the United States the only possibility is to go with the automatic payments option.

Campaign set up

First of all, we choose Search Network Only to direct our ads to those who are in the search phase of our business. We name the campaign and then we should choose All Features – to have all the campaign setup options available.

After that, we will be able to include or not the so called Google search partners. Partners are the secondary search engines that are used in certain parameters or totally by Google’s results. As a rule, you must include them too, especially if you are targeting a customer audience that is not familiar with the smallest details of how the internet goes.

Then, you can target both Computers and Tablets or mobile phones. Typically, you only choose Desktop and Laptop Computers and, in case you want to expand your campaign to cover these devices (phones / tablets), you’ll be making a new campaign on these devices, because customers searching from mobile devices might have a different search behavior than those that are searching from a computer.

Targeting by location

Google AdWords allows us to choose to show our ads only to visitors from a city, country or radius.

Normally, you should go with the “Let Me Choose” option and select your particular city or region that you want to target.

It is very important to save after you have set up.

Also, if you target a city – Los Angeles , for example – you can also exclude visitors from certain cities.

Things to keep in mind:

Target the ENGLISH language (if you target Los Angeles for example, if you target Madrid you should choose Spanish).

Choose the default bid – the amount paid on each click will often be lower than what you set.

Choose the daily budget – You have to know that if you set $100/ day, you can actually spend $120 in a day, but in one month the budget will not exceed $3000. Google does so because there are many days when there are more searches because of higher demands on those keywords.

Delivery Method: Choose Standard to show ads throughout the day if the budget is somehow lower than what Google recommends and if the search volume is more than average.

Ad Extensions: We recommend adding at least 2-3 sitelinks to relevant sections of the site. Ad extensions offer a better click through rate, which improves ad position, offers more clicks and lowers click costs.

Run your ads based on time

Google AdWords allows your ads to be displayed on certain hours, or you can bid more or less at certain times. This feature is recommended to customers who offer services where the customer often needs a quick answer (phone call), and your company offers services in a well defined timeframe.

More in the following parts….