Considering launching a Google Ads campaign or looking to optimize an existing one? You’ve come to the right place.

Many businesses ask themselves the question, "Are Google Ads worth it?" Which is a valid question considering that, compared to other forms of digital marketing, Google Ads comes with increasingly competitive CPCs. However, Google Ads is still one of the most successful ways to advertise your business.

Google Ads is a powerful platform for reaching quality customers, raising awareness of your brand, products, and services, and achieving your marketing goals. However, to ensure success, it's essential to have a well-organized approach, follow best practice, and test and optimize your campaigns.

Our comprehensive checklist for a successful Google Ads campaign in 2024 can help with all of the above.

Before Launching Your Google Ads Campaign

1. Define Clear Goals

Before you even think about creating ads, establish your campaign's objectives. Are you aiming to drive website traffic, generate leads, increase sales, or promote brand awareness?

Your goals guide your entire campaign strategy.

You measure success in terms of those goals. They indicate what type of conversion tracking to set up. Your goals are the backbone of your Google Ads efforts.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation of any successful Google Ads campaign. Invest time in identifying relevant and high-performing keywords that potential customers might use to find your products or services.

You can do this by first creating a keyword list using tools such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and others.

For more detailed information on keyword research, check out our blog post, Keeping Up with Keywords.

3. Complete a Competitor Analysis

Study your competitors' ads and strategies. Analyze their keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. This can provide insights into what's working in your industry and where you can find opportunities.

Research into your competitors' Google Ads can also give you an estimate on how much companies are spending to stay competitive within your given industry.

Tools that can be useful for competitive analysis include SEMrush, ahrefs, and SpyFu.

4. Plan Your Budget

Determine your daily and monthly budget. Align it with your campaign goals and financial resources. Be realistic; is the budget large enough to accomplish your goals, or must you scale back and adjust goals? Google Ads allows you to set a budget cap to control your spending. Just make sure you’re spending enough to allow your campaigns to optimize.

5. Define Your Target Audience

Define your target audience based on demographics, location, interests, and online behavior. Knowing your audience helps you create highly relevant ads and increases the amount of quality leads from Google Ads. It can also be valuable to think about the devices (mobile, tablet, or desktop) that your target audience is using to get to your site.

6. Create Ad Copy and Design Assets

Craft compelling ad copy and engaging visuals. Your ads should resonate with your target audience, be informative and include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages clicks.

Google Ads Campaign Setup Steps

7. Select a Campaign Type

Choose the campaign type that suits your goals. Google Ads offers several options, including:

• Search
• Performance Max (also known as PMax)
• Dynamic Search
• Display
• Video
• Shopping
• Discovery
• Demand Gen
• App

Its best to start at the bottom of your funnel and work up to ensure you can start with a strong ROI. Generally, it makes sense to start with search campaigns and maybe a shopping or PMax campaign, adding in other ad types later. However, this will come down to the industry and budget you have to work with.

8. Choose Your Campaign Settings

Configure campaign settings, including location targeting, language preferences, and ad scheduling. These settings ensure your ads reach the right audience at the right time.

9. Set Up a Sensible Campaign and Ad Groups Structure

Organize your campaign into well-structured ad groups with closely related keywords and ad creatives. This improves ad relevance and click-through rates.

There's no limit to the number of ad groups you can create, but it's important to structure them in an organized manner to keep your account from becoming more complex than it needs to be. The purpose of campaigns and ad groups is to help you keep campaigns organized and effectively analyze results.

10. Determine Keyword Match Types

Select the appropriate keyword match types (broad match, phrase match, exact match, etc.) to control the relevancy of your ads. Make sure to bid on the right keywords and search terms.

11. Add Negative Keywords

Add negative keywords, to prevent your ads from displaying for irrelevant search queries. This helps you save budget for more relevant searches. Hint: Look at your search terms, not just your keywords.

Leverage Your Assets

12. Utilize Ad Assets

Take advantage of ad such extensions as site links, callouts, structured snippets, location, and other assets. These assets enhance your ad's visibility and provide valuable information to potential customers.

Automatically generated assets are now available in Google Ads. Google can now gather information from your website, previous ads, keywords, and landing pages to generate dynamic content.

Bidding and Budget Management

13. Choose a Bid Strategy

Choose a bidding strategy that aligns with your campaign objectives. Options include manual CPC (Cost-Per-Click) and automated bidding, such as maximize clicks and maximize conversions. Generally, you should be using automated bid strategies.

• Manual Bidding: Directly set the maximum amount you're willing to pay per click for each keyword or ad group, giving you full control over your bids.
• Automated Bidding: Google's algorithms use machine learning and data analysis to automatically adjust your bids in real time, aiming to achieve your specified campaign goals (maximize clicks, conversions or target ROAS).

14. Adjust Your Bids

Adjust bids for specific locations, devices, or demographics as needed. This allows you to optimize your campaign's performance.

Conversion Tracking

15. Set Up Conversion Tracking

Install conversion tracking to measure the success of your campaigns. It helps you determine which keywords and ads are driving conversions and provides insights into your return on investment (ROI).

Ad Quality and Relevance

16. Monitor Your Quality Score

Monitor and improve your ad's Quality Score by optimizing ad copy, landing pages, and keywords. A higher Quality Score can lead to lower costs and better ad positions.

17. Test Your Ads

Running responsive ads allows you to test a lot of ad creative. Test different headlines, ad copy variations, and visuals to discover what resonates best with your audience. Continuously feed your ads new creative to learn what performs.

Landing Page Optimization

18. Ensure Landing Page Relevance

Ensure that your landing pages are relevant to the ad content and provide a seamless user experience. Fast-loading and mobile-friendly pages are crucial.

19. Optimize for Mobile

Optimize your landing pages for mobile devices. With a significant portion of internet traffic coming from mobile users, a mobile-friendly experience is essential.

Monitoring and Optimization

20. Conduct Regular Monitoring

Monitor your campaign's performance regularly. Keep an eye on metrics, such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and cost per conversion.

21. Keep an Eye on Keyword Performance

Identify high-performing keywords and allocate more budget to them. Conversely, pause or adjust keywords that fail to deliver.

22. Make Ad Schedule Adjustments

Review your ad scheduling settings; adjust them to match the times your target audience is most active online.

23. Reallocate Budget

Regularly assess your campaign's performance and adjust daily budgets for individual campaigns or ad groups to optimize spending.

24. Refresh Ad Copy and Creative

Avoid ad fatigue by periodically updating ad copy and visuals. Fresh content can re-engage your audience and improve ad relevance.

Reporting and Analysis

25. Integrate Google Analytics

Integrate Google Analytics to gain deeper insights into user behavior on your website. Analyze which campaigns and keywords drive valuable actions beyond clicks.

By following this comprehensive checklist, you'll be well on your way to running a successful Google Ads campaign. But your work isn’t done; optimization is an ongoing process. Keep up with changes in the advertising landscape. Regularly review and adapt your campaigns to ensure they continue to deliver results and meet your marketing objectives.

The market will change over time. Competitors might get more or less aggressive, or your customers might change habits. Observe the market closely and be ready to pivot along with it.

Download a PDF version of the checklist.

If you’re ready to start your first (or next!) Google Ads campaign and want expert help from Google Ads specialists to ensure your business is set up for success, reach out to us! Our experienced digital ads team is here to guide you.

To ensure success with Google Ads, it's essential to have a well-organized approach, follow best practice & test and optimize your campaigns. Follow our step-by-step #GoogleAds campaign checklist! https://nwsdigital.me/45u9pEC @northwoods #digitaladvertising