How to Run Google ADA

Thinking about using Google Ads to attract more customers? You’re in the right place. Running ads directly on Google’s search results page puts your brand in front of people who are actively searching for the exact solutions you offer. This guide walks you through the entire process step-by-step, from setting up your account to launching and optimizing your first campaign for real results.

What Exactly Are Google Ads? A Quick Primer

Before diving into the setup, let's cover a few core concepts. Google Ads is Google's online advertising platform that operates primarily on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. This means you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. Ads can appear in various places, but we'll focus on the most popular type: the Search Network.

Search Network: These are the text ads you see at the top of Google search results pages when you look for something. They are triggered by the specific keywords users type into the search bar. This is powerful because you’re reaching people with high purchase intent - they’re looking for a solution right now.
Display Network: These are banner-style visual ads that appear on a massive network of websites, apps, and videos that have partnered with Google. They’re great for building brand awareness rather than capturing immediate demand.
YouTube Ads: These are the video ads that play before, during, or after videos on YouTube.

Success on the Google Search Network comes down to three things: keywords, ad copy, and your bidding strategy. Think of it as a real-time auction. Every time someone searches, Google runs a lightning-fast auction to decide which ads to show and in what order. Your position, or Ad Rank, is determined by your bid amount and your Quality Score — a metric Google uses to assess the relevance and quality of your keywords, ad copy, and landing page.

Step 1: Set Up Your Google Ads Account Correctly

Creating an account is straightforward, but one initial choice has a big impact. Google will first guide you toward an account in "Smart Mode," a simplified experience that automates much of the process. While well-intentioned, it severely limits your control.

Pro Tip: Immediately switch to "Expert Mode."

Don't be intimidated by the name. Expert Mode unlocks all the features and reports you need to run an effective campaign. You can usually find a small link at the bottom of the page during setup that says "Switch to Expert Mode." This single click gives you full control over your keywords, ad copy, bidding, and optimization, which is essential for managing your budget effectively.

Step 2: Choose Your Campaign Goal and Type

Once you’re in Expert Mode, Google will ask you to choose a campaign objective. This helps Google tailor suggestions and settings to your primary business goal.

Common objectives include:

Sales: To drive purchases on your website, in-app, or in-store.
Leads: To gather contact information from potential customers through a web form.
Website Traffic: To get relevant people to visit your website.
Brand Awareness and Reach: To expose your brand to a broad audience.

Selecting a goal helps frame your strategy, but it's not set in stone. The next crucial step is choosing your campaign type. For beginners aiming for immediate results, the Search campaign is almost always the best starting point because it targets users actively looking for your product or service. That's what we’ll focus on for the rest of this guide.

Step 3: Keyword Research: The Foundation of Your Campaign

Keyword research is the most critical part of setting up a successful Google Ads campaign. You need to get inside your customers' heads and identify the search terms they use when they're looking to solve a problem that you can help with. Your goal is to bid on keywords that signal strong commercial intent.

Understanding Keyword Match Types

Google doesn't just let you add a word and hope for the best. You need to tell it how closely you want searches to match your chosen keywords using "match types."

Broad Match: This is the default setting and gives Google the most freedom. If your keyword is women's running shoes, your ad might show for "women's tennis sneakers" or "best athletic footwear for ladies." It provides the widest reach but can often result in paying for irrelevant clicks. Use with caution.
Phrase Match: To use phrase match, you put your keyword in quotation marks, like "women's running shoes". Your ad will show when the search contains your keyword phrase in the same order, but it might include words before or after it, such as "best women's running shoes sale." This offers a great balance of reach and relevance.
Exact Match: Notated with square brackets, like [women's running shoes], this is the most restrictive type. Your ad will only show for that exact search or extremely close variations, like "running shoes for women." It provides the highest relevance but the lowest reach.

Finally, there are Negative Keywords. These are terms you explicitly tell Google not to show your ads for. Building a strong negative keyword list is just as important as choosing your target keywords. For example, if you sell premium running shoes, you might add negative keywords like cheap, free, or used to avoid wasting money on searchers who aren't your target customer.

How to Find Keywords

Start by brainstorming a list of core terms related to your business. Then, use tools to expand that list and get search volume data. Google’s own Keyword Planner (available inside your Ads account) is a great place to begin. Third-party tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz Keyword Explorer can give you even more detailed insights, including what keywords your competitors are bidding on.

Step 4: Writing Ad Copy That Gets Clicks

Your ad is what convinces a person to click. A standard search ad has three main parts:

Headlines (up to 3): These are the bold, blue titles. They are the most prominent part of the ad and are limited to 30 characters each.
Descriptions (up to 2): The text below the headlines where you can provide more detail, limited to 90 characters each.
Display URL: The URL shown in the ad. You can simplify this to make it clean and easy to read (e.g., yourwebsite.com/running-shoes).

Google uses "Responsive Search Ads," where you provide multiple headlines and descriptions (up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions), and Google's algorithm mixes and matches them to find the highest-performing combinations. This means you should write each one to work independently while still making sense together.

Best Practices for Ad Copy:

Include Your Primary Keyword: Use your target keyword in at least one headline to show relevance and have it appear bolded.
Highlight Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Why should they choose you? Is it free shipping, a lifetime warranty, veteran-owned, or 24/7 support? Make it clear.
Use a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA): Tell users exactly what you want them to do. Use action-oriented phrases like "Shop Now," "Get a Free Quote," or "Download Your Guide."
Use Extensions: Ad extensions allow you to add more information and take up more valuable space on the results page. Sitelink extensions add extra links to specific pages on your site, callout extensions highlight key features (e.g., "Free Returns"), and structured snippets detail your product features. Use them! An ad with extensions looks more authoritative and typically has a much higher click-through rate.

Step 5: Budgeting and Bidding for Your Goals

Next, you’ll tell Google how much you're willing to spend and how you want to bid in the ad auction.

Setting Your Daily Budget

This is the average amount you’re comfortable spending each day. Google might spend a little more or less on any given day, but it will not exceed your average daily budget multiplied by the number of days in the month. Start with a modest budget you’re okay with losing as you gather data. You can always increase it later.

Choosing a Bidding Strategy

Your bid strategy tells Google how to spend your money to achieve your objective. Initially, when your account has no conversion data, it's best to start with a strategy focused on clicks. After you get some conversions, you can switch to a conversion-focused strategy.

Maximize Clicks: Google will try to get you the most clicks possible within your budget. This is a great starting point for new campaigns designed to drive traffic and collect performance data.
Maximize Conversions: Once you have conversion tracking set up and some data flowing, this strategy uses machine learning to automatically bid for users who are most likely to convert (e.g., make a purchase or fill out a form).
Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): This is an advanced version of Maximize Conversions where you set a specific cost you’re willing to pay for each conversion. Google's algorithm will then try to get as many conversions as possible at or below that target CPA.

Step 6: Launch and Monitor Your Campaign

After setting everything up, you'll reach a final review page. Double-check your settings - especially your daily budget, location targeting, and keywords - and then hit launch! But your work isn’t over, it’s just beginning.

You need to check in on your campaign daily for the first week, and weekly after that. Here are the key metrics to watch in your dashboard:

Clicks and Impressions: Impressions are how many times your ad was shown, while clicks are how many times it was clicked on.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click (Clicks ÷ Impressions). A low CTR might signal your ad copy isn't engaging or your keywords aren't relevant enough. A CTR of 2-5% is decent for a Search campaign, but this varies wildly by industry.
Cost Per Conversion (CPA): How much you paid, on average, for each sale or lead. This is arguably the most important metric for judging profitability.
Quality Score: You can see this Google-rated metric at the keyword level. On a scale of 1-10, it estimates the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher Quality Scores lead to lower costs and better ad positions.

Step 7: Optimize for Better Performance

A Google Ads campaign is a living thing. The key to long-term success is continuous optimization based on the data you’re collecting.

Key Optimization Activities:

Monitor the Search Terms Report: This report shows you the actual search queries people typed that triggered your ad. It's a goldmine for finding irrelevant terms to add to your negative keyword list, saving you tons of money. For example, if you sell software for architects and see clicks coming from searches for "free architecture software," you should add "free" as a negative keyword immediately.
A/B Test Your Ads: Because Responsive Search Ads mix and match headlines and descriptions, Google does some of this 'testing' for you. However, you can see which assets are performing best and swap out the 'low' rated ones with new variations to constantly improve your CTR and conversion rate.
Improve Your Landing Page: Your ad’s job is to get the click, your landing page’s job is to get the conversion. Make sure your landing page is directly relevant to what the ad promised. If your ad is for "women's running shoes," the page should feature women's running shoes, not your men's collection or a generic homepage. A strong landing page experience boosts your Quality Score and, most importantly, your conversion rate.

Stick with a regular cycle of monitoring your data, identifying areas for improvement, and testing changes. That's the path to running profitable Google Ads campaigns.

Final Thoughts

Launching a Google Ads campaign involves a direct workflow: mastering your account and keyword strategy, crafting compelling ads, and then diligently monitoring and optimizing based on real performance data. By following these steps, you can avoid common pitfalls and build a powerful channel for attracting high-intent customers to your business.

Of course, after your campaign is live, the challenge shifts to analyzing its true impact alongside all your other efforts. Getting Google Ads data in one place with information from Google Analytics, your CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, and your e-commerce platform like Shopify is often a manual, time-consuming process. To simplify this, we built Graphed . We connect directly to all your data sources so you can ask plain-English questions like, "Which Google Ads campaigns drove the most new customers in Salesforce last month?" and get an instant, real-time dashboard showing the answer. You get the full picture of your performance in seconds, not hours.