When you’re looking to launch Google Ads, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start, what to start with, or what tools are available to help you start. However, this Google Ads checklist will help you know exactly what you need to do to get started. As you continue to optimize, you can refer to this Google Ads checklist to keep yourself organized and make sure that you know what steps to take to grow your business.
Know Your Budget
I can’t stress this enough—you need to know what you can afford to spend on advertising before launching your business. Failure to calculate this properly creates a distressing feedback loop: if you don’t spend enough on advertising, then not enough people know about you. If not enough people know about you, they’re not going to find your business. If people can’t find your business, then you won’t have enough money to spend on advertising.
When you’re first starting out, you need to use tools such as the Google Keyword Planner to compare and calculate the cost of keywords relevant to your target audience. This helps you keep in mind what you need to prepare for, and how you can plan out your growth. You can also see how much your keywords cost in certain target markets (helpful hint: the smaller the geographical area targeted, the more expensive your keywords tend to be).
Organize Your Advertising With “SKAGS”
As a small business owner, you probably want to make sure that your Google Ad Account is well organized and that you can see which keywords are working best for you, how much they’re costing you, and how you can optimize them. If this is the case, you’ll want to use “Single-Keyword Ad Groups” (or “SKAGs” for short).
What this means is that you construct your Ad Groups are the skeletal backbone of your Google Ads Campaign. Each Ad Group features only one keyword, and you build your ads inside of that one Ad Group. So if I were running ads for my insurance company, I’d make a Single-Keyword Ad Group for “House Insurance”, another one for “Car Insurance”, and a third ad group for “Life Insurance”. Within each of those Ad Groups, I would only build ads for that specific type of insurance.
This isn’t a feasible system to maintain as your account scales, but when you’re starting out, keeping the SKAG system is a vital method to keep tight control over your ad spend, ad copy, and carefully measure out which changes will be most effective for your campaign.
From this point on, you begin copywriting your ads. Here are some key tips for copywriting for Google Ads.
Try Out Google Ads Editor
Now that you know your budget, know what keywords you want, and know the best way to organize them, it’s time to write your ads and get them live. The catch, though, is that it takes a long time to sit down and write ads headline by headline. However, Google has a free tool that you can use to create large search campaigns: Google Ads Editor. This tool is a critical asset to the Google Ads checklist because it simplifies the way you can make large changes to the campaign very quickly.
Replace multiple headlines? Boom! Super easy.
Change bids in multiple ad groups? Boom! Super quick.
Add multiple locations? Boom! Find them all.
Google Ads Editor also remembers your progress throughout the ad creation/editing process, so you can always come back to it if you need to take a break. It also allows you to create and upload your new search ad campaign “paused” so that you can take time to review it in Google Ads as a whole before taking it live.
By following this Google Ads checklist, you have what you need to start crafting winning Google Ads Campaigns today. However, not everyone has the time to learn the full twists and tricks of Google Ads, so they rely on our dependable Paid Search Marketing team! Our team manages all the Keyword research, uses winning techniques to draft Google Ad campaigns, and stays on top of the attest changes in Google Ads to make sure that you don’t have to worry about them. If you’d like to learn more about how this team can help your business, reach out for a free consultation today!
Matthew is a Brand Strategist who has a passion for learning, and for improving the world around him. He does this by helping share the stories small businesses have to share and building bonds between businesses and communities. He’s currently working through a movie marathon of all the Academy Awards Best Picture winners.
