How to Create a Search Campaign on Google Ads: A Simple Guide

Among all big and small advertising platforms that exist today, Google Ads is probably the most used one. According to the data, Google owns 70% of the search market share. Therefore, if you are thinking of running some advertisement campaigns for your business and services, it is a no-brainer that Google Ads should be on top of your priorities.

There are many forms of advertisings on Google Ads platform that you can select from. Search Campaigns for text ads, Display Campaigns for Image Ads, Video Campaigns for YouTube advertising, Shopping Campaigns if you have products to sell, and a few other types.

In this blog post, we are going to solely focus on Google Ads Search campaigns.

What is Google Ads Search campaign?

Search campaigns are simply text ads that that appear on Google search results when users search for a specific keyword. Chances are most of the time that you search for a service or product on Google, you have noticed results that carry a small Ad label.

Search campaigns are a great way to drive sales, leads, or traffic to your website, as your ad will be shown to people who are searching for products and services you offer.

How to create a search campaign on Google Ads

When logged into your Google Ads Account, click on New Campaign.

In the next step, you should choose a goal for your campaign. By using a goal, Google Ads will guide you to the specific features designed to help your campaign succeed. You should select a goal that corresponds to the results that you expect to get from your campaign.

For example, let’s say we want to promote your website and drive potential customers to the website. Therefore, we select ‘Website traffic’ as the goal for our campaign.

In the next step, Google Ads provides us with some options on what campaign type we want

to proceed with. As this tutorial is about Search campaigns, so we select Search. Then, it will prompt you to type your business website that you want to run the campaign for. This step is not mandatory, but it will help to customize your campaign setup to focus on settings and features that can help you get the customer actions that matter most to your business.

Setting up general settings of the campaign

The next part of creating your Google Ads Search campaign is to set up the general settings of your campaign.

First, choose a name for your campaign in the ‘Campaign name’ field. It is very plausible that you will create other campaigns in the future, so it is important to choose a structured name for your campaigns so that you can easily recognize each campaign by just looking at its name.

Now, you have the option to choose whether you include Google search partners and Google Display Network to show your ads.

Google search partners are websites in the Search Network that extend the reach of Google Search ads. Google Display Network is a group of more than 2 million websites, videos, and apps where your ads can appear.

Now, you have the options to choose the schedule of your campaign, the audience that you want to target (locations, language, interests etc.), how much you want to spend in your campaign each day, and how much you are willing to pay for each click on your ads.

Selecting the right audience will help you run your campaign more effectively and show your ads to people who might actually be interested in your services. For example, if you are a local business and you just want people in your local area see your ad, you better off to select only that specific area in the location’s settings. You can also exclude the geographical locations that you don’t want you ads to appear.

Ad Extensions

At the bottom of the Campaign Settings page, there are some fields for Ad extensions.

Ad extensions are a feature in Google Ads that shows extra information about your ad, like phone number, address, specific webpages on your website and more. Using the right ad extensions increases the likelihood of driving more engagement to your ad.

As a rule of thumb, it is recommended that you have at least three ad extensions that make sense for your business. You should select as many as possible, but remember that Google Ads will only show a maximum of four ad extension to users.

There is also a feature for Automated Ad Extensions, which allows Google to generate ad extensions by machine learning algorithms.

Setting up Ad Groups

Congratulations! So far, you have taken the first steps to build your search campaign on Google Ads. You selected the ad type, you decided what audience to target, and you set a budget for your campaign. Now, it’s time to organize the structure of your ad groups. But what are ad groups exactly?

In Google Ads hierarchy, Ad groups are where containing your ads. You should create a few ad groups for each campaign based on different topics around your keywords. For example, let’s say you own a pizza shop that you want to run paid campaign for. You sell both vegetarian pizza and meat pizza. You don’t want t run the same ads for different types of pizza, as somebody who is a vegetarian is certainly not interested to buy meat pizza.

Therefore, it is a good practice to divide your ads into different ad groups based on the topics around your products or services.

For each product, service, topic, you create a new ad group and then put the keywords related to that topic in each ad group. There is no limitations on how many ad groups you could build for your campaign (well, yes, officially, you are limited to 20,000 ad groups per campaign in your Google Ads account. But you’ll probably never get close to that number!)

The number of ad groups that you create for each campaign depends entirely on your business.

Inside each ad group, you should choose some keywords related to the topic. It is recommended to limit the number of keywords to 20 per ad group.

How to choose keywords for your campaign?

When creating an ad group, based on the URL of your website, Google automatically suggests some useful keywords related to your business. Although these suggested keywords are very useful, but you should still do more research on what keywords to choose.

On the Tools section of the menu on your Google Ads account, there is tool called Keyword Planner. Here, you could discover new keywords and get keyword ideas that can help you reach people interested in your product or service and see search volume and forecasts around your keywords.

For example, for a Pizza Delivery business, you will see many related keywords, whether the competition around those keywords are high or low, average monthly searches for each keyword, and many more useful data.

This is the place you should delve into to spend some time and do your research in order to choose the right keywords for your ad groups.

There are four ways you could use keywords: Broad match, broad match modifier, Phrase match, and Exact match. Here are each one’s explanations with examples and how you should use them:

Match type	Special symbol	If your keyword is:	Then your ads may show on searches if:	And the person was looking for:
Broad match	none	children's bicycles	The keyword, or any variations like misspellings, synonyms, or related searches, are in any part of the search terms.	buy kids bicycles / Children's scooters
Broad match modifier	+keyword	+children’s +bicycles	The keyword, or its close variations, are in any part of the search terms. Additional words may appear before, after, or between the search terms.	Children’s toys and bicycles / Mountain bicycles for children
Phrase match	“keyword”	“children’s bicycles”	The keywords within the quotation marks, or its close variations, match the search terms. There can’t be any extra words between the search terms.	Safe children’s bicycles / buy children’s bicycles / children’s bicycles on sale
Exact	[keyword]	[children’s bicycles]	The exact keyword, or its close variations, mean the same as the search terms. There can’t be any extra words before or after the search terms.	children’s bicycles / kid’s bicycles / bicycles for children

Creating Ads in Google Ads

After you create your ad groups, it’s time to create your ads: the texts and URLs that people will see when they search for your targeted keywords. It is recommended that for each Ad Group, you create at least 3 Ads.

You need to add Headline, Description, and URL to your ad.

You can add up to three headlines with maximum 30 characters each. Chances are users will notice the headline of your text ad first. Two description fields with up to 90 characters each let you highlight unique details about your product or service. The URL shows your website address which gives users an idea of where they will go when they click your ad.

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And yes, that’s it! By following the above steps, you can create your Search campaign on Google Ads. I hope you found this guide useful.