How Do I Set Up a Google Ads Campaign?

Setting up a Google Ads campaign involves organizing your budget and targeting by location, mainly focusing on cities or areas. Each campaign should be dedicated to a specific city or region with appropriate budget allocation. Within the campaigns, you create ad groups based on the different types of services your business offers, with keywords to trigger your ads and the ads themselves linking to relevant landing pages.

Full Explanation

The core structure of a Google Ads campaign is straightforward and centers around two main components at the campaign level: your budget and your geographic targeting. Designing your campaign around specific cities or localized areas ensures your advertising budget is spent effectively on the audiences most likely to convert. For smaller cities, you might extend your targeting radius around that city, for example 10 or 20 miles, while in larger cities it’s best to create individual campaigns dedicated solely to each city. This segmentation allows for more precise control over budget and messaging.

Below each campaign, ad groups categorize the various services your business provides. Each ad group contains two critical elements: the keywords themselves, which define when your ads will appear, and the ads that visitors will see. These ads link directly to dedicated landing pages tailored to the specific service being promoted.

Ads should mention both the service and the city they target. Including the city name in the ad copy helps reassure users that your service is local and relevant, increasing the likelihood they will click your ad when searching for services in that location.

Step-by-Step Breakdown

1. Set up campaigns by location: Define the geographic area for your campaign. For small cities, consider a radius of 10-20 miles, and for larger cities, create a separate campaign for each city.
2. Allocate budget per campaign: Assign budgets based on the city or area you are targeting to manage your spend effectively.
3. Create ad groups within each campaign: Organize ad groups by types of services your business offers.
4. Define keywords for each ad group: Choose keywords that will trigger your ads to appear when users search for those services.
5. Create ads associated with each ad group: Write ads that include both the service and city name, and link these ads to specific landing pages related to that service.

Real Examples

In practice, if you run a plumbing business with services such as repairs, installations, and inspections in a metropolitan area, you would create separate campaigns for each city your business serves. Under each city campaign, you would create ad groups named ‘Plumbing Repairs,’ ‘Plumbing Installations,’ and ‘Plumbing Inspections.’ Each ad group would have specific keywords related to those services and ads highlighting the service plus the city name, linking directly to the respective service landing page.

Common Mistakes

• Mixing multiple cities in one campaign: This can dilute the effectiveness of your targeting and make budget allocation less efficient.
• Not tailoring ads to location: Leaving out the city name in ads reduces relevance and user trust, which often leads to lower click-through rates.
• Failing to organize ad groups by service: This can result in irrelevant keywords triggering your ads, lowering ad quality and performance.
• Neglecting landing page alignment: Ads should point to landing pages specifically related to the service promoted to maintain consistency and increase conversions.

FAQs

Q: Should I create one campaign for all locations or separate campaigns per city?
It is best to create one campaign per city to tailor your budget, ads, and targeting effectively.

Q: How do I decide on the radius around a small city?
For smaller cities, a 10 to 20-mile radius is recommended to cover surrounding areas without wasting budget on unrelated locations.

Q: Why should ads mention both the service and city?
Mentioning the service and city builds relevance and trust in the ad which encourages more clicks.

Q: What do ad groups represent in a campaign?
Ad groups represent different types of services your business offers within the targeted campaign’s geographic area.

Key Takeaways

• Organize campaigns based on geographic location, preferably separated by individual cities.
• Allocate budgets to match the specific campaign’s city or radius.
• Create ad groups that focus on distinct services your business offers.
• Use keywords to target relevant searches for each service offered in each city.
• Craft ads that mention both the service and city name to increase local relevance and click-through rates.
• Link ads directly to related landing pages for higher conversion effectiveness.