Table of Contents
Understand Google Ads
Every second, users access the information Google Search needs to do everything. Google Ads is a digital advertising solution that can help you reach these audiences and convert them into high-value customers
Why choose Google Ads?
With Google Ads, you can use a wide variety of advertising products to help you reach your customers when it matters most. You can focus on growing your business and let Google’s smart technology help you achieve better advertising results.
1. Increase sales
Increase online, in-app, offline, and phone sales.
2. Mining potential customers
Drive users to take action and increase conversions.
3. Increase the number of website visits
Attract your target audience to your website.
4. Influence Consideration
Attract users to your products and services.
5. Build awareness
Reach a broad audience and maximize exposure.
6. Promote your app
Get more users to install and engage with your app.
Take advantage of Google Ads
To help you grow your business, we’ve built Google Ads around three principles: Relevance, Control, and Performance.
1. Correlation
Google Ads can help you connect with the right user with the right message at the right moment. Your ad can appear on Google Search, YouTube, and more when people search for similar products or services. You can also customize options such as keywords and locations to ensure your ad is shown to relevant users.
2. Effective control
Google Ads puts the budget decision entirely in your hands. You can choose your monthly, daily, and per-ad costs. Based on your settings, Google Ads uses a quick auction to determine which ads to show. If you want to change your strategy, you can easily adjust your ads, modify your budget, or pause and restart your campaigns.
3. Effectiveness
You only pay for what your ads do, such as when people click through to your website or call your business. Our measurement tools make it easy to see how your website, apps and ads are performing. Plus, you can create, manage, and optimize campaigns with smart technology to make the most of your investment.
2. Let Google Ads help you achieve your business goals
With Google Ads, you can reach people who find answers on Google Search, watch videos on YouTube, find apps on Google Play, and more. When you choose a campaign type, you can specify where users can see your ad.
Through this unit, you can learn how to use Google Ads campaigns to achieve your business goals.
Google Ads campaign types
To advertise with Google Ads, first create a campaign based on your business goals. Each campaign type determines where and in what format your ads can appear. Let’s examine how different campaign types (Search, Display, Video, Shopping, and App) can support your business goals.
1. Search campaigns
Search ads appear next to Google search results and on other Google partner sites like YouTube when people search for businesses like yours.
With a search campaign, you can ensure that potential customers will notice your brand, consider what you offer, and take action.
2. Display campaigns
Google Display Ads can be placed on an ad network of more than two million websites and apps, reaching 90% of Internet users. Your ad will be targeted to content relevant to your business or your customers’ interests.
Running a display campaign can increase your ad exposure to specific interest audiences on the web.
3. Video campaigns
With video ads, you can reach and capture your ideal audience at scale. You can display ads on YouTube and Google’s advertising network (which consists of websites and apps) independently or on other streaming video content in these places. You only pay when a user chooses to watch an ad.
Video campaigns can help you bring your business story to life. They can engage users in different ways, such as showing ads before a music video they like, or when they’re researching something they’re about to buy.
4. Shopping campaigns
Shopping ads appear next to search results on Google Shopping and near text and responsive ads. Shopping ads can even promote your products by giving them detailed information about what you sell before consumers choose your ad.
You can use Shopping campaigns to promote your online products and local brick-and-mortar products to increase traffic to your website or local storefronts for better leads.
5. App campaigns
With simple setup, app campaigns run ads across Google-scale properties, including Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and thousands of mobile sites and apps. Your ads and bids are automatically adjusted to get the most downloads possible. All you need to do is add a few lines of text, set a bid, provide some assets, and the rest will be automatically optimized to help users find you.
With App campaigns, you can increase engagement, app installs, and even in-app actions like signing up for a newsletter or ordering a product.
Run smart campaigns more efficiently
Looking for a solution for your small business? Try Smart Campaigns! You just choose your business goals and let the machine learning system bring you the best results across ad networks like Google Search, Display Network, and Google Maps.
Smart campaigns are the default option for advertisers just getting started with Google Ads. This type of campaign is ideal if you want to easily reach relevant customers and achieve great ad performance, but have limited time or experience to manage a Google Ads campaign.
By leaving the work of optimizing your ads to our smart technology, you can focus on what’s important – running your business.
Optimize your campaign
The type of campaign you choose determines where users will see your ads, but you can customize many features to ensure you reach meaningful audiences no matter where they are.
1. Device positioning
Reach your customers on any device, including desktop, tablet, and smartphone.
2. Geographical and language targeting
Ads in a campaign can appear to users in specific geographic locations, or to users who have specified a language of your choice in their browser language settings.
3. Bidding and budget settings
A bid strategy controls how to bid on user interaction with your ad. A bid limit is the amount you’re willing to pay for a click on an ad in an ad group. Budget is the average amount you’re willing to pay for your campaign each day. The size of your budget is entirely up to you, and you can adjust the budget amount at any time.
4. Ad extensions
Add more information to your ad, such as location information, links to pages on your website, and your phone number.
3. Explore the value of Google search
At this moment, tons of potential customers are searching for the products and services you offer. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your information available when they need you! Learn how Google Search campaigns can help you reach the right users at the right time to achieve your business goals.
Recognize the Value of Google Search Ads
Potential customers are searching for your product or service right now. You can create a Google Search campaign to help them find you when they need you!
Through this unit, you will learn what a search campaign is and the importance of showing ads to users at the right moment.
Importance of Google Search
There are approximately 3.5 billion searches per day on Google Search. People search for information, shop online, compare product prices, get directions, or learn new things anytime, anywhere.
Google’s mission is to bring all this available information together for the benefit of everyone.
When people want to know what information, what to buy, where to go or what to do, Google Search is their place!
Turn user intent into performance
Google Search Ads campaigns show your ads alongside search results when people search for what you offer.
4. Master the Basics of Google Search Campaigns
To show your text ads to potential customers, first create a Google Search Ads campaign.
Through this module, you will learn how to create and customize a Google Search campaign to achieve your business goals.
Set up a search campaign
When setting up a search campaign, think about the different ways you can drive more traffic to your website, service, or product.
- Where would you like your ad to appear?
- How much do you want to invest?
- What message do you want to convey in your ad?
- Which keywords match the user’s search terms?
1. Campaign
Campaigns should be built around marketing objectives and set up based on the actions you want users to take.
2. Marketing goals
Marketing goals should be the main business goals you want to achieve and can be adjusted at any time. A search campaign marketing objective can be set to “Sales,” “Leads,” or “Website Traffic.” (There are other optional goals for Display, Video, and App campaigns.)
For example, if Ajiu wanted to get more people to sign up to receive emails from their online store, they could create a potential customer-targeted campaign.
3. Google Search the Web
Google search network (including Google search partners by default). Her ads show not only on Google Search, but also on hundreds of other sites that work with Google. Showing ads to more users should help her grow her business!
4. Advertising Networks
Depending on the type of campaign you choose, you can use your ad network settings to indicate where your ads will appear.
For example, if you choose the Google Search Network, your ad can appear in search results on the Google Search site and on Google Play, Google Shopping, and Google Maps (including the Maps app). Your ad may also appear on non-Google search sites (called search partners, such as CNN) that partner with Google to display search ads. In addition, you have the opportunity to extend your ad exposure to the Google Display Network, allowing your text ads to appear on sites that partner with Google to display ads.
5. Equipment
Campaigns target all types of devices, including desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can also tailor ads to different devices.
6. Geographical location
Ads in a campaign can be shown to users who live in or are interested in specific geographic locations.
For example, a bakery owner in Paris could choose to only reach users in Paris, while an online shoe retailer that supports shipping to Canada and the US could appeal to users in both countries.
7. Language
Language targeting allows you to limit where your ad appears based on the user’s language settings and the language of your website.
8. Budget
Budget is the average amount you’re willing to pay for a campaign each day. The size of your budget is entirely up to you, and you can adjust the budget amount at any time.
9. Bidding strategy
A bid strategy controls how you pay for user interaction with your ad. Once you’ve selected a metric to focus on for your campaign, you’ll see different bidding options that can help you optimize for that metric. You can choose to manually set your bids for ad clicks, or let Google Ads do it for you.
How to get your ad to the right audience
After completing the basic setup of a search campaign, Ajiu is ready to create text ads and show them to the right audience.
1. She creates the ad group first.
For each ad group, she can create specific text ads and a list of search keywords—words and phrases that will trigger her ad to appear. Ad groups are built around themes or products, so Ajiu plans to create multiple ad groups, one for each bike type: kids bikes, mountain bikes, and road bikes.
This level of granularity gives her greater control, allowing her to deliver the right advertising message to the target audience.
2. She created a dedicated keyword list for each ad group.
She thinks through the search terms that users might use when researching or searching for bikes, and uses those terms as keywords. Creating a solid keyword list will help her match her ad to her target audience!
Let’s take a look at some of the keywords she chose for her kids’ bikes ad group:
- kids bike
- children’s bicycle
- girls bike
- boy bike
- bicycle
After the keyword list is complete, she determines the bid amount—the amount that Qiyu Ji will pay when a user clicks on her ad.
3. Created a set of text ads for each ad group
Title – should grab the customer’s attention URL – should point to a specific page on Qiyuji Description – should highlight the details of the product that Qiyuji is selling
Here’s one of her ads:
Ride-on Kids Bikes Sale | 20% off all kids bikes with free shipping https://www.example.com/kidsbikes
quality, choice, and expert advice you can trust. Chat support service available. Check out our customer reviews first! Support mobile phone orders.
4. Create ad groups consisting of dynamically created text ads and keyword lists
To make the ad group more visible, Ajiu chose to create an ad group consisting of dynamically created text ads and keyword lists. These lists of ads and keywords are automatically created by the system based on the content of her website. This allows Ajiu’s ads to be triggered and displayed by search terms she hadn’t thought of when she created her standard ad groups. We’ll cover Dynamic Search Ads in more detail later.
After Ajiu’s search campaign was launched, her ads started showing on search terms like Buy Kids Bikes and Boys Bikes Sale, making it easier for her store to make sales!
More search campaign settings
In addition to choosing where you want your ads to appear and how much you’re willing to spend, you can further set other options:
1. Ad extensions
Add more information to your ad, such as location information, links to pages on your website, and phone numbers.
For example, because Qiyuji also has a physical store, Ajiu can add store location information and phone numbers. She can also add links to specific pages on the site that describe the different bikes she sells.
2. Start date and end date
This option is used to set the start and end dates of the campaign.
Suppose Ajiu is running a mountain bike discount sale in the summer. She wanted to use a dedicated ad to promote the event. The sale only lasts 30 days, so she doesn’t want the promotion to run longer than that.
3. Ad time setting
Allows you to choose days or times of the week to show your ad.
For example, if you know that users are searching for kids bikes more frequently at night, Ajiu can choose to show ads for kids bikes at those times.
How are ads displayed to users?
Step 1: User searches
Search for “buy city bike”.
Step 2: The auction begins
Google’s search engine examines all campaigns of advertisers (including Ajiu), looking for keywords in their ad groups that match the user’s search term “buy a city bike.”
When advertisers (including Ajiu) had previously created ad groups, they had set bids for their keywords, specifying how much they were willing to pay when someone clicked on their ad.
This auction occurs every time someone performs a search.
Step 3: Google search engine ranks all ads
After ranking all ads, the search engine decides which ads to show based on advertiser bids and the ad’s relevance to search results. If the system deems an ad irrelevant, it won’t show.
Step 4: Searches Convert to Sales
When Ajiu’s text ad is shown to a user, the user simply clicks or taps the ad and goes to Ajiu’s landing page. She has specified the landing page as the city bike page on the website.
This is the process of converting searches into sales! With Google Ads, you can easily create and manage search engine marketing campaigns that advertise across the Google Network and help everyone find what they’re looking for.
5. Control which searches can trigger your ad to show
After you create a keyword list in an ad group, Google’s algorithms use the list you create to determine which user searches to match to your ad.
Through this unit, you will learn how to customize your keyword list to widen or narrow the scope of these matches to suit your campaign goals.
How to control which searches can trigger your ad
Step 1: Think in the user’s shoes
Keywords should match the terms people might use when searching for your product or service. This is called keyword targeting .
Step 2: Think about your business goals
Do you want more people to visit your website, or do you want to reach users who are ready to make a purchase? There are five match type options to choose from for keywords, in order from broad to specific: broad match, broad match with modifiers, phrase match, exact match, and negative match .
There are some search terms that you can be sure users will use, and others that are less predictable. Whatever your goals, use match types to reach as many people as possible who are likely to be interested in your business.
Step 3: Give Google the job
Let Google automatically create dynamically generated text ads and keyword lists based on your website content. This will result in more search terms that can trigger your ad than you initially included in your list. We’ll go into more detail about using Dynamic Search Ads later.
Let’s take a look at the different match types you can use to control which searches trigger your ad.
How to reach a broad audience with different types of match
Ajiu is a digital marketing manager for a large online bike and adventure sports store, let’s see how she uses match types to set up her keyword lists.
To show her ad to a wider audience, while ensuring that she doesn’t miss any search terms that users might be using, she uses two keyword match types, broad match and broad match modifier. Let’s take a closer look at these two match types.
1. Broad match (default match type)
Ajiu’s adventure store has just expanded its bike catalog, and she wants to promote the new model. To show her ad to the widest possible audience and make sure she doesn’t miss any searches, she uses broad match for her keywords.
Broad match can trigger your ad to show when a user’s search term includes a keyword (or any variation of a misspelling, synonym, or related search).
With broad match, Ajiu can use more general keywords (like bikes) and show her ad to anyone searching for bikes or their variants (like bikes).
For example, if a user searches for a sale on a bicycle for a 6-year-old or a men’s mountain bike, Ajiu’s ad will show because the user’s search term includes a variation of her keyword bicycle. Not only does this feature give Ajiu’s store website a better chance of showing up to users, but it also increases the chance that her ad will appear on search terms she may not have thought of.
2. Broad match modifier
Ajiu wants to advertise the blue girls’ bike that sells in the store. To show her ad to a broad audience who want to buy a bike, while targeting people searching for blue girls’ bikes, she adds a broad match modifier to her keywords.
Adding a + sign in front of a keyword turns it into a broad match modifier. This will only trigger your ad to show when any part of the search term contains the keyword or its close variants.
This match is different from broad match, which allows any variation of the keyword to appear in the search term. The broad match modifier only allows close variants.
If Ajiu uses the broad match modifier keywords +blue, +girl, and +bicycle, her ad will show to users who search for any combination of these terms (with the possibility of additional terms) in the search engine. However, if any of these keywords are not in the search term, the ad will not show.
For example, her ad would appear for the search term blue bike for a 6-year-old girl because the search includes all three broad match modifier keywords. However, the search term girl bike won’t trigger her ad because the keyword blue is missing.
Ajiu’s broad match modifier keywords are +blue, +girl, and +bike. Why does her ad show when someone searches for blue singles for sporty girls?
Because the search term bicycle is a close variation of bicycle and all broad match modifier keywords appear in the search term.
3. Tips
Broad match is recommended if you don’t want to spend too much time creating an exhaustive keyword list. With this matching mechanism, your keywords will be matched against more variations of your search terms, and you can reach people who aren’t necessarily searching for your specific brand or business. It’s like casting a wide net to cover searches related to your keyword.
With the broad match modifier, you can indicate whether a specific concept related to a keyword must appear in the searches you cover.
How to use match types to narrow your reach
Now that you know how to reach a broad audience, let’s take a look at how Ajiu narrows down the audience that sees her ad using two keyword match types, phrase match and exact match.
1. Phrase match
Ajiu wants to promote the promotion of the new children’s bicycle brand “My Big Bike”. To make sure her ad only shows to users searching for the bike brand, she chooses phrase match for her keywords.
Enclose a keyword in quotation marks to make it a phrase match. This will only trigger your ad to show when a user’s search term matches the keyword in quotes or a close variation of it.
This match differs from the broad match modifier in that it requires no extra words between the user’s search terms, and is similar in that extra words are allowed before and after the phrase.
If Ajiu used the phrase match keyword “my big bike,” her ad wouldn’t match searches that included a big bike, because mine must also appear. Her ad will only show to users who search for the bike brand “my big bike.”
If Ajiu uses phrase match for the keyword “my big bike”, is the search term my big bike worth buying? Will it trigger Ajiu’s ad display?
meeting! This search term contains the complete and correct keyword phrase my big bike. Additional words may be added before and after the phrase.
2. Exact match
Ajiu is running a kids bike sale, and she’s eager to attract users who are searching for deals. In order to show her ad to people who are only searching for kids’ bike promotions, she sets exact match for her keywords.
To use exact match, the keyword should be enclosed in square brackets. This way, your ad will only show on search terms that match the meaning of your keywords. Trigger terms can include close variants of keywords, such as misspellings, plurals, and synonyms.
This match is different from phrase match in that it requires no other words before or after the search term.
For example, the keyword [men’s bikes] will trigger ads for men’s bikes or men’s bikes, but not for men’s bike promotions.
If Ajiu uses the exact match keyword [kids bike sale], users will see her ad whether they’re searching for kids bike deals, kids bike deals, or kids bike deals. This helps her narrow down her audience to reach only potential customers. Her ad won’t show to anyone who just searches for kids bikes, because that query doesn’t include the concept of promotion.
If Jiu used the exact match keyword [kids bike promotions], would her ad match the search term strength kids bike promotions?
Will not. Exact match keywords will only match searches that have the same meaning as the keyword. In other words, such keywords will not match searches that contain additional concepts or details not found in the original keyword.
3. Tips
Phrase match is recommended if you need a more flexible match than exact match and a more targeted match than broad match. Phrase match can help you reach more users while still showing your ad to people who might be searching for your product or service.
Exact match is recommended if you value matching to very specific user searches. Exact match keywords allow you to cover only searches that have the same meaning as the keyword.
How to use match types to prevent ads from showing for inappropriate searches
Let’s see how Ajiu uses negative keywords to ensure her ads only show to relevant users.
1. Negative Keywords
Jiu was targeting her ad with the broad match keyword kids bikes, only to find that sometimes her ad would show for the search term kids scooters. However, there are currently no scooters in her catalog. Before the store replenishes scooters, she wants to show ads only to users who are interested in bicycles, so she adds -scooter as a negative keyword to her keyword list.
Add a minus sign in front of the keyword scooter and the keyword will become a negative keyword (-scooter). This means that ads won’t show when someone searches for that negative keyword.
Using the negative keyword – scooters, Ajiu’s ad will not show to users searching for scooters.
2. Compare match types
Choosing the right match type for your keywords can help you show your ad to the right users. Check out all of the match types below to see how they can expand or narrow your reach.
| match type | special symbols | If you use the following keywords | as long as the search term matches the following | Your ad may show if a user searches for: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broad match | none | kids bike | Any part of the search term contains the keyword or any variations (such as misspellings, synonyms, or related searches). | buy kids bikes, kids scooters |
| Broad match modifier | +keyword | +child+bicycle | Any part of the search term contains the keyword or its close variant. There can be other words before, after, or between these words. | children’s toys and bicycles, children’s mountain bikes |
| Phrase match | “keyword” | “Children’s Bicycle” | The keyword or its close variant within quotation marks matches the search term. There cannot be any extra words between search terms. | safe kids bikes, buy kids bikes, kids bike promotions |
| exact match | [keyword] | [Children’s Bicycle] | The keyword or its close variant has the same meaning as the search term. There cannot be any extra words before or after the search term. | kids bikes, kids bikes, bikes for kids |
3. Tips
The broader match types (broad and broad modifiers) can help you discover words you might not be aware of. An exact match is useful when you know what search terms people will use to search for the product or service you want to specifically advertise.
6. Complement your keyword strategy with Dynamic Search Ads
If you want your ads to trigger searches relevant to your business (including searches you haven’t thought of), Dynamic Search Ads can help!
Through this unit, you will learn how to complement your keyword strategy with Dynamic Search Ads.
1. The Challenge of Creating a Keyword List
Creating a keyword list for user searches relevant to your business can be challenging and time-consuming. With the rapid increase in the use of smartphones and voice search and digital assistants, the way customers find you has changed, resulting in a flood of searches you couldn’t foresee.
There are more and more search moments involving new searches every day. In fact, 15% of every day searches on Google never show up! In this case, manually overriding all searches becomes a never-ending job and leads to missed opportunities.
Creating creatives at scale and correctly matching them to each of the different landing pages is also a daunting task. There may be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of constantly changing landing pages on your website, requiring you to constantly update your ad headlines and display URLs.
Faced with this thorny problem, our solution is: Dynamic Search Ads!
2. What is Dynamic Search Ads?
Dynamic Search Ads can help you expand the reach of your search campaigns. Dynamic Search Ads customize and target your ads based on what Google knows about your site, saving you from having to create an ad for every page on your site or add keywords to every ad.
3. How Dynamic Search Ads Work
How are you, your potential customers, and Google involved in how Dynamic Search Ads work?
- You specify website pages, daily budget, and ad templates.
- User enters search terms on Google Search.
- If you have search-related content, Google dynamically generates ad headlines and destination URLs that point to pages on your site that match your search.
Dynamic Search Ads are based on Google’s web crawling technology, and will index your website and use that indexed list to determine whether a user’s search is relevant to your business. If the search term matches the index, Dynamic Search Ads will automatically tailor the title and destination URL to the user’s search term and submit a Dynamic Search Ad based on your template in the Google Ads auction. You only need to create a description in the template beforehand – everything else is automatically generated based on the user’s search terms.
4. Pay attention
Dynamic Search Ads generate highly relevant ads to complement your other Google Ads campaigns. These ads add value to relevant searches not covered by existing keywords, complement your keyword strategy, and ensure you don’t miss out on any relevant searches.
How Dynamic Search Ads Work
Let’s take a look at how Dynamic Search Ads are created.
1. The user enters a search term.
2. Google matches the search to relevant landing pages on your site.
3. Google’s algorithm will create the ad and customize the headline based on your template.
Targeting options for Dynamic Search Ads
You can control how Google matches users’ searches with your site’s content. There are several site targeting options to choose from, each offering a different level of control.
1. Landing pages used by standard ad groups
This is an easy option because it includes all the pages you’ve used as landing pages in ads within your account.
2. Category
Google creates targetable categories based on your site’s content, which are also groups of landing pages organized by topic. You can decide which groups of pages to target, how to group similar pages, and the level of granularity.
Example: In an electronics store, you can target only the “Digital Cameras” category of the store.
3. You can target pages on your website that contain specific strings.
Example: You want to target all blog-related pages on your site based on the URL string that users display when they browse your electronics site. If all of these URLs follow a similar pattern (eg example.com/blog/), you should target every URL that contains “blog”.
4. The URL is
You can target specific URLs.
Example: If you want to create a dynamic ad group based on your “Special Offers” page, you can choose to target only that page.
5. Page Feed
Generates dynamic search ad targets for ad groups based on feeds containing specific URLs (mapped to auto-updating custom labels).
Example: You want to create a campaign for TVs that are on sale. To do this, you need to create a feed and add the tag “ON_SALE” to all TVs that are on sale. In the dynamic ad group, select Target custom labels and enter “ON_SALE” as the custom label. Additionally, you can add custom bids to this targeting
Key Benefits of Dynamic Search Ads
1. Broad coverage
Cover more searches!
Match searches that are highly relevant to your site but you might be missing out on.
2. Efficient and time-saving
No need to manage an endless keyword list. No more pausing or creating ads based on seasonality or demand, because our web scraping technology does it for you, knowing exactly what products or services your site offers and when. *
*It will take several days for the crawler to update the information
3. Transparency and Control
Without sacrificing control!
Dynamic Search Ads provide full transparency with search terms reporting, control through dynamic target-level bidding, and support for excluding irrelevant traffic.
Run Dynamic Search Ads based on your business goals
What are your business goals? How can Dynamic Search Ads help you reach your goals?
1. Expand your reach
“I want to make sure that ads show for more relevant user searches.”
Using Dynamic Search Ads to complement your existing keyword strategy ensures good reach with little effort or complex implementation or campaign management.
2. Long tail automation
“I want users to find my long-tail products.”
If you have a lot of dynamic content on your website and you’re concerned about the risk of missing out on long-tail traffic with a keyword-only campaign, Dynamic Search Ads are for you.
3. Rapid expansion
“I want to enter new markets quickly.”
Dynamic Search Ads can help you expand your current business activities into new regions or countries.
4. Review
Google Search Ads campaigns are a proven way to reach people when they need you (and when they use the Google search engine to search for your products and services). By offering different matching and keyword options, paired with machine learning algorithms in Dynamic Search Ads, we make it easy for you and your ads to create lasting connections with customers.