(VIDEO) 6 Things I Wish I Knew When Starting A Google Ads Campaign

So in today’s Google Ads tutorial we are going to talk about six things that I wish I knew when I was first getting started working with Google Ads, or as some of you still call it, Google AdWords.

By the end of the video, you will know those six things that will hopefully, help you become better at doing Google Ads and help you become more successful in your campaigns. Stay tuned.


So if you like videos about Google Ads and starting your own small business, do us a favor, hit the subscribe button below in the little bell notification, so you get notified when we release new videos each and every week.

Quality Over Quantity

Number one, it’s not about the quantity or number of keywords that you have in your campaigns, it’s about the quality.

Now what I mean by that is if you’re starting a brand new campaign, and you are advertising…

Let’s just say you’re advertising spend is less than $1000.00 a month, you do not need to have a thousand keywords in your campaign.

And some people would be like, “Well, that’s a lot.” Yes, it is. Other people would say that that’s not very many.

Now Google made a change a number of years ago when it came to keywords. And it used to be if you did not have the keywords in the campaign, Google would not show your ads for that search.

But that has changed. Over the last few years, what has happened is they have basically started saying, “You know what? People are searching for this keyword.

It’s not necessarily in your campaign, but it’s highly related to what you are advertising for, so we are going to show it.”

And it’s really helped us as advertisers really hone in as advertising searches change.

Now when we talk about changes, sometimes that could be instead of people that used to be looking for maybe a plumber with a zip code, now they’re looking for plumbers near me.

That might be their keyword. That used to not be the case, but with these search terms, or terms that people are actually typing into Google, we’re able to see as these terms change and in different locations, especially, what people are searching for.

So just because your keyword is not in the campaign does not mean that it won’t get shown.

So to find out more about this, in your campaign go under keywords, and then check out search terms, and you can see what people have been looking for.

The 80/20 Rule

Number two, the 80/20 Rule. Now this goes back to our keywords, but it’s a little bit different. When I’m talking about the 80/20 Rule, yes, I am talking about the Pareto… excuse me.

The Pareto principle. And what we’re talking about is 80% of something will come from 20% of another thing.

And in this concept we are talking about 80% of your sales, or your business is going to come from 20% of your keywords.

So let’s just say if you have a hundred keywords in your campaign, 80% of your business is going to come from 20 of those 100 keywords, and I can’t tell you how true this is across multiple campaigns, multiple accounts, I don’t know how many industries.

It is very true.

Oh, probably getting distracted by the puppy.

This is absolutely a 100% true, true principal. But when we’re dealing with it, a lot of people will not put that into effect.

What we like to do is we like to find out, as fast as we can, what the 20% of those keywords are and we put those keywords in their own campaign.

And now we can name that whatever we want. Whether it’s called conversions or converted keywords or top 20% or whatever it might be. But then we know that those are in their own group.

They are basically separated and the majority of our budget is going to go towards those keywords. Make sense? So the 80/20 rule, 80% of your business is going to come from 20% of your keywords.

So do you agree with me about the 80/20 rule? Do me a favor, in the comments below let us know if that works out for you.

Go check some of your campaigns and see if that is not, in fact, true for your campaigns. Let us know just by saying yes or no.

Take Your Time And Do It The Right Way

Number three, take your time and do it right during the setup. Now, a lot of people will just basically set it up as fast as they can and they don’t take their time and go through all the settings.

When we audit campaigns, this is where we find a majority of the problems. We don’t go in there and just say… start tearing into ads.

The first place that we start is inside the settings. What’s going on in there? Are they advertising across the entire United States when they only service the Los Angeles area?

While that seems really kooky and crazy to say, it’s happened. We’ve seen it happen and they wonder why their entire budget is used up by 30 minutes after their campaign turns on for the day. It’s some of those settings.

Another big setting is not just location, but time of day.

If you are advertising your campaigns 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you don’t have an E-commerce company where people can buy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, chances are you should probably reign in those hours a little bit.

But those are just two of the… a number of settings that could really trip up your campaigns. So make sure you take the time and you set up your settings correctly.

Be Specific With Your Ads

Number four, your ads are not all the same. Meaning, you don’t want to have one ad for your entire campaign, nor should you expect one ad to work in one ad group and have it work just as well in another.

Let’s say you’re selling cars. You don’t want to have the same ad for all of your cars that you’re selling. And the reason is, is that you want to be as specific as you can.

And in fact, you would like to have a keyword inside an ad.

So if you are advertising cars and you are selling blue trucks, in your ad, in your headline somewhere, you should definitely be talking about blue trucks.

In your description, you should definitely be talking about blue trucks. And in the ad URL, the place that once they click on it, where you’re taking your customers, it should take them to a page about blue trucks.

If you have another ad group that’s talking about red cars, it should be the same, but with red cars, obviously, inserted instead of blue trucks.

See what I mean? You want your ads to be as specific as they can. You want them to include keywords and you want them to be 100% relevant to whatever the person is searching for.

If you have a dentist office and you also offer orthodontic services, you don’t want to be talking about just general dentistry in your ad for orthodontic services.

You want to be talking in that ad about orthodontic services and sending them to a page that offers those services. Make sense?

Don’t Rely On Quality Score

Number five, quality score is not everything. I don’t care what you read.

When you are talking about quality score, which is the number that Google gives your keywords and kind of grades your ads.

The problem with the quality score metric is, it’s not always a hundred percent accurate.

We have keywords with a quality score of two or three that are the highest performing keywords in some of our campaigns. So that is a guideline.

Now the majority of the time, that is obviously not the case. But you need to take into account how everything is being measured.

In the campaigns I’m talking about, it is producing a ton of phone calls for these campaigns, which is not being measured because we are measuring it separately outside of Google.

Google does not realize that, so it’s giving us a very low keyword quality score.

But it will also say sometimes, “You’re ads are not performing the way they should”, but our ads are performing phenomenally. We’re having click-through rates of 15, or 20% on those ads.

So it’s just a guideline. Do not live or die by it. Just look at it as strictly as that, as a guideline.

Patience Is The Key

And last, but not least, patience is key. It is so important to be patient when running Google Ads.

Turning Google Ads on and then turning it off the next day because you think it doesn’t work, is not how you should be running it.

In fact, you should basically be running it for probably about a week to start out with.

Now if you can’t afford that, you need to adjust your budgets.

But one thing people do is they’ll turn it on and they’ll have a five or $10.00 budget a day, but those keywords might only be getting two or three clicks.

So your campaign might only be getting two or three clicks a day and your budget is used up. Three clicks is not enough to measure your campaigns with.

We like to see a hundred to 200 clicks before we even start making major changes. So you need to have some patience. Some campaigns it will work right away.

We’ve literally had our fastest campaign ever, which it does not happen as much anymore. This was a few years ago. We turned it on. It got it’s first lead within 12 minutes.

That has never happened since. But we also have other campaigns that have run for a week or so before they actually start getting conversions.

You need to measure how many clicks you’re getting.

Now if you’re getting a hundred or 200 clicks in a day and it’s not converting, you need to make sure that you’ve got your negative keywords checked out, that you’re looking in your campaign, are all the clicks on a legitimate keywords, so on and so forth.

There’s a number of checks to make, but you’ve got to be patient and you’ve got to give it time.

So if you’d like more Google Ads training, over to the right hand side there, you’ll see a video called Six Reasons Why Your Google Ads May Not Be Showing Up and also the first day of our AdWords Optimization series.

Thanks so much for watching. See you next time.

Thank you for watching 6 Things I Wish I Knew When Starting A Google Ads Campaign

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