Google Ads (Adwords) Masterclass - Pay-Per-Click PPC Adverts

Welcome to the Google Ads Masterclass.  This course covers everything you need to know about promoting your business using Google ads including account setup, creating ads and measuring performance.

Paid Search programs, such as Google Ads, have the potential to provide highly targeted, measurable and cost-effective traffic to your website. By advertising alongside the search results for queries relevant to your business, you target potential customers researching or buying a product.

The opportunities for businesses to promote their businesses via search engines are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Paid Search. This lecture looks at the pros and cons of both options.

Google Ads is Google's online advertising programme. It enables you can create online ads to reach people when they are interested in the products and services that you offer.

So you want to start a Google Ads campaigns. Test your knowledge of the basics

Google account level settings are specified in the tools menu.  This includes account access and billing.

Google displays Paid Search results in order, just like organic search results. The position of an ad has a significant impact on traffic. To decide the relative positioning of ads, Google has devised a score called Ad Rank. The higher an ad scores, the better its position. Ad rank is calculated for each search based on the relevance, bid amount and quality score.

With Google Ads, there are several ways to bid for your ads, know as bid strategies. These include focusing on clicks, impressions, conversions or views (for video ads).

Your daily budget is the average daily amount you want to spend for each campaign. It specifies the rough amount you are happy to spend each day over a month. Your daily budget can be edited at any time. They can be set at the campaign level or across multiple campaigns.

Test on Ad auction, rankings, bidding and budgets

Your choice of campaign type should be based on your marketing goals, brand strategy and how much time you have the manage your account. For example, smart campaigns may be less optimised but are definitely easier to manage.

Before launching your Google campaign, you should first decide on the goal of your campaign. Your campaign objectives will determine the type of campaign you choose. Possible campaign objectives include sales, leads and website traffic.

Google Ads is organised into three layers: account, campaigns and ad groups. Organising your account allows you to serve the right ads to the right customers more effectively, and it allows you to track the effectiveness of your advertising efforts better.

Your campaign settings to help you target your campaign and reach the customers you want to reach. The campaign settings that you select will apply to all ads within the same campaign. The type of campaign determines the settings available.

Google ads can be optimised to improve ROI by focusing their targeting.  Targeting options include devices, location, ad scheduling and audiences.

Test your knowledge of Google Campaigns.

To create search ads, advertisers specify targets (keywords) for which they wish their ads to appear and a maximum cost per click (CPC) they are willing to pay.

To effectively reach potential customers, your text ads should be specific, relevant, attractive and include calls to action.

Creating Google Search Ads campaigns requires specifying lists of keywords which will trigger ads. Advertisers must research keywords and organise these into campaigns and ad groups based on themes to create successful campaigns.

Google's Keyword Planner is a free tool for discovering new keywords related to your business. It also estimates the number of searches they will receive and the cost of targeting them.

Keywords are words or phrases used to match ads with the terms for which people are searching. The keyword match types determine how closely the keyword needs to match with the user's search query so that the ad can be included in the auction.

Dynamic Search Ads make it easy to reach relevant customers on Google search. Dynamic Search Ads use your website's content to target your ads and can help and they automatically keep your campaigns up to date using all relevant keywords.

Once you have create your Google Search campaign, you should be constantly tweaking it to improve performance.

Test your knowledge of Google Search Ads

Display campaigns show visual ads on the Google Display Network. The Display Network enable advertisers to reach people on millions of websites, apps and Google-owned properties such as YouTube and Gmail.

This video goes through creating a Display Campaign step-by-step.

In this lesson, we cover how to get the best performance out of your Google Display Ads.

Shopping campaigns promote online and local inventory, driving traffic to your website or local store. Product data from the Google merchant centre is used to set up Google shopping ads in the Google Ads interface.

Google merchant centre is Google's online platform allowing merchants to submit their product data to Google for publishing. Product data is submitted to Google through a product 'feed' generated by your eCommerce platform. Google uses this data to publish your products on its shopping search service and also on product-focused ads across Google and its advertising network.

To run Google shopping campaigns and be eligible for free shopping listings, you must submit a valid feed through the Google merchant centre.

Global merchant centre settings are accessed from the cog icon in the top menu. Setting including shipping, return and reviews.

There are two types of Google Shopping campaigns - Performance Max and Standard.  In this video, we discuss how to create these two campaign types.

Google Shopping campaigns are easy to create as they do not require specifying keyword targets. They will however underperform is you do not optimise your campaign structure and settings.

Test your knowledge on Google Shopping

Tracking your Google ads performance is vital.  This section looks at the most important performance measures and metrics.

The Insights page helps you find trends in your market and understand your performance. Insights for your business are based on your account’s performance and searches across Google for the products and services for which you wish to show ads. They are updated daily.

The Google Ads reports give you after-click performance metrics for users who clicked on your ads and then went to your website.

Dashboards enable you to quickly gather your most important data to identify problems and spot business opportunities.

Conversion tracking enables you to track what a customer does after interacting with your ads, e.g. purchasing a product, newsletter sign-up, call or app download. When a customer completes an action you have specified, these customer actions are called conversions.

Google Ads Editor is a free desktop application for managing Google Ads campaigns. It can help you save time and make it easier to make changes in bulk.

Shared libraries allow advertisers to share features and settings across campaigns. They are accessed from the Tools menu at the top of the screen.

The Ad Preview Tool helps you discover why your ad or ad extension might not be shown.

Performance Max is a goal-based ad format that allows advertisers to access all Google Ads campaign types from a single campaign. It is a highly automated advertising programme that uses machine learning to optimise your ads and bidding in real-time.