Search campaign

One of the campaign types businesses can use in Google Ads to reach target customers and promote products, and services is the Search Campaign. By implementing this campaign, your business’s products, services, and brand will appear on Google’s search results pages. Typically, when users need a product or service, they search for information on Google. Google Search Ads enable businesses to connect with the right audience at the right time, increasing conversion rates. Let’s explore this campaign type and learn how to execute it with Ad Support.

Understanding Google search ads

Google’s Search Network comprises websites and apps where your business ads can appear when users search. If someone searches for information about a product or service using terms related to the keywords included in your ads, your business ads will appear on Google’s search results page.

Where search ads appear

Search ads appear alongside organic search results on Google (SEO) and other search engine websites when your business keywords match the content users search for.

On Google search properties: Ads appear above or below the search results on Google Search. They may also appear beside, above, or below search results on Google Shopping tabs, Google Images, Google Maps, and the Maps app.

On Google search partners: Ads can appear near or after search results on Google’s search partner websites or within related search content. Search partners include hundreds of non-Google sites, such as YouTube, Bing, and more. Ads appear on search partner sites, displaying and linking to products being sold.

Types of ads on the Search network

The most common types of search ads include: Text Ads, Dynamic, Search Ads, Responsive Search Ads,… These ads appear with a label such as “Ad” and can include additional components like business information to help customers connect with your business quickly.

Shopping ads display product images, names, descriptions, prices, and providers, along with links to the product pages. These ads are labeled as “Sponsored” or “Ad.” Additionally, image ads and video ads can also be part of the campaign.

Benefits of implementing a search campaign

Achieve goals quickly

Search ads allow you to target customers who are actively searching for your products or services on Google. This ensures that your business can reach the right audience at the right time, increasing the likelihood of clicks on your ads. As a result, website traffic, potential leads, conversions, and sales improve. Compared to SEO, Google Search Ads deliver quicker results, helping businesses achieve their goals more efficiently.

Reach the right target audience

With precise targeting options such as demographics, behavior, interests, age, and more, combined with tools like Google Analytics, businesses can accurately identify and target specific audiences. Furthermore, search ads ensure your business reaches individuals actively seeking information about your products or services. This precision targeting increases click-through rates (CTR), traffic, and conversions.

Easy to set up and measure

Search Ads are the simplest and most popular type of Google Ads. You can quickly create these ads without requiring special elements. Additionally, Google provides advertisers with various tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to monitor and measure campaign performance. These tools offer valuable data, allowing advertisers to assess their campaign’s effectiveness and make adjustments accordingly.

Cost-Effective

Unlike Facebook Ads, Google charges advertisers based on the number of clicks (Pay-Per-Click). Additionally, with Google Search Ads, businesses can easily manage costs by setting daily or lifetime budgets and selecting appropriate bidding strategies. By optimizing ad quality, businesses can improve click-through rates and achieve better cost efficiency.

How to create a search campaign in Google Ads in detail

Create a new search campaign and set up goals

Access your Google account and click on Campaigns with the speaker icon. Then click on the drop-down menu in the Campaign section and select Campaign. Next, click the (+) icon to create a new campaign. Next, select the appropriate goal for the search campaign including Sales, Leads, and Website Traffic. Or you can choose Create a campaign without guidance on goals.

After selecting the campaign goal, select the appropriate campaign type. Here, select the campaign type as Search. In the Select how you want to achieve your goals section, enter more information about your business and select Continue. On the next page, enter a name for the campaign for easy management. When creating a campaign, the changes will be automatically saved.

Set up a search campaign

In this step, you choose the target audience in the ad, choose a bidding strategy, and add ad components.

Targeting criteria

To choose the right audience, you need to spend time researching and sketching a portrait of the customer that the ad wants to target. Next, you need to decide where the ad will appear, including the Google search network, Google search partners, or the display network to expand the search scope.

If you want to adjust targeting criteria based on the relationship between the target audience and the selected location, click on Location Options. Next, select the geographic locations where you want your ads to appear or specify locations to exclude. Additionally, enter the language you want to target so that your ads and keywords will be displayed in the chosen language.

Next, add audiences to your targeting criteria, such as demographics, interests, site visits, and remarketing… Finally, click Browse to explore options that may align with your objectives.

Setting a Bidding Strategy

While targeting determines who will see your ad, bidding determines what action you want your customers to take. Depending on your campaign objective, choose the most appropriate bidding strategy.

If you want to increase sales or leads, focus on Conversions. If you want to increase website traffic, focus on Clicks. If you have set conversions and a specific value for those conversions, set the amount in Conversion Value.

To maximize the frequency of your ad, choose Impression Share, which will show your ad to a certain number of visits to relevant search results pages.

When you have experience using bidding strategies, choose a bidding strategy. Click Show more settings to choose additional options including conversions (the type of conversion you want to bid on), ad schedule (the days and times you want your ads to show), and ad rotation (Choose whether your ads perform better at a regular frequency or show them all evenly).

Enhancing Ads with Extensions

By adding ad extensions, you enable users to interact with your business ads in multiple ways, such as through phone numbers, website links, lead forms, calls, annotations, promotions, prices, locations, images, and more. Extensions help expand your ad presence within search results, increasing visibility.

Here, you can create new extensions or choose from existing ones. Commonly, website links, annotation extensions, and call extensions are pre-filled. Click + Add Ad Extensions to explore available options. Finally, click Save and Continue to save your campaign settings.

Setting up ad groups

Ad groups should align closely with the content users search for when looking for your business’s products or services. There are two methods to create ad groups in a Google Search Ads campaign:

Creating standard ad groups

For standard ad groups, you need to input a set of keywords related to the search content and create ads that match those keywords. This is the default ad group type, and you can only use one ad group type per campaign.

When creating a standard ad group, name the ad group. Then enter keywords, each word on a new line. To get keyword ideas, enter products and services in the Get keyword ideas section or use the Keyword Planner.

Next, select your keyword match type to determine which search queries will trigger your ad. Typically, keywords will match to relevant searches. If you want to reach specific groups of customers, add the following characters to your keywords to change how they match searches:

Phrase match: Add double quotes ” ” around your keyword to match it to a phrase and close variations of that phrase.

Exact match: Add square brackets [ ] around your keyword to narrow your targeting to searches that exactly match.

Negative match: Add a minus sign in front of your keyword to exclude search phrases.

Finally, click Save and Continue.

Create Dynamic Ad Groups

In the Ad Group Type section, select Dynamic and name the ad group. Then enter the domain name of the website, you can enter the domain or subdomain and choose any category to target. Choose pages that are relevant enough to promote with similar ads. On the other hand, you can target pages according to the rules. Then click +New Ad Group to add other ad groups. Finally, click Save and Continue to complete.

Create Search Ads

The important thing to pay attention to when creating Google Search ads is to focus on the relevance of the keywords. Create headlines and content descriptions that match the keywords in the ad group. You should create at least 3 ads for each ad group. Here you can create standard ads and dynamic ads.

Create Standard Search Ads

Add the landing page URL to the ad and enter 1-3 headlines as blue text at the top of the ad. If you want to customize the landing page URL that appears in your ad, change the display link. Continue writing 2 lines of descriptive text with up to 90 characters and content related to your product or service. In addition, you can add tracking parameters to the URL and click Done to complete the ad.

Click + New Ad to include additional ads in your ad group. Ensure you create ads for all ad groups, then click Save and Continue. On the Review page, you will see a list of issues potentially reducing your campaign’s performance, along with reminders to address them. Click Fix It to resolve the issues and publish your Search Campaign immediately.

Create Dynamic Search Ads

Unlike standard ads, Dynamic Search Ads automatically generate the final URL, headline, and display URL using Google’s algorithms. However, you must still customize the ad description, similar to how it’s done for standard search ads.

Set Your Advertising Budget

Choosing an appropriate bidding strategy helps define the desired conversion actions for customers. The advertising budget, on the other hand, determines how many people will see your ads. You can set a daily budget, specifying the average amount you want to spend per day.

Google may suggest budget levels based on similar campaigns or allow you to set a custom budget. If your campaign achieves its objectives, consider increasing the budget to drive better results. Conversely, if performance is lacking, you might adjust the budget downward. 

Publish Search Campaign

After setting up your campaign, check your ads for any issues and click Publish Campaign.

As soon as the campaign is published, it will enter the approval process, which may take several days before the ads start appearing. Typically, ad reviews are completed within one day. However, it might take more time for your bidding strategy to fully optimize performance. Once your campaign begins displaying ads, monitor its performance via the Overview or Campaigns page. By metrics: impressions, clicks, click-through rate, phone calls, conversions, cost, average CPC, etc.

How to optimize a successful search campaign

Once the campaign is created and measured for effectiveness, you can optimize it to improve performance with the following steps:

Set up conversion tracking on the website

The conversion tracking feature provides detailed insights to help optimize your campaign’s effectiveness. When a customer performs an action deemed valuable, it is recorded as a conversion. To activate this feature, set up a conversion action for your account, then copy the code called the “tag” and paste it into your website.

Use a Smart Bidding Strategy

The automatic bidding feature leverages Google’s AI technology to optimize bids for each auction. Automatic bidding strategies are popular because they improve performance and save time. Smart Bidding is a subset of automatic bidding strategies that helps optimize conversions and conversion value. To use this bidding strategy, you need to set up conversion tracking. If you haven’t set this up yet, you can use the “Maximize Clicks” strategy instead.

Expand your targeting

While expanding your targeting will help your business reach more customers, targeting too large an area will bring irrelevant traffic to your site. To avoid this, target the locations where your customers live, adding as many relevant keywords as possible by taking the time to research and create a suitable keyword list.

Add keywords to multiple ad groups

Ad groups are ads that appear to people who are searching for information using specific keywords. A campaign has several ad groups, and each group has ads and keywords. The ad copy should be directly related to the keywords in the ad group.

Create ad copy that is directly related to the product or service

For text ads, it is important to mention the exact product or service that the customer wants to buy. Be clear about the product or service being advertised by including at least one of the keywords in the headline. Provide relevant information that answers questions or offers solutions to customers. Consider whether the landing page that the ad redirects people to mentions the product, service or promotion featured in the ad. All ads should be of high quality and meet high editorial and professional standards.

Ensure at least 3 ads in each ad group

There should be multiple ads so that Google can show the ad that is most likely to perform well for each search. One headline in each ad should mention at least one of the keywords. While other headlines and descriptions highlight different aspects of the product or service.

Use at least 4 ad elements

Using ad elements will make your search ads more compelling by attracting people to take immediate action. It also helps to increase ad space, increase click-through rates, and optimize conversion costs. Common ad elements include call buttons, website links, addresses, emails, etc.

Contact a consulting expert

If you are having difficulty setting up your Google Search Ads campaign or lack experience in optimizing ads to improve performance, increase revenue, and maximize return on investment (ROI), consider consulting a Google Ads expert by scheduling a free consultation. The experts will provide guidance on campaign implementation, budget setup, and how to optimize performance effectively.

This article has provided useful information about search campaigns and how to deploy a successful campaign. Hopefully, it will help you in the process of practicing and accumulating experience running Google Ads.

Frequently Asked Questions