Google Ads Account Setup

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is Google Ads?

When you’re working with paid search campaigns, you’ll be working a lot with Google Ads, which was formerly known as AdWords. Google Ads is an AI-powered advertising service, for businesses that want to show ads on Google search and its other properties.

It’s most commonly associated with paid search but advertisers can also run Display Banners, Video (YouTube) and Shopping campaigns through the Google Ads platform.

Setting up Google Ads

When setting up a Google Ads account, you need to bear in mind that:

• You can use the same login details for any Google application, whether that’s Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube, Google Search Console, Google Merchant Center, as well as Google Business Profile, and so on. If you already have a Google login or Gmail for example, you can use this to sign up for Google Ads. Just to note, setting up everything with one Gmail to begin with makes things a lot easier to connect across the tools as you grow and develop.
• With Google Ads, you will also need to enter the website address for the business you want to advertise.

A Google Ads account can contain numerous paid search campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords.

As well as creating keyword lists, organizing these lists into Ad Groups, and organizing your Ad Groups into campaigns, a Google Ads account is also where you’ll create, and input ad copy related to your keyword lists. It also allows you to report on performance on all account levels. For example, you can generate campaign reports, ad group reports, keyword reports, ad copy reports, and much more.

Expert mode

Just bear in mind that during account set up you need to specify that you want to set up an account in “Expert” mode. If you have already set up an account that is in basic mode, you can switch to “Expert” mode by pressing the tools icon in the top-right corner and switching there.

The advantages of expert mode are that you have full control over the keywords you choose, your ads, match types, and all the functionality of Google Ads. On the other hand, the basic mode hands control for everything over to Google apart from how much you are willing to spend each day. Expert mode is the preferred option for anyone looking to run their PPC campaigns and keep control of keyword choice, ad messaging, and campaign settings.

Google Ads Manager

But what if you’re running an advertising agency, and you want to run numerous Google Ads accounts through one profile? In that case, a standard Google Ads account won’t work, and you’ll need to set up a Google Ads Manager account, sometimes called an MCC. A manager account allows you to use a single sign-in to access all Google Ads accounts that you manage, including other manager accounts you’re in control of. Just as an FYI: when you add a Google Ads account to your Google Ads Manager account, it is referred to as a ‘child’ account.

You can use your manager account to search, navigate, and manage all of your client accounts from a single, easy-to-read dashboard. You can create and manage campaigns for your child accounts, compare performance across all accounts, and run reports for multiple accounts all at once. While you can see campaigns metrics and performance across all of your clients, your clients can only see their own performance, they can’t see what your other clients are doing or reporting on, spending or targeting, and so on.

There are some handy efficiencies built into Google Ads Manager accounts. These include consolidated billing that generates simple, monthly invoices for all of your managed child accounts. You can also share remarketing lists and conversion data across associated child accounts, as well as setting alerts to efficiently monitor activity on all of your linked accounts.

And since you can quickly create and link Google Ads accounts from within your own manager account, it’s really useful if your clients require different Google Ads accounts for each product type or territory they're targeting.

Example: Digital Basics

A good example of this is my own company Digital Basics, a search and analytics agency based in Europe. We streamline our client PPC management by using a Google Ads Manager account.

As a digital agency, having multiple clients in different industries and with differing objectives means that there are multiple Google Ads profiles to manage. Rather than getting direct access to each Google Ads account, Digital Basics saves an estimated 35 minutes per day by using Google Ads Manager account to quickly move across clients and manage their campaigns, budgets, and objectives. This time saving is invested back into campaign management, yielding double-figure percentage point conversion rates for most clients, as well as high-level trend identification during seasonal peaks and troughs.