Google Ads

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is Google Ads?

We begin with Google AdWords. Now I have mentioned that Google AdWords is, it's Google's advertising platform that does encompass other things like the display network and Gmail ads and YouTube and different, you know, other channels within the mix. But for today's activity, we're going to be looking predominantly at the paid search aspect of AdWords. But Google AdWords is an online advertising service by Google for businesses who want to serve clickable ads on the Google search results page, the search results page, sometimes called the search engine results page or SERP is something you'll hear again and again as you work more in the world of search marketing.

Account types

To understand the fundamentals of AdWords and how we launch a campaign, we're going to look at the structure of account types.

There are two main account types within AdWords:

• Standard account: A standard account is an account that contains your campaigns, your keywords, and all the different aspects of AdWords.
• Manager account: A manager account is kind of an account above that. It's free to set up but think of it like an agency account. So, if you are an advertising agency, you might have a number of clients each of which will have its own standard account. And you can contain all of these within your manager account.

When a standard account is contained within a manager account, it's called a child account. So a child account is a standard AdWords account but just contained within a manager account. And then obviously within those child accounts, you will have your campaigns, you will have your ad groups and your keywords.

Just to note, there is a third type of AdWords account which I haven't really explained too much. It's called AdWords Express. It is a limited, quick setup account with very restricted functionality and generally as search marketers, we wouldn't use them.  It is out there but it does restrict what you can do in terms of what keywords you choose, what ads you choose and how you bid. All you can do is set a monthly budget, for example, enter your website and AdWords kind of automatically does the rest. It's generally not recommended for any experienced search marketers to be using AdWords Express.

So consider that when setting up your AdWords account. I would certainly veer towards a standard AdWords account if you just have one client or a manager account with multiple standard AdWords accounts or indeed child accounts as they're called if you've got multiple clients.

Create an Ads manager account

We're going to start at the very top which is AdWords manager accounts. So you can set up the AdWords manager account from: https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/manager-accounts/

And from there, you can sign up using your Gmail. A peculiar quirk with AdWords is you can only link one email address to one AdWords account. So, if you have an email address that's already linked to another AdWords account, it won't work setting up a second AdWords account with it.

So ideally, it should be a new email address you use to set up your manager account and then you can link all of your other AdWords accounts to your manager account, not to your email address. And that is the benefit of using a manager account.

Features of a manager account

This is an example of a manager account.

You can see here that we've got an account list. These are the different types of accounts that may be contained within one single view. So, if you were a travel organization, you may have a manager account with all your French accommodation in one child account, all of your Italian accommodation in another child account, and so on.

Or indeed, if you want to split it up by product type, you might have all of your hotels in one child account and all of your B&Bs; or apartments in another child account all the way down through the list as you see fit. So you can segment your product list or use your client list as you see fit within that manager account. But it does make the management of multiple AdWords accounts clients a lot more straightforward and a lot easier to access.

And once you dive into a child account, that's when you start seeing things like your campaigns and your keywords and your ads.

Features of a child account

So the features of a child account are indeed a standard AdWords account.

The first thing you'll see is your overview. This gives you I suppose an indication of different metrics around devices, times of day, types of conversions, campaigns that are moving, and campaigns that are doing stuff.

You've got two main tabs within the overview:

• You've got your navigation tabs which are over on the left-hand side which allow you to go to what's called campaign level, keyword level, ad group level, ad level. These are the different sections of any AdWords account and you can just toggle between those using the left-hand menu.
• And then in the center, you've got your performance overview, which in this particular section is within the overview navigation tab.

However, if you're in your keywords level, you'll see only data related to keywords. If you go to your campaigns level, you'll see only aggregated data, which is the combined data of all of the keywords in those campaigns. So these type of metrics and these type of levels will be something we'll get more and more familiar with as we go through the lectures.