Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Elements of a search campaign
So now that we’ve decided on our keywords, we need to look at some considerations around the campaign.
So what type of campaign do we want to build? We need to consider:
- The goals available to us (These are predetermined goals by Google
- What we’re going to call it
- Where we’re targeting the language of our users
- The daily budget we want to apply to that campaign based on the function of the keywords within that campaign
- The bidding strategy within the campaign itself
Campaign type
To begin with a search campaign, when you click New Campaign, you press the New Campaign Button, and we’re then presented with several campaign options available to us within Google Ads.
Goals
When setting our goals for our campaign, we need to know what exactly we are trying to do here.
- If we’re e-commerce, we’re probably going to drive sales.
- Perhaps we’re assisted e-commerce like insurance. People enter a quote and then they might get a phone call from an insurance sales rep afterwards saying, “We see you just entered your details into the site, would you like to talk about motor insurance?”
- And the third option is website traffic where we might just want to drive traffic to the website. So if we are, say, a convenience store, we don’t sell online but we do have, you know, a map to where our nearest location is or our latest offers or whatever it may be. So we still want to drive that traffic because that traffic leads to brand engagement, and hopefully down the line, it will lead to some kind of conversion or some kind of valuable action that your business can track back to that original search.
So we have our search display, we’ve got video, we’ve got apps, and we’ve got shopping campaigns. So we’re most interested in search, so we’re going to choose Search as, you know, our starting point.
Name
When we have our goals chosen, we’re going to name our campaign obviously. An important next step in the campaign setup is to uncheck the Display Network Box. So underneath the campaign name area, and we’ve got Search Network and Display Network as our options here, we don’t want to mix search activity with display activity. Keep them separate. Always uncheck that Google Display Network Box there or you’ll have mixed results. The display can fill in too much of your budget. It can drive a lower CTR. It doesn’t drive the precision that a pure search campaign will.
Location and language
Then, working through the process here, we set our location and our language.
Daily budget
Our daily budget is very important. It determines how much we actually want to spend per day on this campaign. We can set it at an initial level like €1 when we’re building the campaign. And then, when the campaign is built, we can change it to whatever we want at a later stage. But the key is, we do need to put something into the daily budget area when we’re setting up the campaign. It can be changed at a later stage, at whatever point during the day.
And then, we can modify our delivery methods. So, we can already go Accelerated, which is served keywords as quickly as possible until the budget runs out, or Standard where Google Ads kind of matches your available budget to the search traffic to ensure you don’t really go offline as frequently as you could. If there was a massive amount of clicks done with the accelerated delivery, you could be off by 10:00 in the morning.
Bidding
You then need to choose your bid strategy. The default option is to Optimize For Conversions, which is obviously what we all want to do. But there’s other options in there. And it’s, you know, over time, and in later optimization activity, we could change this. It’s better off starting off with the recommended bid strategy, and we’ll change at a later date.
Ad extensions
We can skip out extensions. It is an option, but I would generally set them up at a later point when we’re setting up the ads. And then when we set up all these options, we can create the campaign and move on to our next step.
Ad group
An ad group contains our keyword lists. The ads are related to those keyword lists and the bids that we are willing to pay for those particular keywords. Bids can be set on an ad group level or on a keyword level. I would always recommend setting it on a keyword level.
Keywords
And when you move on to the ad group stage, after you’ve created your campaign, this is where you can input your keywords. So if you have a list of keywords already made with those square brackets for exact match, pluses for modified broad match, quotation marks for phrase match, or no indicator whatsoever for broad match, input your keyword list into this area and hit Save and Continue.
Ad
After you’ve input your keyword list, you want to create the ad for that keyword list. It’s very straightforward, and Google will tell you when you go over the character limits. Just fill in all the areas, and then include your landing page. It’s a very straightforward process. The key to any kind of copywriting is actually what you’re saying, not doing it. Doing it’s fairly straightforward. It’s what you’re actually saying. That’s where the real magic will happen in that regard.
Back to TopCathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known digital marketing director, commercial analyst, and ecommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specialises in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimisition. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-Side, in digital marketing agencies and media owners with brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
