How to Win Customers

With Google Ads

A Practical Jargon Free Guide For
CEOs And Business Owners
ii
 How to Win Customers
With Google Ads
A Practical Jargon Free Guide For
CEOs And Business Owners

Written by
Ajay Dhunna

iii
iv
Win Customers With Google Ads
A Practical Jargon Free Guide For CEOs and Business
Owners
© 2022 Digital Search Academy Ltd T/A Ajay Dhunna
Digital

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning or other)
except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles without the
prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 9798353624271 Paperback

Edited By: Ajay Dhunna

The strategies in this book are presented primarily for enjoyment

and educational purposes. Every effort has been made to trace
copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of
copyright material.

The information and resources provided in this book are based on

the authors’ personal experiences. Any outcome, income statements
or other results, are based on the authors’ experiences, and there is
no guarantee that your experience will be the same. There is an
inherent risk in any business enterprise or activity, and there is no
guarantee that you will have similar results as the author as a result
of reading this book.

The author reserves the right to make changes and assumes no

responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of any purchaser or
reader of these materials.

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Get Free Lifetime updates of this book.
Visit www.ajaydhunna.com/google-book

Claim Your Free Website & Google Ads Review.

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Remember to. Download your PPC Worksheet which I will

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vi
“Reading books or video
training won’t make you
an expert, however
taking actions and
implementations will!”

vii
viii
Index
1) Dedication 1
2) Acknowledgements 2
3) Praise 4
James Nicholson, Business Growth Academy 4
Nari Hakobyan, Google 4
Guy Littlejohn, Founder, Consultancy. Ex, Google 5
Amitab Dev, Business Head at Bruce Clay India 5
4) “Google Ads don't work!”? 7
5) My Promise To You 12
6) Is this book for you? 16
This book is for you if… 16
This book is not for you if… 19
7) So why should you listen to me? 21
8) Google Ads – Past, Present & Future 28
In the beginning 29
Moving on 29
The start of advertising 30
Going public 30
Early acquisitions 31
Alphabet 31
Advertising on Google 32
The first Google ad 32
Google introduces AdWords pay-per-click 33
Google AdSense 33
AdWords rebranded as Google Ads 34

ix
 Google launches Smart Campaigns 34
Google shopping 35
The anatomy of Google search engine results page
(SERP) 35
9) How does Google Ads work? 40
The Digital Marketing Success Triad™ 40
Quality Score 43
Bid 43
Ad Rank 44
Anatomy of a Google Ads account 44
Google today and in the future 46
The future of Google Ads 47
10) Intro to my 7 Step Google Ads Fastrack
Blueprint 49
11) Getting the most out of this book 52
Theory vs Practice… Implementation Is Priceless! 52
Gmail 53
Take Your Time 53
Download the PPC Worksheet 54
12) Step 1 - Analyse 55
Competitors 58
Internal data 60
Industry Research 60
Do a search 61
Browsing and Retargeting 62
Researching & Forecasting 63
Accountabilities 63

x
 USPs 63
Brand Guidelines 64
Customer Journey 64
Keyword Research Like A Pro 65
Keyword Funnel 66
Categorising Keywords 69
Research intent 69
Buying intent 70
Negative keywords 71
Steps For Putting Together Your Keywords 71
Step 1 - Brainstorm some keywords 71
Step 2 - Let’s see who are competing for these
keywords 72
Google 73
Keyword Planner 75
SEMrush 83
UberSuggests 87
Google Trends 87
13) Step 2 - Audience 89
Understanding Your Audiences & Avatars 89
What is a Customer Avatar? 90
Building Avatars 91
14) Step 3 - Aim 95
Budgeting 96
Intro on budgeting 96
How Google Ads makes money 98
Budgeting basics 99

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 Key Google Ads metrics 99
Cost per Click (CPC) 100
Click-Through Rate (CTR) 100
Conversion Rate (CR) (or Conversion rate Value
(CRV) 101
Modelling and Optimising Your Google Ads
Campaign 101
An example of a starter budget 102
Step 1 – Allocate a total marketing budget 102
Step 2 – Setting your initial Google Ads budget 103
Step 3 – Estimate the CPC for your keywords 103
Step 4 – Set your target revenue and ROI 103
Step 5 – Putting it all together 104
Step 6 – Setting your minimum ROI per click 104
Finally 104
Define Your KPIs 106
Consider Seasonality 107
When are People Shopping vs Buying? 108
How does your finance process work? 108
Do you want to Grow, or Maintain? 108
15) Step 4 - Access 109
What makes a good landing page website? 112
1. Your website satisfies users' needs 112
2. Fast loading 113
3. Excellent design and user interface 114
4. Trustworthy, safe & secure 114
5. Social media friendly 115

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 6. Search engine friendly 116
7. Optimised for mobile 117
8. Concise landing pages 117
9. Tracking your visitors 118
Google Analytics 119
Google Tag Manager 119
16) Step 5 - Action 120
First Step – Create a “Google Account” 123
Creating Your First Google Search Ads Campaign 124
Go to Ads.google.com 126
Creating your first campaign 126
Campaign settings 133
General settings 133
Campaign Name 133
Networks 134
Display Network 135
Show more options 136
Targeting and Audience Segments 137
Locations 137
Location Settings 138
Languages 142
Audience Segments 143
Targeting Google Ads with Avatars 145
Observation Mode 146
Finally 147
Budget and Bidding 147
Budget 148

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 Bidding 149
Setting up the ad groups 155
Ad group type 156
Ad group Name 157
Keywords 157
Setting up your Ads 167
Ad Strength 169
Preview 171
Final URL 171
Display Path 172
Headlines 173
Descriptions 174
Confirm Payment Info 177
Refining your Google Ads campaign 179
Refining Ad Extensions 179
Sitelink Extensions 181
Call Extensions 183
Callout Extensions 184
Location Extensions 185
Refining Campaigns 186
Refining Ad Groups & Keywords 187
Refining Keywords 189
Refining Your Ads 191
Refining Your Budget 192
Next Steps After Refining? 194
17) Step 6 - Augment 195
Why do we need to optimise? 196

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 How often should you be optimising? 197
Weekly optimisation tasks 198
Monthly optimisation tasks 198
Quarterly optimisation tasks 198
What optimisation tasks should we be carrying out?
199
Prioritise Your Optimisation 200
Campaign Optimisation 200
Ad Group Optimisation 202
Keyword Optimisation 203
Device Optimisation 207
Location Optimisation 207
Day / Hour Optimisation 208
Bid Strategy Optimisation 209
Budget Optimisation 210
Impression Share 211
Review “Recommendations” 212
18) Step 7 - Audit 213
Website 214
Conversion Tracking 215
Google Analytics 215
Goals 215
Structure of your Campaigns and Ad Groups 217
Ads and Extensions 217
Search Terms 218
Reporting 218
19) Some Final Thoughts 220

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 Google Analytics 220
Managing customer expectations 220
Recruiting the right staff 221
Outsource of DIY? (Do It Yourself)? 221
20) What Next? 223

xvi
1) Dedication
I dedicate this book, to my son, Aryan Dhunna, who is the
light of my life. He is by far my biggest fan and supporter.
Always questioning what I am doing, why, and how, all of
which I love, and makes me proud to see him growing up as
an inquisitive and bright young lad. He was the one who
passingly once told me I should write a book… this was when
he co-authored a book which got published when he was
around 10 years of age. It seeded in my mind until one day, I
knew it had to be done. I knew it was time for me to serve
other CEOs, business owners and marketing managers by
putting my wealth of knowledge on Google Ads into a book
which will help them. Aryan is one of the few people whom I
can count on one hand, who has been questioning the
progress and nature of my book. Thank you, Aryan, you’re
my rock, and one in a million!

1
2) Acknowledgements

Being a techy, I needed guidance and a push to transfer the

knowledge inside my head onto paper, to help serve others.
There are so many I would like to thank during this journey
of writing my first book.

I have already mentioned my son, Aryan Dhunna, who has

truly been my backbone. Everything I do, I do it for you son.
Thank you for supporting and believing in me.

I also want to give a special thank you to my mentor, James

Nicholson. Back in 2020, right at the start of the global
pandemic, I was lost, and at my all-time low, especially
having lost some loved ones. It was you who helped me to re-
focus, to help me believe in myself, supported me in my
business during the last couple of years and persuaded me to
write this book. I’m eternally grateful to you!

I thank my team for helping and guiding me throughout the

process of writing this book as well as inspiring me and
forcing sleepless nights upon me.

A massive thank you to Petrina Ten who voluntarily offered

to read my book and do the initial proof-reading! You’re a
legend!

2
Thank you Jody Raynsford who has always been my go to pro
for any advice/guidance I needed on copy-writing as well as
creating awesome ad copy!

I know I should be listing many others here, but for now, I’d
just like to say a massive Thank you to everyone that has been
there for me including my friends, family, dad, mum and my
wife.

Equally, I’d love to thank all those, who have never

supported, discouraged me to write a book, told me to quit
business and get a 9-5 job, never believed in me or never been
there for me, as without you, this would never have been
possible! You know who you are, you fuelled me, and I’ll be
eternally grateful to you. J

3
3) Praise

James Nicholson, Business Growth

Academy
Having read this awesome book written by Ajay, and having
known Ajay for the last 5 years, I can see he has put all his
knowledge and expertise on Google Ads into it, as well as his
personality and humour. Ajay has a very methodical
approach when it comes to implementing Google Ads
campaigns. I’ve also benefited so much from his knowledge
of Google Ads, particularly when it comes to building great
Google Ads campaign which work very well, optimising
Google Ads accounts as well as understanding how
keywords really work, and the mistakes to avoid. Ajay has
worked extremely hard on this very well-written
book. Well done Ajay!

Nari Hakobyan, Google

I’ve worked with Ajay over the course of 3 years whilst being
employed for Google and, throughout that time, he has been
totally serving the needs of his clients with scrupulous eye to
every detail in the process. From daily strategic talks to high
commitment to results, Ajay has been doing his level best to
aim for success.

This book is indeed a true reflection of his perfect knowledge

of Google Ads, more specifically on what to do to make more
money from it rather than the vice versa. I can relate to

4
everything he says in the book. Ajay has a great ability to
explain complicated scenarios in a very simple-to-understand
way. Ajay has a very structured approach to managing and
optimizing Google Ads campaigns as well as how he sets
them up in the first place. Ajay’s knowledge and skills on
Google Ads is tremendous. He knows exactly what it takes to
help businesses generate more leads and sales. It’s been an
absolute pleasure working with Ajay, and he truly deserves a
lot of success from his book.

Guy Littlejohn, Founder, Consultancy. Ex,

Google
Having worked at Google (UK) for 3 years as a Google Ads
Account Manager, I have seen how hard Ajay works to create
Google Ads campaigns which are profitable at a very early
stage. This book is a true reflection of Ajay’s expertise in how
he goes about building successful and profitable campaigns.
He uses a 7-step system which he has explained very well in
this book. Ajay has many years of experience in creating,
optimizing and reporting on Google Ads, and it has been such
a pleasure to read his book, which is a must-have for any
business owner.

Amitab Dev, Business Head at Bruce Clay

India
I’m the Business Head at Bruce Clay India, a world-renowned
SEO agency. I’ve known Ajay since my days at RankWatch in
2018, where we were involved in a project to create reporting

5
tools for Google Ads. I have continually watched Ajay go
from strength to strength when it comes to Google Ads, and
his knowledge on the subject is phenomenal! I have been
privileged to have been given the opportunity to read Ajay’s
book and can honestly say, every CEO, Business Owner and
Marketing Manager must read it if you are involved in Google
Ads in any shape or form. A very easy-to-read,
understandable and logically written book! Great work Ajay
Dhunna!

6
4) “Google Ads don't work!”?
I get it all the time!! You can bet your bottom dollar I hear this
at least once a month from potential customers. So how does
the conversation usually go? Here goes (I’m cutting it short of
course)…

Customer: Hi, we want to get more traffic via SEO (that’s

Search Engine Optimization) to get our website listed at the
top of Google, but we do not wish to use Google Ads.

Me: Sure, no problem. But before I tell you more about our
services, have you considered other options such as Google
Ads?

Customer: No, Google Ads doesn’t work!

Me: Why not?

Customer: We ran it a while and lost all our money on it, and
conversions were poor.

Me: OK. So who created and ran your Google Ads?

Customer: We did.

Me: How much experience do you have of running Google

Ads?

Customer: I’ve just started!

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And there you have it. 99% of the time, there lies the answer
as to why they thought Google Ads doesn’t work.

Unsurprisingly, over 60% of potential customers who say this

to me, end up becoming my Google Ads customers!

I give it to you straight. It's not that Google Ads doesn’t work.
It's usually the case that the Google Ads account was not set
up properly and managed by someone who didn’t
understand exactly how it works.

I love cars. I love to drive nice sports cars, feeling every bump
of that road, whilst listening to that engine purr whilst I put
my foot down on the gas. But would I dare to lift the bonnet
of the car, tune the fuel injectors, change the spark plugs, tune
the air intake, only because I’ve read a book on “Dummies
Guide To Tuning A Car Engine”, and then put the car on the
motorway? No chance…

Not unless I have years of experience behind me in tuning car

engines, have the right tools, I’ve undergone some formal
training, or I am accompanied by an expert, who ‘hand-holds’
me as to what nut and bolt to turn, and when.

The same goes with Google Ads: To get great results from
Google Ads, you need to understand how it works, what
defines a Good or Bad, and which “cogs” you need to turn to
help you create a profitable Google Ads account right from
day one! Try guess working and it will only result in letting

8
you down. As they say, a good workman never blames his
tools. And neither should you, i.e. Let’s not blame Google!

Knowledge is power. Following a system is what you need. A

proven system which has been tried and tested to work, time
and time again.

Google Ads is exactly the same as the example of fixing your

sports car which I gave above. If managed poorly, it's going
to give you poor results back. I call this GIGO. Garbage-In-
Garbage-Out. If you do a garbage job of managing your
Google Ads, you are going to get garbage results. When
managed well, Google Ads is a gold-mine for any business. It
requires skill. An understanding of how each cog of the
system works. Just like a car engine. Turn the wrong cogs, and
your Google Ads will suffer, whereas knowing which cogs to
turn and when, could instantly start delivering you a constant
stream of leads and sales.

I’m not implying you have to be the best in the world. You
just have to know how Google Ads functions. You need to
know what knowledge you have which you can capitalize on,
and where you might need that extra hand holding.

Did you know, you can even tell Google Ads what your
objectives are? For example, you can tell Google Ads that you
wish to set up a campaign to drive you lots of conversions
(Leads). Or you can tell Google Ads that you don’t mind
having less leads, but you want each lead to cost you a certain
amount (i.e. £20 per lead, or you are looking for an ROI of 5:1.

9
It’s all there. You just have to have the knowledge to know
what you wish to achieve, then knowing how to achieve it, is
the easy part.

What is even more scary is how many so-called agencies or

freelancers I come across that have managed Google Ads
accounts so poorly, it’s quite shocking. By nature, I have
always encouraged all my customers to take a step back and
really have a good think about what they are hoping to
achieve first. And then consider if they have the foundations
ready to help them achieve that, like their website? Have they
got the resources available to manage their campaigns, as well
as the number of leads/sales they get, i.e. the infrastructure?
I see reports given to clients by agencies, which are not worth
the paper they are written on. This is what I am hoping to
clarify and educate people who read this book. Knowing
what to look out for.

So next time someone says to you, Google Ads doesn’t work.

Just ask them, who set it up in the first place and what’s their
experience? Knowledge is power. Whether you are managing
Google Ads yourself, your staff is managing it for you, or
even your agency/freelancer. If you understand how it
works, you are in a much better boat to talk to them at their
level and take no cr@p from them. Good knowledge gives you
the ammunition to ask the right questions, which then gives
you the right answers, allowing “You” to decide, what’s not
working, what may not be working, as well as giving you the
knowledge to suggest next steps.

10
This is precisely why I wrote this book. Not to make you the
next Einstein of Google Ads. But to give you enough
knowledge to help steer your business, by understanding the
fundamentals of Google Ads, and more importantly,
understanding a system you can follow to build success and
profitable Google Ads campaigns right from the start.

On a final note, a famous quote from one of the founders of

Google…

“Optimism is important. You have to be a

little silly about the goals you are going to
set. There is a phrase I learned in college
called, 'having a healthy disregard for the
impossible.' That is a really good phrase.
You should try to do things that most
people would not do.“
- Larry Page

11
5) My Promise To You
I want you to understand, I’m writing this book myself. It's
not a book written by a ghost-writer who has collated
information from various sources and put it together. And
what that means, is everything in this book is from my own
personal experience, from what I have gained over the last 20
years or so. What I say in this book works. And it's taken me
years to work out, which I’m giving to you on a plate.

What I do promise is total transparency. I have a No-BS

approach to everything both in business as well as personal
life. I consider myself very straight talking, so what you will
get is my thoughts on everything in an unpolished manner,
hash tag, raw format!

This book will therefore empower you with knowledge to talk

at a competent level with whomever it is you are talking to
about Google Ads. Whether that be your marketing agency,
or your internal marketing staff, a freelancer or whether it’s
your clients or even potential clients. That's because you will
learn to cut all through the BS that's out there and get straight
to the point.

By learning content from this book, you will learn to reassess

what you are doing right, what you may be doing wrong, and
more importantly, where are the untapped opportunities for
growth. Just imagine what this can do to your business. Just
imagine what this can do when you ask your marketing

12
agency, or your marketing consultants, questions they just
did not expect you to know about, let alone ask about.

What annoys me is when I hear some of my competitors

making great claims with customers, just to win their
business. Such as “they have inside secrets, they have direct
contact with Google, making false promises and
mismanaging expectations”. Such strategies are short-lived as
most the time they are untrue, and customers soon start
seeing through the BS. It’s important to win the trust of
customers you work with. Likewise, it's important for your
suppliers (agencies or consultants) to win your trust. The only
way to achieve this is by being totally honest, having full
transparency, and managing expectations. I’m a great
believer of this and hence I have been able to build a
successful agency and taught so many people on how to
manage Google Ads and similar digital marketing
campaigns.

Whatever I teach in this book, I use it day in-day-out and use

this to manage a portfolio of currently around $750,000. So I
know it works!

I’ll let you in on another secret… “Disclaimer… this is just of

course just my own opinion :-)”… What Google says or
recommends is not always true. I don’t always agree with the
typical accepted conventional wisdoms that are out there. It’s
good to assess everything for yourself. For example, Google
rewards you for having a great CTR (Click-Through-Rate).
Click-Through-Rate is essentially what percentage of people

13
clicked on your Ad against how many times it was shown on
the Google page. The exact formula is:

CTR = (Number of times your Ad was

Shown on Google (Impressions)) / No. of
times your Ad was Clicked) X 100

Funny isn’t it. Each time someone clicks on your Ad, Google
makes money. Quite ironic Google loves CTR! I have
numerous campaigns where the CTR is incredibly low, yet
the ROI is absolutely amazing. However, when I look at the
Google Ads reports and metrics, it still keeps telling me to
improve my CTR! And that's because I have amazingly
optimised campaigns and Ads. Ads which will deter people
from clicking on them if the service being provided is not
suited to them, whilst attracting clicks from very highly,
relevant and qualified audiences. So although the Clicks may
be low, the quality of the clicks is exceptionally high!

By reading this book, I want you to have the “WOW” factor,

“Wow, I didn’t know this or that”. I almost want you to feel
‘cocky’, knowing you are armed with powerful information,
tools and techniques, to know what it takes, to run a
successful Google Ads campaign.

Now here’s the thing, even if you don’t plan on becoming the
next Larry Page or Sergey Brin (the legends who founded
Google), you can bet your bottom dollar that by reading this
book, you will be able to have a half-decent conversation with
your fellow peers about what really makes Google Ads tick,

14
and understanding a tried and tested, proven system to help
grow businesses.

At the age of 45, I decided to start practising martial arts, in

particular karate. I set a goal that I am going to aim to be a
black-belt in karate by the age of 50. I worked damn hard for
it and my sensei, Sensei Om Parkash supporting me
throughout this journey. What I learnt was, success does not
come overnight. You have to work for it, weeks, months or
even years. Whether it is learning a new skill set or trying to
achieve something in life. Keep at it, work hard…
Determination, Persistency and Resilience. Whether you wish
to setup a business, learn marketing, or any other goals in
your life, these are the values that will help you in your
journey to success. Sounds good? Let’s move on. J

15
6) Is this book for you?

This book is for you if…

“You do not need to be a techy! You just

have to have the ambition and
determination to learn and to succeed in
business, whether it be your own, or the
organisation you work for.”

If you have picked up this book, it is likely you may be the

CEO of a company, a business owner, or Marketing Director.
It could also be that you have an authoritative role within
marketing and have a vested interest in helping to scale up
the growth & revenue of a business.

Perhaps you have tried, or are running Google Ads

campaigns yourself, whether you personally or your
company, and maybe you have realized that there is so much
to understand, and a basic superficial knowledge of Google
Ads can do more damage than good, whether to your
business, or to your clients.

It could also be you have vaguely heard about Google Ads,

and want to better understand what it is, how it works and
how you can potentially use it to help grow your business.
You do not need to be a Google Ads Expert to get value from

16
this book. Neither do you need to even know what it is. I’m
going to talk you through it all, right from the very beginning.

Maybe your business right now is not where you want it to

be. Or maybe you are just starting out in business, and are
looking to grow your business, by getting more sales, more
qualified leads, and more enquiries, which ultimately results
in more customers.

If you are reading this book, I know you are hungry for
success and want to be a leader within your field.

On the Flipside, you may be fearing your competitors may be

stealing your business. Maybe you hate losing tenders, you
hate losing customers and you hate losing sales. Possibly you
blame your staff, your marketing agency, or your freelance
consultant if they have not got the knowledge or experience
to get your business to where you want it to be.

If you resonate with any of these, please continue reading,

as you are certainly in the right place!

I want you to feel in total control of your Google Ads. I don’t

want you to feel your business may go down, or out of control
due to a lack of knowledge, whilst your competitors are
succeeding each day.

One of the biggest fears a business owner can experience is

when their customer moves to their competitor. I want to

17
almost eradicate the possibility of this, especially if it is due to
the marketing results you have not achieved.

My sole purpose in this book is to ensure you understand the

power behind Google Ads. It’s a complex platform, and there
is a lot to learn. I want you to have a solid understanding of a
methodology to apply, and a system to use, which enables
you to step back and look at the entire Google Ads process
from a holistic perspective.

I want you to be certain of achieving success & delivering

tangible results to grow your business. So much in control
that you know you are armed with the best knowledge
possible, and if you cannot do it, then you know someone
who can, and you know the right questions to ask as well as
results to expect.

I come across a lot of people who are tired of listening to the

so-called ‘experts’ advising them to ‘do this’, and ‘do that’, or
‘we did this’ and ‘we did that’, but it hasn’t worked. It
normally ends up being a blame-oriented culture, where it is
always someone else fault!

This is why I am keen to share with you my “7 Step Google

Ads Fastrack Blueprint”, to ensure your Google Ads
campaign is set up correctly from day 1 and is driving a
stream of quality leads and sales within a very short period of
time. My intention is to help you understand exactly what
Google Ads is, how it works, what’s the difference between

18
Google Ads and SEO, Facebook, and the other numerous
platforms out there.

Furthermore, my 7-step system ensures you avoid making

mistakes, which many people make when setting up their
campaigns, i.e. by deep diving straight into Google Ads. The
number one cause of many failed Google Ads campaigns is
not having the correct foundations in place prior to building
the campaign.

I have worked on a variety of different types of businesses,

mostly service-based businesses such as dentists, lawyers,
marketing agencies, home improvements, and similar types
of businesses. I have also worked on numerous e-commerce
projects helping businesses to achieve a return on ad spends
(ROAS) in excess of 500%! You’re definitely in the right place.

This book is not for you if…

There is no such thing as a shortcut to a successful campaign.

There is no such thing as instant gratification. I promise you.
If that’s what you are looking for, I politely request you close
this book and go live your life in Bongo-Bongo land.

Gone are the days when you can launch a digital marketing
campaign and it can start driving you tons of qualified traffic
for free, or at a cost of next to nothing. It takes time. Time,
Patience, and a lot of work to optimise. Above all, it requires
a good strategy to be put into place. So if you think you can
read this book, or any book or course for that matter, and

19
implement a get-rich scheme overnight, you better pack your
bags back to planet mars, as it ain’t gonna happen!

This book is also not for you if you want to become a complete
hands-on whiz kid at Google Ads. If that is you, I would like
to invite you to check out my courses or mentoring
programmes where I can train you, by visiting
www.AjayDhunna.com/training. This book really is to
introduce Google Ads as well as introduce you to a system. A
methodology, which firstly helps you to understand exactly
how Google Ads work, and also ensures your Google Ads
campaigns have been setup for success, from day one!

This book is certainly not for you if you have no interest in

knowing what your marketing team does, in ensuring that
your marketing budget is well spent, or if you still believe
Google Ads doesn’t work and aren't open to being shown
why and how they can work.

20
7) So why should you listen to
me?
My name’s Ajay Dhunna, and I’m a digital marketing
specialist. I’ve been implementing digital marketing
strategies for the best part of 20 years now, so there is not a lot
you can tell me about that I may never have heard of. That
being said, I’m always open to learning more, as technology
is an ever-evolving cycle of new developments, new
platforms, and new strategies.

Having started my first career 20+ years ago, I started as a

Software Engineer, developing intranet applications for
multi-national companies such as Barclays Bank, KPMG,
Npower (Called Midlands Electricity Board back then) to
name a few.

I developed a natural interest in marketing, purely by chance.

I was intrigued as to how websites are built and how they get
traffic. I soon started implementing digital marketing
strategies, the first of which was SEO (Search Engine
Optimisation). Back in the day, Google was unheard of. It
didn’t even exist. I remember the first search engine I
optimized a website for Excite, Hotbot, Yahoo & Altavista.

21
Yahoo very quickly became my favourite search engine.
Simply because it became one of the most popular search
engines. It was undefeatable. The King of all Kings when it
comes to search engines. No one could come anywhere near
it in terms of the amount of people using it, its popularity and
so much more. Very quickly I learned how to get websites
listed in Yahoo, which in all fairness was not a lot, but just a
little bit of keyword optimisation. I grew my company fast as
it was a skill I had that most people did not have, and the
number of websites being created was growing steadily.

This continued for years. Same again with Excite, Altavista

and of course, Hotbot!

22
Out of nowhere, almost overnight, came the big G! Google.
With simply 1 input bar on its screen, it totally revolutionized
the search engine history. It was focused on giving users high
quality and highly relevant results according to what users
had searched for. It was all about providing the best user-
experience possible. Google was simple to use. It was simple
to look at; It had no Ads, no News sections on the page, and
allowed people to have pure focus, on whatever they were
looking for. The other engines since soon went on a rapid
exponential decline. Though some still exist, Google has
continued to Rule the No. 1 spot where people go to conduct
a search for over 2 decades and has since built multiple
platforms enabling advertisers to choose how they wish to
advertise on Google!

I soon found myself torn between developing web

applications and marketing. I had developed some highly
sophisticated applications for the likes of KPMG, and
Barclays bank as a senior software engineer. I had done
everything from database design, designing what screens
should look like to provide best user-experience, technical
implementations using various coding languages. At the
same time, I had figured out how to optimise websites, how
to get websites listed at the top of search engines, how to get
more traffic onto websites and so much more.

But I had to make a decision as to which route I wanted to

take. It was like hitting a crossroad. Technologies for web
development were grown rapidly, as were the algorithms
used by search engines. Both of which needed proper

23
attention. After a long debate with me and myself, I chose the
digital marketing route. I knew it was the right decision as
soon as I made it. The rest is all history, and I never looked
back since.

Since, I have also trained hundreds of students on various

forms of digital marketing throughout my life. I soon
developed an ability to talk to customers in a non-technical,
jargon free method, with a great commercial understanding
of business needs. To better understand what they are looking
for and to be able to advise them on what they NEED as
opposed to what they WANT.

I have seen a lot of Google Ads campaigns fail miserably. And

I have equally seen many go from strength to strength.
Finding out why some campaigns work so brilliantly and
why many fail has always intrigued me. I have always put a
lot of time and money into understanding why this happens.

Through my years of experience, I started to understand that

implementing a marketing campaign should not start off with
a platform such as Google Ads, Bing Ads (Now Microsoft
Ads) or whatever it may be, but the starting point must be to
step-back and really analyse what you are trying to achieve,
who is your competition, what are your KPIs and so much
more.

This then helps to build a solid foundation which can then

lead to implementing strategies on a platform of your choice
such as Google Ads.

24
I started putting my experience into a framework, which I can
then use again and again. Very soon I realized that Google
Ads campaigns that are implemented using this strategy, get
far quicker and more positive results. I formed this into a
system. I developed a 7-step system, which starts from the
absolute basics to the implementation of your Google Ads
accounts, as well as reporting and optimization.

As a Google Ads specialist, I have often gone from company

to company to either train their staff on Google Ads or to
consult with them to help them implement Google Ads
strategies. Over the years I am astonished at how many CEOs
and Directors of companies don’t quite understand what
Google Ads really is or how it works or why we need it.
Instead, many have referred to it as SEO, which is far from the
truth.

Google Ads is typically managed by digital marketing

agencies where work gets outsourced to, or internal staff, who
somehow, “do something” with Google Ads to help generate
leads and sales.

This is where I knew there was a gap in the market, to come

up with a book. It reminded me of when my son, Aryan,
casually once said, “Dad, you should write a book” (As he co-
authored a book at the age of 6 as part of a school project,
which then got published). His casual comment hit a chord.
Although I did not do it at the time. It was only when I
realised the lack of knowledge many CEOs and business

25
owners have about how Google works, I recalled what Aryan
had said, and it was like that lightbulb moment.

I need to put my knowledge into a book to help and serve

others. I decided to start the journey of writing this book,
using my year of experience to help educate CEOs, Business
Owners and Directors, about exactly what Google Ads is,
how it works, as well as what defines a good structure, what
type of methodology to use when implementing Google Ads
and so much more.

By understanding this, the readers of this book are then far

better equipped to talk to agencies (or staff) at their level.
Better understand the terminology they use. Not only that,
but this book better helps to arm CEOs and business owners
with powerful knowledge of what are the right questions to
ask, what types of reports should we get as opposed to the
reports we do get, and how Google Ads should be set up right
in the first place, how research is conducted and so much
more.

I use a data-driven approach. In other words, I base my

decisions based on data. Hence why it's imperative to have
good quality data. Again, I’m a firm believer of GIGO. For

26
those of you who have attended any of my training courses,
would have heard me mention this a million times. GIGO
stands for Garbage In Garbage Out. In other words, if you
feed a system with Garbage Information, i.e. (Garbage IN),
you will end up making Garbage decisions so your outcome
will be Garbage too (Garbage OUT).

27
8) Google Ads – Past, Present
& Future
Google Ads is a pay-per-click advertising model that
underpins the world’s most successful search engine.

BTW, if you wish to get straight into the learnings of Google Ads,
feel free to skip this section. I wrote this as I felt it was important to
get a background on Google and how it came about.

Google was by no means the first search engine on the block.

Before it, there was Archie, VLib, Veronica, Jughead,
Wanderer, Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Alta
Vista, and more. However, what later became Google was
initially called BackRub, though unlike the others, it used a
novel way of ranking websites.

Here is the story of how Google grew from an idea cooked up

by a couple of university students to a business with around
99,000 employees, and annual revenues of about $140 billion.

Google receives most of that revenue, about $120 billion, from

advertising. We will look in some detail at how Google has
developed its advertising model, how it works today, and
how Google has integrated advertising with organic search.

28
 In the beginning

In 1995, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and

Sergey Brin, along with several additional collaborators,
created an innovative search engine. They based it on
estimating the importance of a web page from the number of
times other web pages linked to them, along with the
significance of the sites from where the backlinks originated.
They called their algorithm PageRank and the search engine
BackRub, which a little later became known as Google.

After a year of running Google on university servers, they

launched Google.com. Their first investor, Andy
Bechtolsheim, wrote them a cheque for $100,000 in 1998,
Several other angel investors joined in including Amazon’s
Jeff Bezos. All together they raised around $1 million.

This was enough money to allow Page and Bib to launch the
company working from a friend’s garage in Menlo Park,
California.

Moving on

By 1999 with a staff of eight they moved to a new home at 165

University Avenue, Palo Alto. They also added a dog called
Yoshka to their team and hired their first chef. Later that year
they received $25 million in funding from two venture
capitalists, an investment that lit the touchpaper.

29
 The start of advertising

Initially, Page and Brin were opposed to funding their project

through advertising but eventually came around to the idea.
They sold text-based ads associated with the keywords uses
entered in their search queries. Eric Schmidt, appointed as
Google’s Chairman and CEO, played a crucial role in growing
advertising revenues.

Here you can see what the Google page first looked like when
it was launched in 1998:

Going public

In 2003, Google relocated to an office complex in Mountain

View, California, which they subsequently called Googleplex.
The following year, in August 2004, Google launched its IPO,
offering 19,605,052 shares. The offer price was $85; today, the
share price is around $1,600.

30
 Early acquisitions

In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, and the

following year acquired the internet advertising company
DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Business boomed as businesses
that previously advertised on traditional media such as TV
and newspapers switched to internet advertising, To
accommodate the massive increase in site visits, which
reached 3 billion a day in 2011, Google built a global network
of data centres. That same year Google acquired the mobile
phone company Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion. After
stripping the company of most of its patents, Google sold it
on to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. The patents were needed to
protect the IPR of the Android operating system.

Business continued to boom. By 2012 revenues were

exceeding $50 billion, and in 2013, Google acquired Waze, a
GPS app that complimented Google Maps, for $966 million.
The following year Google acquired the UK-based AI start-up
DeepMind for an undisclosed sum estimated to be around
$400 million.

Alphabet

In 2015, Google reorganised its corporate structure and

created Alphabet Inc with Google handling all the
conglomerate’s internet-related activities.

31
 Advertising on Google

As we have indicated, Google derives most of its revenue

from advertising. Since Google started advertising 20 years or
so ago, the advertising model has evolved considerably. In the
early days, ads were typically glossy and were clearly
advertisements, but today they are barely distinguishable
from the organic search results. Sometimes you need to look
quite hard to tell organic search results and ads apart. We look
at the anatomy of a search engine results page (SERP) below,
but first, we will look at the history of advertising on Google
and how it has evolved to become the enormous revenue-
generating beast it is today.

The first Google ad

The first Google ad appeared on a webpage in January 2000.

Back then, Google called the service Premium Sponsorship,
and sold text ads directly on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis.
It wasn’t a commercial success and generated only a little
money, though there was potential. Google relaunched the
service as AdWords in October 2000 as a pay-per-impression
system. This was more successful than before, generating a
revenue of $85 million in the first year.

However, there was considerable competition. At the time,

another company, Overture (previously Go To) was also
selling ads on a pay-per-placement auction self-service basis.
Go To was the original developer. Their platform gave
advertisers the option of bidding on their ads to appear at the

32
top of SERPs. The Go-To service was highly successful,
generating a revenue of $288 million. (Yahoo subsequently
acquired the company).

Google introduces AdWords pay-per-click

In 2002, Google relaunched AdWords this time using a pay-

per-click (PPC) auction model, similar to but more
sophisticated than Overture. With Overture, the more
advertisers paid, the higher their ad appeared, making it
possible to buy the top placement. The downside was that if
only a few people clicked on the ad, it would generate very
little money.

Aware of this, Google included “Click-Through Rate” (CTR)

into its algorithm as a measure of the relevance of the ad.
More relevant ads would receive a higher placement. Thus,
even if the competition beat the advertisers' top bid, if site
visitors clicked on it more often, then it would still rise in the
rankings. The algorithm had a massive impact on the success
of AdWords both for Google and for its advertisers.

Google AdSense

Google launched AdSense in 2003 after acquiring Applied

Semantics. In this model, web developers can add small
JavaScript programs to their web pages that display ads
available through the Google network. These may be banner
ads or smaller display ads. The intention is to show only ads
that are relevant to the web page. The website receives
payment when the visitors click the ads. Advertisers pay

33
Google on either a per-click basis or a CPM model based on
the number of impressions.

AdWords rebranded as Google Ads

In 2017, Google rebranded AdWords as Google Ads, though

it was more than a simple rebranding. Effectively, Google Ads
integrates AdWords and AdSense. The revised format makes
it much easier for businesses to advertise on platforms other
than Google’s SERPs such as YouTube, Google Maps,
relevant websites, and across the Google display network.

Everything is in one place, so it can all be managed on a single

platform, which is a boon for smaller businesses.

Google launches Smart Campaigns

The following year, Google made it very much more
straightforward for advertisers by launching Smart
Campaigns, an upgrade of the old Google AdWords Express.
Essentially, Smart Campaigns provide a management tool
which automates many of the functions of running Google
Ads.

Advertisers set their marketing goals, geographical targeting,

and the products and services they wish to market. The
platform will suggest options based on the business type, and
once advertisers select them, help create ads and optimise
advertising budgets. After launching the campaign, it is easy
to monitor the performance of keywords and phrases,
adjusting where necessary.

34
Google shopping

Google launched Google Shopping in 2012 as part of the

AdWords package and is now integrated into Google Ads.
The model allows advertisers to share data from their online
store with Google. Google uses the data to produce product
boxes that display an image and other data such as price and
sellers’ name. Google Shopping has proven to be a highly
effective advertising strategy. We give an example below.

Customers can also go to the Google Shopping homepage and

search directly from there for specific items. Google shopping
has had a significant impact on the way retailers market their
products. As a response to the COVID-12 pandemic, Google
has made Google Shopping a free service to assist retailers in
rebuilding their businesses following the downturn.

The anatomy of Google search engine

results page (SERP)

The face of Google advertising has changed considerably. In

the early years of AdWords, ads appeared above and to the
right of organic search results. The ads were clearly
distinguishable.

35
Over the next few years, Google regularly tinkered with the
ads, changing their colour schemes and positioning. They
carried out countless experiments to discover what works
best. We all know what a modern SERP looks like, we see
them every day, but from an SEO viewpoint, it is worth
analysing them in more detail.

36
The first thing to note is that the page’s appearance varies
considerably depending on what you are searching. For
instance, if you are searching for a product such as “rugby
balls” the page might look something like this. The
advertisements are clearly visible at the top of the page, and
the organic search results are immediately below. The adverts
in this screenshot are an example of ads generated by Google
Shopping, which, as we say above, was launched in 2012.

37
However, if you are searching for information, for instance,
“investment banking”, the page is likely to be very different.
Here you will see ads at the top of the page underneath a
small “Ad” logo, the organic search results below that, and in
this case an information box on the right.

If you then scroll down the page, you will see three more ads
below the organic search results. The total number of ads on
the first page of this search was 7, and there were ten organic
search results.

38
39
9) How does Google Ads
work?

The Digital Marketing Success Triad™

I wanted to include this section as I’m truly passionate about

it. I tell all my potential customers about it at the start of each
project. And that’s to help manage expectations. It helps
customers get away from the popular misconceived belief
that “all they need to do” is to hire a Google Ads specialist, or
setup a Google Ads account, and it will become a licence to
print money. Far from it, I’m afraid.

The success of a digital marketing campaign is largely

dependent on 3 core pillars, which I call, “The Digital
Marketing Success Triad™”

40
These are:
1) Website
2) Traffic
3) Content
Let me explain this…

Website: Some of the main factors which influence the

success of your website are things like usability, speed of
website etc (As described per image below). Now let’s say you
had the best website, however, let’s say the traffic to your
website was poor (maybe low quality or irrelevant, or even
not enough traffic), or the content on your website was poor
(i.e. poor images, products or services not properly described,
then your entire marketing campaign will fail.

Traffic – Similarly, let’s say you had the best marketing

campaign. In other words, you got traffic for all the best
keywords for your business and you were getting lots of
clicks to your website. However, if your website sucked, or
you’re the content on your website was poor, the whole
marketing campaign will fail.

Content – Last but not least, let’s say you had the best quality
content, but your website was poorly designed or the quality
of your traffic was poor, the whole marketing campaign will
fail.

Why am I telling you this and what is the significance of the

“Digital Marketing Success Triad”? What I’m getting at, is
you need to be working as a team. Your web developers, your

41
marketing team, your content writers, all need to be working
as a close-knit team so that when sales or leads are low, it
doesn’t become a blame culture, but you work out
collectively, which area of the Digital Marketing Success
Triad you need to resolve. Which part or even parts of the
triad could be causing the low number of expected leads or
sales?

To help implement the Digital Marketing Success Triad, I

came up with a system. A system which takes you from the
ground up on creating a Google Ads campaign, with fast
success of the campaign being in the forefront. I call this
system “7 Step Google Ads Fastrack Blueprint”

Essentially Google Ads works on an auction system. There are

3 main components when it comes to Google Ads:
1) The customer – This is the person who does the
search on Google for a particular keyword.
2) The Advertiser – The advertiser is the person who
will pay Google each time someone who has searched
for one of their keywords, will click on the Ad.
3) Google – Google will then process the keywords
which a user has typed in and depending on which
advertiser is bidding for those keywords, Google will
use an auction system to determine which advert gets
shown on the Google page, and more importantly, at
what position on Google.

The “Ad Rank” is ultimately what determines what position

Google decides to display Ads on, which is based on your Bid

42
price (i.e. how much you are willing to pay per click) and
Quality Score.

Quality Score
Your Quality Score is the most important element that will
determine the amount you need to bid on keywords to
determine which position your ads get displayed on the
search engine results pages. The higher your Google Quality
Score, the less you will have to pay for your ad to appear on
the Google page.

Quality score is determined by 3 main factors:

● Ad Relevance - how relevant is your Advertisement
which a user sees, in relation to what they may have
searched for.
● Expected Click-Through-Rate – This is Google’s
estimation of the rate at which your potential viewers
will actually click on your ad to visit your website or
landing page.
● Landing Page Experience – This refers to the quality
of the experience that a customer has whilst they visit
your website or landing page.

Quality score is then reported as a score from 1 to 10.

Bid
The bid is the maximum amount an advertiser will pay to list
their advertisement onto the Google page, for a given
keyword. However, depending on your Quality Score,

43
Google will decide how much you are charged. The higher
your quality score the less you need to pay.

Ad Rank
As discussed earlier, Ad rank is simply a number which
determines which position your Advertisement gets
displayed at:

AD Rank = Maximum Bid X Quality Score

Anatomy of a Google Ads account

Let’s understand how a Google account looks like, in other
words, its anatomy. A Google Ads account should ideally
only be built for 1 business. if you have several businesses, I
advise you to create separate Google Ads accounts for each of
the businesses. In this way, all the reporting, main settings,
goals, are all kept focused to that business only, as well as ease
of management.

The anatomy of a Google Ads account seems pretty

straightforward.

44
We will discuss all parts of a Google Ads account later, but as
a summary, we have:

1) Account – As discussed earlier this would ideally

belong to just one business, with its own time zones,
payment currencies, billing details.
2) Campaign: Each account can have many campaigns.
Think of campaigns as filing drawers. In a filing
drawer, you would keep all your paperwork in
separate drawers. Like your bills, insurances,
personal paperwork etc. So Campaigns work in a
similar way, you can separate your overall products
or services separated and organised. In this way, they
can all be managed separately, each with its own

45
 ways of how they are set up. In actual face, each
Google Ads account can have up to 10,000
campaigns. I have yet to come across an account that
even has 10% of that!
3) Ad Groups. Again, using the example of a filing
cabinet, within each drawer you can have dividers to
subdivide your paperwork. For Bills you might have
electricity bills, eating bills and so on. In the same
way, Ad groups allow you to subdivide your
campaigns so that each one of more specific.
Interesting fact, you can have up to 20,000 Ad groups.
I usually advise having in the region of 5 to 10 Ad
groups per campaign.
4) Keywords. Each Ad group has keywords. Keywords
are what you want your Ads to show on the Google
page, which relates to your products or services. I
always advise no more than around 20 keywords per
Ad group.
5) Ads. These are the text-based Ads that your users will
see on the Google page when they search for your
products or services. We will again discuss these in
more detail later.

Google today and in the future

Google is extraordinarily successful. It now has over 90% of
the worldwide search engine market, it carries out 63,000
searches per second, and its current market value is around
$739 billion. While we have mentioned some of Google’s

46
significant acquisitions, it owns many more, approximately
200 other companies.

But what of the future? Google has never stood still; the
business has always had an eye on the future. Of course, there
is the possibility that Google has become so big that
governments might force it to break up into smaller entities,
though it’s difficult to see how this might be achieved. Even
if it does happen, the Google Ads and organic search models
are inseparable and will still grow and improve. However, the
whole of the search landscape could change as Artificial
Intelligence (AI), machine learning and associated
technologies increase their impact.

The future of Google Ads

AI and machine learning will impact Google Ads
significantly. This is where such technologies will do most of
the heavy lifting for you in terms of targeting your potential
customers, knowing who to target more aggressively based
on the likelihood of them converting into a sale or lead, and
vice versa. These so-called “Smart Campaigns” will utilise
such technologies to help create more efficient campaigns. We
have described these above, and while they make the life of
an advertiser much easier, they are still far from perfect. One
weakness is that they still use widely fashioned keywords. In
any campaign choosing the right keywords is critical. Get
them wrong, and your campaign will fail to deliver and go
over budget. Choosing the right keywords is a skill within
itself.

47
In future, Google Ads will use AI and machine learning more
effectively. For instance, as the amount of available data on
advertising campaigns increases, AI will become far better at
selecting and fine-tuning the most effective keywords for
your campaign. Rather than defining keywords, you would
need to merely set your goals and let AI take over from there.
AI could also monitor your campaign in real-time, making
fine adjustments to your ads and intelligently targeting your
prospects. I’m reluctant to say the quality of the
recommendations Google’s AI makes today, is perfect, far
from it to be honest. I look at these daily. Whenever Google
says, “I recommend these keywords”, on a good day I would
use less than 20% of its recommendations.

But of course, there are dangers. Many advertisers are wary

that AI is effectively a black box and that there is the potential
to lose control of our campaigns. Do we want to hand our
advertising over to a machine? If we lose the transparency of
our campaigns, how can we manage them should things go
wrong? AI has the potential to make Google Ads better, but
we do need to handle it with care.

48
10) Intro to my 7 Step Google
Ads Fastrack Blueprint
It's fair enough to say you want to set up a Google Ads
campaign. I’ve heard it all before.

“Setup a Google campaign and it starts giving you a flood of leads

and sales straight away”… This is so far from the truth and is
just utter BS!

But there is little point in starting off a Google Ads campaign

without really understanding what you hope to achieve from
it, how much budget you have and so much more.

It's one of the all-time classic mistakes over 50% of businesses

make, deep diving into Google Ads without the preparation.
Here’s a question for you…. “Would you build a house of bricks
if you did not have the architectural drawings ready, the foundation
built strong, knowing where you want the doors and windows to
be?” I don’t think so, as if you do, your house will probably
crumble before it's even built.

Your Google Ads campaign is just the same.

You need a framework to work from. A system. One that has
been tried and tested. And more importantly where unlike a
lot of courses and systems I have seen, step 1 or 2 is certainly
NOT “Creating the Google Ads Campaign”, but to create a
solid foundation first.

49
As mentioned earlier, in my early days after graduating from
university, I was a software engineer. It was only here that I
learnt the importance of preparing to code before coding.
Without preparation, you’re working on a ticking time bomb.

“Failing To Prepare Is Preparing To Fail”

In the software engineering world, I learnt to spend 30% of

my time in planning, 30% in programming the website or
software itself, and the remaining 30% in Testing.

I applied this to Google Ads, and through years of testing and

developing campaigns, I have developed my own system.

The system is called “The 7 Step Google Ads Blueprint

System” and is one that I currently use to manage a portfolio
of almost $750,000.

I have personally gone through a lot of pain in “working

things out”. I’ve lost tens of thousands of pounds of my own
hard-earned money by rushing into implementing what I
thought would be a great Google Ads campaign. I learnt I
needed to implement several steps. And I started
implementing this into my campaigns. The more I
implemented the better my Google Ads campaigns got. I
started saving money for my clients, I started quickly
producing results for my clients, and I started improving the
return on ad spend for my clients (ROAS), until I figured out
that hey, this is a system. A Blueprint that I have. This was
then the birth of “The 7 Step Google Ads Blueprint System”.

50
My system follows 7 Key steps:
1) Analyse - Analysing the market
2) Audience – Identifying Target Audience
3) Aim –Your Key Performance Indicators
4) Access – Prepare the website to convert visitors to
customers
5) Action – Build a highly optimised Google Ads
campaign
6) Augment - Optimising your Google Ads
7) Audit - Auditing & Reporting In line with business
objectives

51
11) Getting the most out of this
book
To help you get the most out of this book, and to understand
how Google Ads works, I have compiled some of the basics
you might like to consider. Here goes…

Theory vs Practice… Implementation Is

Priceless!
Like all things, theory is one thing and practice is another. It’s
good to play around and experiment with the system within
this book, whether you wish to start off from scratch, or even
sit with someone who already manages Google Ads and ask
them to show you around.

Whatever you decide, you can read all the books in the world,
but what will really help you to best understand Google Ads,
is implementation. Implementation is priceless, whether you
do it yourself, or your team members, so that you can see for
yourself, what the results are of what you have read and
created.

Let me tell you, some of the best Google Ads experts I have
trained up, I have done so by putting them into the deep end.
Giving them a real project to work on. As a result, this
demands real questions, not just textbook type Q&A’s.
Questions such as “Why this?”, “Where do I do this from?”.
“How Do I?”, “What Next? and “Oh Sh#te screwed up”, and
so on. And it’s only by screwing up that you learn, you
actually learn!

52
Create a Google Account as this book will show you. You
don’t necessarily have to use it. It will be just for practice
purposes so that you can understand the items this book
refers to.

On the other hand, if you only wish to know some of the main
theories of what makes a successful and profitable Google
Ads campaign, read at your leisure and I’m sure you will find
bags of value and golden nuggets within this book.

Gmail
I would also suggest creating an email account with Google
(Gmail). As we are primarily focusing on Google, creating an
account with Google will enable you to access all platforms
more easily, as well as integrations with one another more
seamlessly.

To do this, go to www.gmail.com, and follow the prompts. By

doing so you will have created an email address that you can
use for all the Google platforms you use. For those of you who
may be more tech-savvy, you can make your own email
address into a Google email address too. Take your pick!

Take Your Time

What I find works best with me, as well as customers and
students I speak to, is when they take in small amounts of
information at a time. Maybe then couple this with the
practical element, where they try out things that they have

53
learned. I would therefore suggest the same process
throughout this book. Read small amounts at a time, and try
to implement what you may have learned, not necessarily on
the Google platform, but even if it’s making your own notes
on how the advice and guidance given in this book, can be
applied to your business.

Download the PPC Worksheet

I have created a worksheet which I use for all my Google Ads
campaigns. Ensure to download it as we will be referring to it
throughout this book.

The link is www.ajaydunna.com/ppcworksheet

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12) Step 1 - Analyse

Here we analyse the market. Without conducting proper

analysis, how will we ever know who we are competing
against? How will we ever know how our products or
services compare to theirs? We may think we have the best
products in the world. But what is it that your competitors are
putting out there, which could potentially be far superior to
yours?

Here I will also introduce you to tools and templates I

personally use and always have done, when implementing

55
the Analysis stage prior to implementing a Google Ads
campaign.

As humans, we sometimes get a little emotionally involved

with our products or services, and start guarding it, thinking
it’s the best out there. And that’s because we may have spent
time building it. Lots of money maybe, sleepless nights. That’s
quite normal. But as a marketeer, it’s imperative we step back
and conduct detailed, objective market research, and detach
yourselves from any emotions.

I once had a client, a dentist, who told me they want to market

themselves as a general dentist, with a fairly low marketing
budget. That was all well saying that. But when we looked
around and conducted our analysis, we found they will just
blend into the other local competitors, and there is nothing
about them which stands out, as most of the local dentists
were also general all-round dentists. It took some convincing
to my client, but we then decided that based on the research
we conducted, they need to be seen as an expert within
orthodontics, in particular, Invisalign. We discovered a whole
host of gaps in the market which our competitors were not
taking advantage of. 6 months down the line, not only have
we found the business turnover has increased by 20%, but
people are travelling from all over the UK, not just the local
area, primarily due to how we packaged up & marketed their
services, standing out from the crowd, without having to
compromise on price. In fact, once we have packaged up their
services, it becomes a no-brainer for people to pay the price,
regardless of where from the UK they travelled from.

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Now when it comes to Google Ads, the importance of this
amplifies. And that’s because you are paying Google each
time someone clicks on your Ads. And if the Ads are do not
to convert into a lead or enquiries, your costs may go through
the roof whilst your conversions remain low to none, or even
non-profitable. This is why the Analysis stage is imperative,
as it’s helping to build a strong foundation for your Google
Ads account.

So to help with this, I have outlined the main things you need
to be aware of when analysing the market before
implementing your Google Ads campaign.

These are the steps I take myself. Not only do these help me,
to create a brilliant campaign which starts churning out leads
and sales straight away, but these steps help my customers to
better understand their own market, pricing, services, KPIs
and so much more.

I also have a template which I use. This template helps me to

keep my research well organised as well as constructive, so
that I, or my clients, don’t accidentally miss out on something
important. This template really has been a gold mine for me.
You can download it for free by visiting:

www.AjayDhunna.com/ppcTemplates

57
 Competitors
This is a really interesting one. So many times, when I ask my
customers, they end up giving me a huge list, and once I’ve
finished with them, the list has shrunk to just one or two.

The reason is normally quite simple. There is a massive

difference between who you “think” your competitor is and
who is “actually” your competitor. Let me explain. So just
because somebody sells the same products as you do or caters
for the same services as you do does not necessarily make
them a competitor, although technically they may be your
competitor and you can learn from them.

Who I consider to be your competitors as far as online

marketing is concerned are those that have a strong digital
presence. In other words when you search on Google for their
brand, their products, or services they are always there,
predominantly towards the top of the search page. These are
the companies who you are up against, when implementing
a Google strategy for your business. Whether that be in the
sponsored section at the top of the page, or the organic section
(both of which we will cover later on).

So for example let's assume you are a chiropractor based in

London. People who are looking for your products or services
may well therefore, type into Google the words “chiropractor
London”, or “chiropractor near me”. The question is: are the
companies who you thought were your competitors
anywhere to be found on the Google Search results page? If
they cannot be found on the first page or even the second page

58
for that matter then although they may be your competitor, I
would not deem them to be your top three or four competitors
to be concerned about or to even learn from.

The real threats are those who are listed on the first page or
the second page but more so at the top of the first page, as
they are the ones who are actively marketing their products
and services which completed yours.

In many cases, the reason people sometimes think somebody

is their competitor is because they may be getting lots of leads
or sales. What you must understand is those people who may
not be your competitor as far as Google is concerned, maybe
your competitor on a different platform. In other words, they
may be using different marketing strategies to get their leads
and sales in the first place. For example, email nurturing,
LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and the list goes
on.

So why do we need to understand our competitors? By

understanding our competitors:
a) We can help to benchmark our business. We can
identify gaps and opportunities in the market which
we may be missing out on.
b) Likewise, we can identify competing products or
services. By understanding this, we can then dive
deeper into how you can improve on this, have better
messaging, stronger Ads, assess your pricing and so
much more.

59
 c) We can see what types of Ads they may be using to
attract customers, which we can then model.
d) Similarly, we can research their landing pages to see
how the landing pages have been setup, thereby
utilising the things we learn from them.

How is this relevant to Google Ads? Simply put are gaining

competitor intelligence to learn from their mistakes and to
capitalise on the good work they may be doing.

Types of things you may want to look at are as follows:

Internal data
What do you know about your competitors? Brainstorm who
you’re likely to compete with and why. Ask yourself, what is
it about specific competitors that make you think of them as
competitors? Remember, in the digital world, your real
competitors are arguably those that have a digital presence in
terms of being shown on search engines, social media etc, for
products or services that you also cater for.

Industry Research

What do you know about the wider industry? Who’s an

agitator? Who’s “old faithful”? What’s big on the horizon,
which you can get in early on? A great tool I use for this is
“Google Trends” which shows general search trends
(trends.google.com). For example, using the word ‘home
office furniture’ I can see clearly that this is an up-and-coming
trend, within the date range and location specified. So, is this

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an indication of a service or product you may need to consider
providing now and get in early?

Do a search
Detach yourself from your business. You are the knowledge
party within your business. Though this is good, it also means
you’re presumptuous. Presumptuous in that you may “think”
people know what they are looking for, people know what
they may be searching for. For example, I just typed the
phrase:
“Website top of google”.

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Here you can see the intent of the searcher, it’s clear that he
wants to get his website listed at the top of Google. What it
also shows is he may not be aware of technical terminology.
So, this searcher is less likely to use words such as “Google
Ads Specialist”, or “Setting up a PPC account”. If you were
only marketing keywords which you know about and
presumed your customers know about them, you would be
missing out on potential business from customers who might
be typing in keywords/phrases which are at a higher level.

Browsing and Retargeting

Retargeting is a way to show your advertisements to people

who may have visited your website before but have now gone
away from your website to another website altogether. Now
here’s a clever trick. Once you have researched your
competitors, leave it a few days. When you are casually
browsing other websites such as Facebook or content
websites, you are likely to see their Ads, incentivising you to
come back onto their website again. These are retargeting
Ads. Take note of what types of Ads they are using, what
page are they taking you to when you click on the Ad. All of
a sudden, you have a new ammunition in your competitors’
research basket.

We will be discussing retargeting in another module, so don’t

worry about it for now. But as a visual representation of how
retargeting works, I have drawn a simple diagram:

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[My Top Tip] – It’s good to know the main difference
between Retargeting & Remarketing. Retargeting is
essentially focused on paid Ads, whereas Remarketing is
more about using non-paid strategies such as email
campaigns.

Researching & Forecasting

Accountabilities
Investigate who is responsible for what? Who is held
accountable for budgeting? Who oversees performance?
Consider completing a RACI (Responsible, Accountable,
Consulted & Informed) of all areas and make sure you know
who owns what! This help you get good insights into your
competitors.

USPs

How can you shout about what you do and what makes you
standout? In other words, what are your unique selling points
that set you apart from your competitors? Consider what you
can rely on to make you the one that wins the click!

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Avoid thinking of the generic stuff which every tom-dick &
harry say i.e.
● We offer great service
● We have the best products on the market
● We pride ourselves
● Etc

However, something a little more tangible would be better.

For example:
● 30 day money back guarantee – no questions asked
● Next day delivery
● Free 30 minute consultation
● 2 year warranty
● … I think you get the point!

Brand Guidelines

Is there anything you need to consider from a brand safety /

or guideline point of view? How should you talk about your
business, what tone of voice (TOV) should you be using?
What distinguishes your brand from your competitors? Use
your brand identity to draw engagement!

Customer Journey

Consider how the customer will interact with you and your
business. Don't forecast an immediate glut of sales if you
know it takes 4 weeks for the average sale to convert!
Higher-value products usually entail a longer-buying cycle.
Is there anything you can offer your customers at a lower
price entry? As a result, maybe you can then upsell them other

64
products or services. Can you provide a free demonstration
of the product, either in person or online? Can you offer
payment plans? What objections might your customer shave
that you can address proactively?

By understanding your typical customers journey, you can

make tweaks to your website as well as the ads you create, to
significantly increase your conversion rate, otherwise known
as conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Keyword Research Like A Pro

Previously, we touched base on keyword research. Now let's
start getting into the nitty-gritty. So, what is Keyword
Research? According to Wikipedia,

“Keyword research is a practice search

engine optimization (SEO) professionals
use to find and research search terms that
users enter into search engines when
looking for products, services or general
information.”

Though Wiki refers to SEO, we use the same type of process

for Google Ads. I think Wiki needs to review their definition
and open it up a little!

Using the right keywords will be one of the single most

important decisions you will make that will determine how
much you end up spending, how many conversions (leads or

65
sales) you get, and more importantly, the quality of the leads
you get.

It's also important to understand the simple concept of the

less competitive keywords are, the lower CPCs (Cost-Per-
Click) are on average. The opposite applies too, the more
competitive the keywords are, the more you will usually end
up paying per click.

Google’s average CPC varies depending on many factors such

as the industry you are in, the competitive nature of the
service, competition, location, seasonal trends and so much
more.

Before we move on, as and when we conduct research, keep

exporting your keywords into a spreadsheet, with any data
you have available for them. At a later date, we can then use
this spreadsheet to use these within your Google Ads
campaign.

You may also wish to download my free Google Ads

Keywords template by visiting:
https://ajaydhunna.com/keywordtemplate

Keyword Funnel

I want to introduce you to the concept of “Keyword Funnel”.

A keyword funnel essentially helps you to categorize
keywords depending on what stage a user is at. If we take a
real-life example, let’s say you were a salesperson at a Porsche

66
car dealership, and 2 customers walked in. One asked “I want
to buy a car” and the other asked, “I’d like to buy a Porsche
Cayenne”. If you were limited for time and had to serve just
one of these customers, who would you serve? Most likely the
2nd one as the second customer is being more specific and
you know you have more of a chance of converting them to a
sale.

Keywords work in the same way, the more specific you are,
the more you are likely to convert to a lead or sale.

In this example, the person who said “I want to buy a car”

would be classified as higher up the Keyword Funnel, and the
one who asked for “I’d like to buy a Porsche Cayenne” is
lower down the funnel. You generally get a large number of
searches/clicks for keywords that are higher up the funnel,
and a lower number of clicks towards the bottom, but the ones
at the bottom are more likely to convert.

See diagram below of how a keyword funnel may work, using

illustrative figures which were true at the time of writing this
book. As you can see, the keywords which are higher up the
funnel, have a higher search volume (they are searched for a
lot), their Cost Per Click is low, but their conversion rate is
low (i.e., the quality of the keyword is low). In other words,
the person using this keyword is at a fairly early stage within
their sales journey, thus being higher up the funnel. In this
case, they know they want to buy a Porsche but are not sure
which one.

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Likewise at the bottom of the funnel, i.e., Porsche Cayenne
Dealer, though the search volume is low (Average 210
searches per month), the Average Cost Per Click Is Higher but
the Conversion rate is far higher.

So what do we learn from this?

What we learn is to avoid only going for keywords which are
higher up the keyword funnel, as though you may get a lot of
clicks, the searcher is not quite yet ready to buy and is in
“research phase”.

Likewise avoid only going for just keywords which are at the
bottom of the keyword funnel, as though you will get
conversions, you will be missing out on opportunities
whereby people may have conducted some high-level
searches first, so now, they don’t know who you are and are
not aware of your brand.

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Instead, implement a mixture of keywords that are at the top
of the funnel and bottom, and adjust how much you are
paying per click for each of these accordingly.

In terms of distribution, if you have a healthy budget, you can

spread your budget across all levels of the keyword funnel.
However, if you don’t have an endless pot of money, bias
your budget more so towards the mid to bottom of the funnel,
as these keywords are more likely to drive you more
conversions relatively quickly.

In this section, we will run through the steps I take to conduct

competitor research. But before I do, I want to quickly cover
the importance of your Categorising keywords.

Categorising Keywords
I always break keywords down into 3 categories. This helps
me to better understand which keywords I’m ready to pay a
fortune for, and those that I need to avoid at all costs, By
categorizing your keywords into such categories could be the
difference between instant success, or complete failure. What
we are really trying to understand here is Keyword Intent.
What is the Intent behind a keyword, which a user may type
into Google? There are 2 main intents…

Research intent

These are keywords which people use to simply conduct

research, with little or no intention to make a purchase or to
enquire about a product or service.

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For example:
● “Best ways to cure anxiety myself”
Here, the user is clearly researching how to cure
anxiety and wants to do it himself. As a result, the
chances of this keyword converting into a lead or a
sale is minimal.
● “What is a good family car?”.
Here, though the user seems to be at the research
stage, it could be argued that they do have an
intention to purchase. However, I would probably
keep them into the research intent category as at this
stage, they still have not seemed to have made up
their mind as to the type of car they wish to buy and
are very much at research stage.

Buying intent
These are keywords where the user clearly has a high intent
to make a purchase or make an enquiry.
For example:
● “local anxiety therapist”
This clearly shows this user is actively looking to hire
the services of a local anxiety therapist. The chances
of this keyword driving conversions is therefore
much higher.

● “4 x 4 Range Rover Sports Electric”

Here the user is being very specific and has more than
likely already done his/her research as to what type
of car they want, make, model, performance and fuel
type.

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Negative keywords

These are keywords which you want to ensure that your Ads
on Google never show up, as you do not provide such services
or projects.

Google works in a very funny way. You tell Google what

keywords you want to be shown on, when a user conducts a
search, and Google makes up its own mind, as to other close
variations or synonyms it thinks the user might also be
interested in. We must therefore tell Google that such
keywords are not relevant to you or your business.
For example:
● “Garden decking jobs” - Here the intent of the user is
to look for a job. You can then tell Google that if
someone conducts a search, and if one of the words
they type in is “job” or “vacancy or “apprentice” then
we do not wish for our Ad to be shown. We would
then put such keywords into a “Negative keyword
list”.

Steps For Putting Together Your

Keywords

Step 1 - Brainstorm some keywords

In this step, we are first trying to find out “who” your online
competitors are. There are so many ways you can do this, but
what I have detailed is what we do and what works well for
us.

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Make a list of the core keywords which describe your services
at a high level. These are also known as your “Seed
Keywords”. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer, what is it
that you would type in to find your products or services?

● Cars
● Cars for sale
● Buy a car
● Porsche dealer
● Used Porsche for sale
● Porsche dealer near me
● Porsche dealer <Your location name> i.e. Porsche
dealer London

Add these to your worksheet using the ‘Keyword Intent’ tab.

Step 2 - Let’s see who are competing for these

keywords

Now we wish to see who are the companies/websites that are

competing for these keywords. There are many ways you can
do this and many tools you can use. Now we will use the
keywords you brainstorm in the earlier section, in one or
more of the following keyword research tools. They all have
their pros and cons, so I always suggest, try them all and see
which one suits you best.

Here are a few ways:

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Google
Go to Google.com, or Google.co.uk or whichever you prefer
to use, and simply type one of your keywords. In this
example, I typed in USED PORSCHE FOR SALE and the
screenshot below shows what I can see, above the page-fold.

What you can see here is the advertisers who are competing
in the Google Ads Auction, for the keyword “used Porsche
for sale”. In other words, these are advertisers/companies
who are participating in the Google Ads platform auction, to
be shown on Google for these keywords, which when clicked
on, they will be charged a specific amount by Google, per
click. Remember, the Google Ad listings are denoted by the
“Ad” symbol, for example, see screenshot below:

73
Now although this is great as you can quickly get a snapshot
of who is competing for the same keywords that you want to
be found for, you don’t get much more information than that.
So, there is not a lot you can do with it from a Google Ads
perspective.

This is where you can make a note of your competitors so that

when conducting further research, you can quickly refer to
them. Best way to do this is to use the worksheet, refer to the
‘competitors’ tab.

Tip:
Scroll to the bottom of the page. Here you will see a section
titled “Searches related to….” and your keyword. This is
where you can find some golden nuggets! Google is using the
keyword you typed in, and is showing you other similar &
related keywords, which people are commonly typing in. So
now you are getting suggestions for keywords you might not
even have thought about using.

74
This is where you can use various tools to help you get more
information on your competitors. I will therefore discuss a
few of the many tools I personally use.

Keyword Planner

Website link:
https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

The Google Keyword planner is a free keyword research tool,

and as its name implies, is owned by Google :-) By using
Google keyword planner, you can quickly find out how many
times keywords that are relevant to your business have been
searched for, typically within the last 30 days.

More specifically Google Keyword planner allows you to:

75
 1. Find out an estimate of how many times
keyword have been recently searched (Called
‘Search Volume’).
2. Generate new keyword ideas by combining
different keyword lists.
3. Create new keyword variations based on a
primary keyword.
4. Provides Keywords used on specific websites
which is excellent for competitive analysis.

Using Google planner is free. However, in order to use

Google Keyword Planner, you need to have:

1. A Google Ads account. Note this does not

need to be active.
2. Have at least 1 Google Ads campaign
created.
3. If you have created a Google Ads account
and have not yet entered your billing details
and got an active campaign running, you
may still use Google Keyword Planner, but
the data Google will show for search
volumes, will be broader.

The screenshot below shows what the Keyword Planner looks

like when you first log into it.

76
Here you will get 3 areas:

1) Discover new Keywords. This is where you can

type some keywords which you feel people might
search for when looking for your business, and
Google will give you some statistics on.
2) Get search volume and forecasts. Here Google
will give you some forecasting information,
allowing you to get an idea of how many
conversions (Leads/Sales) you are likely to get for a
specific budget, what your average cost may be etc.
3) Plans created for you. Whatever keywords you
research, you will be able to see a summary of them
within this section.
In this example, I typed in 3 keywords:
● Cars for sale
● Porsche for sale
● Porsche dealer

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See table below what Google Keyword planner shows

So what does all this in the table above mean? Let me explain
in a semi-layman's way:
1) Keyword that typed in:
This column shows the keywords you typed in.
2) Volume:
Shows on average, how many times the keyword
you typed in, has been recently searched for, within
the location and date range specified.
3) CPC:
This is the Average Cost-Per-Click you can expect to
pay, each time someone searches for these keywords
and clicks on the ads.
4) Comp and Competition:
The Comp column shows how competitive this
keyword is, and ranges from 0 to 1.0 (Typical of
Google not to use a simple 1 to 10 system instead :-)
). In the “Competition” column, you can see the same
information, except represented by High, Medium
or Low. The more advertisers that compete for
visibility, the higher the competition.
5) Trend:
Now, I love this column! As it shows a summary of
how many times this keyword has been searched for

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 over recent months. Using this can tell you a lot
about the seasonal impact of the keyword. You can
either just look at the graph to get a quick summary,
or if you hover over it, a small window will open
showing you monthly search volumes.

6) Avg. Monthly Searches:

This shows on average, how many people have
searched for this keyword, within your target
location and date range.
7) Top of page bid (low range) and Top of page bid
(high range):
This gives us an idea of how much we may need to
bid, for our ads to show above the organic search
results on Google.

Wait! It gets better. Scroll down the page a little… The Google
Keyword Planner tool will now also give you keywords ideas,

79
based on your original set, which you may also like to
consider using.

The brilliant thing is you can now tick the boxes for the
keywords you are interested in, click ADD KEYWORDS and
they will be added to your “plan” which we discussed earlier.
Here you can see some forecasting and trend information,
based on all the keywords you have added. You may also add
the keywords you have selected into an existing campaign.

So for example, using the keywords you added, you can see
some forecasting information. In this case, I wanted to see
how much traffic I can get if I were to bid an average of £1.50
per click, for the next 7 days. What The Plan is telling me is if
I were to go all-out, it would cost me £4,100, if my conversion
rate was 5%, I could receive 220 conversions. If my conversion
Value was £1,500, it means i have had 320,000 worth of
conversions. Needless to say, you can specify your own daily
budget and not go along with what Google suggests.

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Create Charts
At the top of the page, you will notice you can see an overview
chart which shows trends for the keywords you have entered.

This may look something like this:

Note: if you click on the CHART icon, you can get different
data such as typical device usage, or User Locations.

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Now that we have an idea of keywords, we can similarly get
data on keywords used by competitors. Similar to the way we
have conducted keyword research, click Discover new
keywords, then, instead click on START WITH A WEBSITE
and simply enter your competitor’s website address as per
screenshot below. Click GET RESULTS and you will get a
similar data to the one I showed you above. Isn’t that
fantastic!

Conclusion about Google’s Keywords Planner tool

Great tool. Shame it requires you to have a Google Ads
account prior to using it. But it’s a great starter, and it’s free
to use. I have found that though we get to see estimates on
trends, search volumes, average cost-per-click etc, the data

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you see must be treated with caution, as it is only a guide, and
not always accurate. The only way to get accurate data, is by
implementing the campaigns in Google Ads.

Once you have found your keywords, add them into your
worksheet, within the ‘our researched keywords’ tab. This is
the ideal place to also take note of additional information such
as search volumes, estimates cost per click etc.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a paid tool, which allows you to conduct various

types of research for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Paid
Advertising and so much more. But for the sake of this book,
we will only focus on Paid Advertising.

I won’t go through all the usual metrics now, as I have

covered them within the Google Planner section.

The concept is pretty much the same, we enter a competitor,

and SEMrush gives you competitor data. SEMrush calls their
equivalent tool, “Advertising Research Tool”.

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Here you can see an example of the sort of table SEMrush
show. As you can see it shows more data on the right, where
it breaks down individual keywords, so you can get a
breakdown of specific keywords which SEMrush gives you
ideas on. So, I’m not going to bore you with the same details,
as generally, the principles are the same.

However in addition you get additional information such as:

Competitor Position Roadmap

This is where you can visualise who your main competitors
are at a glance:

A feature I like in SEMrush is it shows you a tabular summary

of the overlap between keywords you are advertising, and
they are advertising. See “Comp Level” column. It shows in

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this case, if you look at CINCH.CO.UK, there are for example
314 common keywords (when compared to your keywords)
and they have a total of approximately 1,600 Paid keywords,
all of which you can export into a spreadsheet, and decide
which of those you may wish to use too, within your Google
Ads campaign!

This is where things really start getting interesting, and the

value of using a paid tool really starts to kick in! SEMrush also
shows you the actual Ads your competitors are using and as
well as which Ads keywords are being used for each of these
Ads.

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By analysing Ads which your competitors are using, you can
start evaluating things like:
o Which Ads have been receiving the most amount of
clicks
o How long the ads have been used for
o The ad copy which is being used
o Landing pages used
o Etc.

You can then start using this information to model your own
ads by improving on them.

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UberSuggests

Ubersuggest does pretty much what the Google Keyword

Planner and SEMrush do. It is certainly worth using as I find
using multiple tools, gives me a clearer picture of competitors,
keyword ideas and so much more. You can also use
Ubersuggest for free for a period of time which give you
limited data. If you like it, consider signing up for a paid
version to take advantage of the full data it provides you.

One cool feature I absolutely love about Ubersuggest is it

provides you with Keyword intent data. Its “Keyword
Magic” tools break keywords into the following:
● Information Keywords
● Commercial Keywords
● Navigational Keywords
● Transactional Keywords

Google Trends

Google Trends is one of my favourite tools. Most decisions I

make are data-driven decisions. When I get a customer telling

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me they have the coolest product or service in the world,
which no one has yet tapped into, Google Trends is one of the
tools I quickly tap into, to see if what they are telling me
carries any weight, or am I going to have to be the bearer of
the bad news!

Google trends allow you to quickly see a graph showing you

trends for a particular search term/keyword. This can be
broken down to a specific country or year. In other words, it
can show you the demand for a search term or keyword over
a period of time. As a result, you can quickly gauge if
whatever you are searching for, has an upward trajectory or
a declining one. If upwards, then how sharp is the trajectory
and has it hit its peak?

Check out the graph below for the word ‘electric cars’,
location - worldwide, timespan - 5 years. It clearly shows a
continuous growth in demand and is constantly increasing.
By looking at this graph alone, you can gain some degree of
confidence that the demand for electric cars, is yet to increase,
and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a spike in demand either!

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13) Step 2 - Audience

It is essential to know who we are trying to target. Who are

our target audiences? Here, I will help you to understand
what the audience is and why it is crucial to define your target
audience from day dot!

Understanding Your Audiences & Avatars

Targeting audiences is one of marketing’s earliest concepts.
Understanding and appealing to your customer’s needs is the
best way to drive sales. One of digital marketing’s significant

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benefits is that it substantially simplifies targeting; there is
now a wealth of available marketing data, both historical and
real-time, so it makes sense to exploit it. For instance, there
are numerous Google tools within the Google Digital
marketing Toolbox along with various third party real-time
data platforms such as Lotame and Funnel.

Here we will look at the science and art of targeting

customers, including getting to know your existing customers
(audience analysis) and extending this to other groups to
attract potential buyers from different sectors.

We will introduce the concept of “avatars” in marketing and

show why this is highly effective in segmenting our audience
and fine-tuning customer targeting. We will show how this is
compatible with Google Ads targeting and observation
modes.

What is a Customer Avatar?

The word “avatar” has many connotations that range from
the earthly manifestation to a hybrid creature with a mix of
human and alien DNA. We use avatars in video games and
social media. But here, in the context of digital marketing, we
are using an avatar, or preferably several avatars, as the
embodiment of our perfect customer. So why don’t we say,
“target audience?”

The reason is subtle. When we think of target audiences, we

tend to think in terms of averages. We group many potential

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buyers and take the mean. For instance, if we are selling
clothes, we would discover that the average dress size in the
UK is size 15, the figure provided by YouGov. However, the
ideal dress size is considered size 11 for 18 to 39-year-old
women, 13 for those aged 40 to 59, and 14 for women aged 60
and over.

You can think of a customer avatar as a persona that is

imbued with carefully crafted characteristics. Each avatar will
represent your perfect customer in the targeted niche. With
this approach, we can be far more granular in targeting our
customers. We can assign multiple avatars, each with its
unique characteristics.

For instance, our avatars may be characterised by gender

(sex), age, marital status, motivations, aspirations, interests,
household income, and so forth for our clothing store. We
would then serve the most relevant ads to those who would
be more likely to take an interest in them. This approach
avoids wasting money serving ads that fall wide of the mark
and would likely be ignored.

Building Avatars
The easiest way to construct avatars is to use a template or
multiple templates. You can start with the example below and
modify it, or you may wish to create your own. Begin by
developing a set of questions that will help you understand
your perfect customer. For instance:

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 Name It’s a good idea to create a Your Notes
name. Let’s say Pam

Demographics Age

Gender

Occupation

Education

Income

Marital status

Parental status

Work-life Job title

What is their role?

How do they influence their

work environment

What motivates them?

Work frustrations

Career aspirations

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 Personality Introvert, extrovert,
balanced?

Political leaning

IQ and EQ characteristics

Pain points

Sociability etc.

Lifetime goals What motivates them?

Short and long time

aspirations

Aspirations for their children

A bigger house?

A new car?

A luxury round-the-world
cruise?

These are just a few examples; you will undoubtedly be able

to come up with more. By the time you have finished, you
should understand Pam and know what makes her tick. You
can then do another one addressing her big brother John.

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By building your avatars you can then adjust various factors
of your Google Ads campaigns. For example:

● The ad copy you use can be tailored to your avatar.

● Your demographics i.e., you might decide to target a
specific gender or age range.
● Locations – by understanding your avatar, you can
adjust your location targeting to only serve ads
within those locations.
● Interests – you can overlay your targeting to include
interests as well as keywords.

You can refer to the “avatar” tab within your worksheet to

help you build your avatars.

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14) Step 3 - Aim

Here we figure out what we are actually aiming to achieve.

What we don’t want to do is to start marketing campaigns
until we understand the maths of exactly what statistics we
are trying to achieve, our KPIs, our budgets and so on. For
this, we use the “Aim” stage within “The 7 Step Google Ads
Blueprint System”.

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 Budgeting

Intro on budgeting

Most businesses I speak to don’t have a limitless budget to

spend on marketing. I say that with a hint of sarcasm. It’s
funny, when I go to see companies who wish to engage with
us to implement their marketing strategies, when asked,
“What’s your marketing budget?”, you can bet that 9 out of
10 say, “We don’t have one, tell us what it will take”. It is
almost like they feel we’re going to take all their hard-earned
pennies and take a trip to the South of France to sip away at
the finest wine! Interestingly, when we do come back with a
budget, then the normal answer is, “it's too high”, or “this isn't
within our budget” or “what can we do for a lower budget?”
in the words.

it's not that they didn't have the budget, because they clearly
did, they would not have been asking us to reduce, but the
mere fact is they just did not want to disclose it.

So let me tell you one thing,

Marketing campaigns can range from as little as $10 a day to

10s of 1000s of dollars a day.

So the question is, what is it that you can afford, within your
budget, so that when the marketing company does come back
to you?

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The proposals that they come back with fall in line with your
budgets, and you're not in for a nasty shock.

And the flip side, when they do come back to you.

It's not the case that their proposal is way under what you
otherwise would have been ready to expend so have a budget
in mind.

Whether the budget is, for the first month, the first quarter.
The year. And don't be afraid to tell the marketing company
what your budget is.

Because only by doing so, can your agency come back with a
proposal, which meets your financial constraints. Only then
can you work well with your marketing experts to help meet
your needs and objectives. By better understanding your
budget, your agency can create a more strategic plan of how
they can help you to accomplish your goals, which may entail
a hybrid strategy using multiple various channels.

If you are considering using Google Ads for your business,

you will need to know how much it will cost you and the
potential benefits. The accepted wisdom is that small
businesses should spend between 5% and 12% of their
revenue on marketing, but that is far from being a firm rule.
The amount you spend will depend on many factors,
including the maturity of your company, the sector you
operate in, and your short-term objectives. For instance, if you
want to reach a large audience quickly, you might aim to

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splash out on an extensive marketing campaign at the outset
before establishing a steady revenue stream. Whatever your
situation, adding Google Ads to your marketing channels is
likely to provide positive results.

When it comes to how much you should spend on Google

Ads, there is, of course, no firm answer out there. "As long as
a piece of string" comes to mind. But here we will try to
provide a little guidance to help you decide. First, we will
quickly review how Google Ads operates and then drill down
to some more pithy material on the key metrics you should
focus on. We will say a few words on modelling and
optimising your Google Ads campaigns and an example of
how to allocate your initial budget.

How Google Ads makes money

To recap, Google Ads is, of course, Google's advertising

platform where businesses bid to show ads on search results
pages and websites. It is the principal income earner for
Alphabet, Google's holding company. There is also a Google
Shopping channel, but we will look at that in detail on another
occasion. For now, we will focus on Google Ads.

Advertisers can choose whether their ads will appear on

search engines' results pages (the Google Search Network), on
websites, apps, and videos (the Google Display Network) or
both. Advertisers pay Alphabet based on a pay-per-click
(PPC) basis for search ads, but there are alternative ways to
pay for display ads. For instance, you can pay on a CPM basis
(cost-per-thousand impressions) which is recommended if

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you want to increase your visibility or stick with PPC. Google
also offer a CPC model (cost per conversion).

Budgeting basics

It is essential to realise that you do not pay for ad impressions

with PPC; you are only charged when somebody clicks on
your ad. What is important is how much that click will cost
you - your cost per click (CPC); how frequently people will
click on your ad - the click-through rate (CTR); and what
proportion of those clicks will result in you achieving your
objective – the conversion rate (CR).

It is a little more complicated than that. Google is secretive

about precisely how its algorithm works. You might think
from the above that there is little point in a small business
participating, as larger enterprises will entirely dominate the
scene. But that's not the case. Google encourages the
participation of small businesses, and the algorithm ensures
that they get a fair deal. From experience, we can state
categorically that Google Ads can work very well for a small
business.

Key Google Ads metrics

We have already mentioned the three metrics you should
focus on to set your budget. These are the cost per click (CPC),
click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate (CR). We will
now look at these in detail. The actual values that you
experience will be specific to your campaign, but we can learn
much by looking at averages for different industry sectors.

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You will see significant differences between the various
industries and the cost and performance of search and display
ads.

Cost per Click (CPC)

The first chart shows the average CPC across multiple sectors
for both search and display networks. The figures are in
dollars as they are based on US data which are bigger and
more readily available than UK data. However, it is a
reasonable approximation to the UK. Note the difference
between the search (left hand) and display (right hand) scales.

In all sectors, the display CPC is less than one dollar. Law and
Government have the highest CPC (over $6) and Dining and
Nightlife the lowest (just over $1). If you are working in one
of these or a closely related sector, you can see what your CPC
might be.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

You won't be charged for an ad impression' you will only be

charged when somebody clicks on it. But you do need to
know the probability that your ad will be clicked on. If you
have a high CTR and a high CPC, you will likely burn through
your budget quickly. If that is the case, you will probably
need to focus your ad on your target audience more closely.
The following graphic shows average CTRs for various
sectors.

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Here it is interesting to note that there tends to be an inverse
relationship between CTR and CPC. For instance, Law and
Government have a high CPC and low CTR, while Dining and
Nightlife have a low CPC and a high CTR. Again, you can get
some idea of the CTR for your sector.

Conversion Rate (CR) (or Conversion rate Value

(CRV)

Your CR is critically important. It is the proportion of visitors

who click on your ad and go on to complete your desired
goal—for instance, making a purchase or signing up for a
newsletter. If your CR is high, you are doing well, and your
Google Ads campaign is working for you. If it is low, then you
should do something about improving it, or your campaign
might cost you more than it brings in. Here are the average
CRs across the various sectors.

Vehicles would appear to have the highest CR closely

followed by Law and Government. Apparel is a highly
competitive sector. From the above, you can see the kind of
CR you should aim for.

Modelling and Optimising Your Google

Ads Campaign
Now that you are armed with the key metrics, you will need
to optimise your campaign. Don't expect to achieve all your
goals from the start. You will almost certainly need to modify
a range of parameters before reaching your goals, always

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keeping a close eye on the metrics we have highlighted. The
overall aim is to reduce your costs and maximise your ROI.

The elements of your model should be:

1) Selection of keywords and phrases – this is critical, and
we recommend that you do extensive research on the
subject
2) Ad design – this is harder than it seems and may take
several iterations to get right
3) Excluding keywords that have a low CR and are
costing you money without reward
4) Geolocating your campaign to exclude pointless clicks
for people who geographically can't take advantage of
what you are offering
5) Optimise the design of your landing pages. Good
landing pages will increase your CR
6) Continuously monitor and analyse your results

An example of a starter budget

While your budget will depend on your sector and your
specific business environment, this example should provide
you with a starting position that you can build on. We will
use PPC search ads to keep it simple, but you can apply the
same principles for display ads.

Step 1 – Allocate a total marketing budget

Let's assume your business generates a revenue of $500,000

pa. Allocating 10% of this to marketing means your total
marketing spend should be around £50,000.

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Step 2 – Setting your initial Google Ads budget

Naturally, you will be using a range of marketing channels,

but it's not unusual for businesses to spend 40% to 50% of this
on Google Ads, so lay you will allocate a ceiling of $24,000 a
year, or $2,000 a month. The beauty of Google Ads is that you
don't need to make a long-term commitment. It is best to set a
monthly budget and iterate on this, depending on the results.

Step 3 – Estimate the CPC for your keywords

Your actual CPC is the total cost of your campaign divided by

the total number of clicks. However, we will start by using the
average CPC figures given above. Let's say you operate in the
Computer and Related sector, where the average CPC is $2.8.
Note that the average CTR is 3.5% for this sector, and the
average CR is 3.2%.

Step 4 – Set your target revenue and ROI

The big question is, how much is a conversion worth to you

in terms of profit? Your conversion could be part of a multi-
channel purchase decision, or it could be as simple as making
a purchase. For simplicity, let's say it is a purchase that will
generate $1,000 revenue with a profit of $200.

You also need a target ROI. The ROI on PPC tends to be

higher than alternative marketing channels, so you might
wish to target an ROI of 100%; in other words, for each $1 you
spend on Google Ads, you aim to generate $2 profits.

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Step 5 – Putting it all together

Your target spend is $2,000 a month, and you aim to generate

a profit of $4,000 on sales of $20,000. Thus, you need 20
conversions. Given a conversion rate of 3.2%, you will need
(100/3.2) x 20 clicks = 625 clicks.

A CPC of $2.8 would involve an initial outlay of $625 x 2.8 =

$1,750, which is well within your budget, leaving a reasonable
contingency. However, if your return per click were much
less than these figures, you would fall short of your targets.

Step 6 – Setting your minimum ROI per click

An alternative approach is deciding the minimum profit you

need to generate per click to make PPC worthwhile. For
instance, using the same parameters, each $2.8 (CPC) you
spend will generate 3.2/100 (CR) = 0.032 conversions. Thus,
to break even, each conversion must generate a profit of $87.5
and, to make a 100% ROI, it must generate $175. In other
words, CPC x CR.

Finally
If you came here to find out how much a Google Ads
campaign might cost you, we have already done the "how's
long a piece of string" routine. It all depends, and we have
indicated many of the things on which it depends. However,
if it helps, a large corporation might spend over $50 million a
year on Google Ads, while a small business might budget
between $1,000 to $10,000 a month.

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A great approach is to dive in at the start with your best-
calculated guess and then constantly review your returns and
budgets, optimising as you go. Never be scared to reallocate
budgets based on what is generating the best profits. Always
have a backup plan and be patient. If ROI is falling below
expectations, try to revise your strategy before abandoning it.
With Google Ads, you are in control, so make the best of it.

If you would like to get more information about your

proposed campaign, please get in touch. We would be happy
to hear from you.

To help you get a very vague indication as to what conversion

rates in your industry may be, here’s a screenshot I took from
Wordstream.com:

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/goo
gle-adwords-industry-benchmarks

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 Define Your KPIs
What do you want from the Google Ads account you are
creating? Like how many sales, or what should the value of
sales be which you wish to achieve, and within what period
of time? Or if it is the leads you are looking for, then exactly
how many? Are you looking for an efficient ROAS? Or maybe
you are focused on acquiring a consistent Cost-Per-
Acquisition (CPA). Make sure you know what you're
budgeting for.

It is imperative you keep these as realistic as possible.

Some will want brand awareness - focus on traffic.
Some will want leads - focus on quality,
Whilst e-commerce businesses may wish to focus on ROAS
(Return On Ad Spend).
Think both short and long-term. If you already have existing
campaigns and data, then it makes working out your KPIs a
lot easy.

Not only is it important to know what metric you are going to

use, but also what values are you going to associate with those
metrics.

Here are a few examples…

Example 1
Maybe you have a web design agency and are looking to
achieve leads. In which case you are more likely going to want
to focus on Conversions as well as CPA.

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Let’s assume on average a CPC (Cost-Per-Click) is $5 and on
average it takes 20 clicks to get 1 conversion. Your actual CPA
is therefore 5 x 20 = $100. You can now use this data-driven
approach to set a new CPA, which as discussed earlier should
be in the region of a maximum of 10 to 15% reductions. In the
can you can adjust the Google bid settings to target a CPA of
$85 and monitor its conversion rates and cost per conversion
at the same time over a period of time.

[My Top Tip] Let’s not get too ambitious. When adjusting
Target CPA, maybe do increments of 10% at a time and allow
the algorithm to settle down for a good few weeks before you
determine if it has worked or not.

Example 2
Using the same scenarios as above, let’s say you are not overly
bothered about CPA but just want as many leads as possible.
In this case, you can set your bid strategy to ‘Maximise
conversions’ only, in which case the algorithm will drive as
many potential conversions as possible, without factoring in
CPA.

Consider Seasonality

Should you split your budget evenly through the year? Or do

you need to work around key industry peaks and times?
Consider Christmas, School Holidays, Summer etc. Demands
for your services may be more, or less competitive depending
on the seasonality so it is worth reviewing targets
respectively.

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 When are People Shopping vs Buying?

Do you have a long consideration time? Does it take a while

for people to buy? If so, factor in that people may wish to visit
your website several times before they make a purchase, in
which case you could even consider allocating a budget for
retargeting.

How does your finance process work?

Is there anything you need to consider internally - are you

limited to a weekly budget etc?

Do you want to Grow, or Maintain?

Is your objective to get bigger quick - or are you looking to re-

invest gently? Consider phasing and constraints to your cash
flow. Maybe set your budgets Quarterly instead of a blanket
monthly budget for the whole 12 months.

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15) Step 4 - Access

By Access, I mean, what is it that people are going to get

access to, once they have clicked on Google, to access your
information about your products or services? 9 times out of
10, this would be your website!

Wow, “website”! I remember back in 1996 when I set up my

first ever business, Web-Tech. And this is the screenshot of
the homepage of my first ever website. Geeze, how much
things have changed!

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Back in those days, we used to ask people, “Do you want a
static website or a dynamic one (i.e., database driven)?” And
we really had to go to town to explain the differences of what
these are. Static websites would be built using only hand-
coded HTML and maybe a bit of JavaScript, which if they
wanted some changes done to, they will have to come to us
and we will charge them, though the initial costs will be
lower. On the other hand, dynamic websites, as we called
them were “database driven” websites that would be built
using a “server-side” programming language such as ASP, or
PHP as it were in those days, allowing our customers to log
in and make as many changes as you want without incurring
additional expenses!

It’s amazing when talking about website domain names, these

days we say “.co.uk” or “.com” whereas back in the days,
people used to say “full stop c, o full stop u. k” and “full stop
c,o,m”! Look how far time has come in just over 2 decades. It

110
frightens me to think about what lies ahead in another
decade's time, let alone 2 decades' time. Anyway, I just had a
few flashbacks whilst starting this chapter which I needed to
get off my chest.

Anyway, the point being is that things change and technology

changes. Consumer expectations change, as does consumer
knowledge, demands, trends and so much more. I generally
find that every 4-5 years, there are always some big shifts in
technology, and it is our job to keep up to date with them and
those that don’t, fail, and fail hard.

With that in mind, here’s what I feel works well… today!

The most critical element in any digital marketing project is

your website. The primary aim in almost all Google Ads
campaigns is to send your audience there, so it's essential to
provide your visitor with the best possible experience you can
create for them. Your website is your one opportunity to grab
your visitors' attention and convert them into paying
customers.

But what makes a good website? Of course, there is no

definitive answer. Hardly anybody gets it right from the start.
Websites tend to evolve as their designers continually make
changes to optimise their performance; however, there are
several essential elements that all good websites have in
common, so let's focus on these.

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Just to put this into perspective, according to internet live
statistics, there are over 1.8 billion websites online right now,
so there is plenty of data out there we can learn from.

From a Google Ads perspective, it is essential that when

people click on an ad, they are taken to the most relevant page
on your website. Avoid taking people to the home page as
you are they relying on them to navigate around your
website, which reduces conversion rates. If your ad is about
“Plumbers in Birmingham”, then hey, take people to a page
which is related to plumbers in Birmingham. This is widely
known as a ‘landing page’.

What makes a good landing page

website?

1. Your website satisfies users' needs

Far too many websites put themselves first and set out to
showcase the owner’s business. Unfortunately, this approach
is a little like putting the cart before the horse; in other words,
it's the wrong way around. Instead, good websites focus
primarily on the customer and solve their pain, wants, needs,
and dilemmas.

You need to understand your audience and what they want.

Does what you provide to your visitors improve at least some
aspects of their life? The story you tell should align with what
your customers want to achieve.

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Remember that your visitors are focused on their own goals
and unlikely to have the time or the inclination to read or view
content that fails in this role. In addition, ensure that your
content is unique to your website and not plagiarised from
another source. While the way Google handles duplicate
content is relatively complex and using it might or might not
incur a penalty, duplicate content is best avoided.

This holistic design ethos applies to every aspect of your

website, including most of the elements we describe below.
They should all work in harmony to create the ultimate user
experience that satisfies your visitors rather than adding to
their frustration.

So ask yourself, does your landing page give enough

information to your users to make them feel that you have the
answer to their requirements? Or are you spending far too
long babbling on about how great you are and how your
grandfather built the business up 20 years ago!

2. Fast loading

Few things are more frustrating than websites that take a long
time to load. Pages with load times longer than a few seconds
will lose your visitors quickly. Optimising your pages for
speed will enhance your user experience and potentially
improve your search engine ranking. Some of the factors that
impact loading speed include the number of images, videos
and other media files; plugins and themes; coding and server-

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side scripts. An excellent tool to check your loading speed is
Google PageSpeed Insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev/)

3. Excellent design and user interface

Excellent design includes far more than making your website
look beautiful. While looking good is an important feature, it
is far more vital to satisfy your users' goals. Therefore, the
messages you provide must be clear and concise, easy to
navigate, and uncluttered. Unfortunately, now that we all
have fast broadband, there is a tendency for many designers
to use ever more cluttered designs that do nothing to enhance
user experience. This is a case of "less is more"; simple,
straightforward typography, imagery, and navigation, will
make it easy for your visitors.

Understanding how users read websites is also critical. There

are various design paradigms based on this, and one of the
more popular of these is the "F" layout. Eye-tracking studies
have established that most people read their screens
following an "F" pattern, so the paradigm suggests that you
should place the most important design elements on the left
side.

4. Trustworthy, safe & secure

We cannot overemphasise how crucial it is to make your
website trustworthy, safe and secure. Sites that fail in this are
quickly identified as such by search engines, and users are
now warier than ever about visiting websites that fail to live
up to high safety standards. You also run a serious risk that

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someone might hack your website and destroy your
reputation. The fundamental security standards your website
should adhere to include:

• HTTPS protocol assures your visitors they are

interacting with the correct server and that their session
is safe from interception. If you fail to use this, your
web browser will likely identify your site as "not
secure". Secure sites display a padlock to the left of the
URL in your browser.
• SSL – secure sockets layer certificate – this means that
the communication between your user's browser and
the server is encrypted and thus cannot be hacked.
• GDPR policies – when handling sensitive user
information, you are legally obliged to adhere to
General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
Therefore, your website should include a clear
statement of your privacy policy, explaining how you
use customers' data. Search engines are likely to de-
rank your site if they fail to locate your privacy
statement.

5. Social media friendly

Social media is a crucial element of marketing, so your
website should integrate with modern social media. Doing so
makes it easier for your visitors to share important
information with their particular social networks. This has the
potential to increase your audience substantially with a
positive impact on your search ranking. Some ways in
improving your social media friendliness include:

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 • Create content that people want to share. Is your
content beneficial and solves problems in a novel way?
Are you a thought leader in your chosen niche? Are
your graphics excellent and original?
• Make your content easily shareable. Of course, the first
step is to produce content that people want to share,
but you should also make it easy for them to do so, for
instance, by including sharing button that provides
single-click sharing.
• Include live chat. Live chat has the potential to engage
your customers immediately and build rapport. While
live chat is resource-hungry and not always possible, if
you have sufficient resources to monitor and respond
to messages, it can be very worthwhile.

6. Search engine friendly

It is essential to distinguish between creating a search engine-

friendly website (SEF) and search engine optimised (SEO).
While both are important, SEF focuses on making it easy for
search robots to navigate and understand your website. To be
SEF, your website should:

Have 100% valid coding - always validate your HTML and

CSS coding. Doing so will ensure that it is compatible with all
web browsers and that search engines will accurately
interpret the code and decipher the content.

• Accurate page titles – every page should have a valid

title. Note that the page title will appear in search
engine results pages (SERP).

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 • Proper heading tags – always use proper heading tags
<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.
• Links – use valid links with appropriate anchor text.
• Meta-tags – these are important for search engines.
• ALT tags – ensure that every image on your website
has an ALT tag that describes the image.
• CSS – nowadays, it almost goes without saying that
you should use a CSS design – but not everybody does.

7. Optimised for mobile

Every website should be optimised for mobile. The best
approach is to think "mobile-first"; in other words, design
your site for the smallest screen. Doing so will ensure that
your users enjoy a seamless experience whatever size screen
they are using. Google also favours mobile-friendly sites;
those that don't receive a lower ranking.

8. Concise landing pages

Remember that the primary purpose of your landing page is

to convert your visitors into leads and that you have minimal
time to do so. Therefore, your landing pages must get across
your message as quickly and concisely as possible. Some of
the crucial features of a good landing page include:

• A headline that communicates the benefits you are

offering.
• A fast-loading image that illustrates that offer.
• Compelling copy that tells your story quickly.
• A form to collect visitor information.

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 • A clear call to action.
• No irrelevant links or navigation.

9. Tracking your visitors

Unlike a published book, a website is not frozen in time and
space. The best websites evolve along with the needs of their
visitors. Some things may work from the outset; others may
need extensive rework before they achieve their targets. By
understanding your traffic, you can see where you need to
focus your efforts and stop missing sales opportunities.
Visitor tracking software makes the process easy. Here are
just a few of the tracking tools to explore:

• Google Analytics – this highly featured application is

free. It tracks and reports visitor information on the
number and actions of visitors along with how they
found you. You can set goals, track sales, and view
their entire journey. It even performs real-time
analytics.
• Hotjar – while Hotjar isn't free, you can try it before you
buy it. It takes what you can achieve with Google
Analytics to the next level. Using heatmaps, surveys
and session recordings, the app provides a deep insight
into how people interact with your website.
• Outfunnel – this app shines at tracking leads captured
from form filling and lead scoring matrices. By
focusing on leads, you can target them individually, for
instance, by sending them tailored messages.

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 Google Analytics
Install Google Analytics into your website. Google Analytics
is a free tool which helps you to understand the behaviour of
your visitors. It also helps to create Goals which you can then
import into Google Ads. Examples of Goals would be things
like:

● Recording number of people who fill in your contact

form
● Sales made
● Value of sales
● Number of downloads
● etc
To install Google Analytics simply go to
https://analytics.google.com/ and sign up for free.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM for short) is an awesome tool
which allows you to easily install various scripts into your
website with each, for example Google Analytics, Facebook
Pixels and so much more. So when installing Google
Analytics, best to do it via GTM.

Visit https://tagmanager.google.com/ to learn more.

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16) Step 5 - Action

This is where we actually start building your Google Ads

campaign or understanding how it is built, if you already
have one.

Now remember, there are many ways you can use Google
Ads to market your business, this includes:

● Google Search Ads

● Google Shopping
● Google Display Ads
● Video Ads

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 ● Now under Discover Ads

Next, I will talk you through the fundamentals of what you

need to implement and be aware of when creating your
Google Ads campaigns.

For the sake of this book, I will primarily focus on Google

Search Ads as these are the most common types of Ads which
can be used to generate leads, enquiries, as well as great for
businesses that sell online via e-commerce.

As a recap, these are the most common types of Ads on

Google. Search Ads are the Text Ads that appear on the
Google page when someone conducts a search. See
screenshot.

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Google will show a maximum of 4 Ads at the top of the
Google page and a maximum of 3 ads at the bottom of the
page.

As discussed in the earlier section, your Quality Score will

predominantly determine the amount you need to bid on a
keyword in order to determine which position your Ad gets
displayed at whenever someone searches for it.

Furthermore, for the purpose of this book, we will use a

specific real website as a way to demonstrate what we are
building a campaign for. In this case, the website (which exists
at the time of writing this book is
www.myhomefurniture.co.uk)

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 First Step – Create a “Google Account”
So, before we even start to create our Google ads account the
very first thing I would recommend we do is to create an
actual Google Account.

Creating a Google account means that any service that you

use of Google you will easily be able to share data from one
to another. Examples of services (as well as Google Ads)
include Google Analytics, Gmail, YouTube, Google Business
Profile, Google Docs and so on.

To Create a Google account simply:

1) Go to accounts.google.com (or your
countries domain name extension i.e.
Google.co.uk)
2) Select “Create an account”
3) And then select “To manage my business”

Thereafter simply follow the prompts and eventually you will

end up with a new email address (i.e.
<something>@gmail.com) which you can use for all the
Google services.

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 Creating Your First Google Search Ads
Campaign
Now as you can see on the MyHomeFurniture.co.uk website,
here there are many categories, such as Living Furniture,
Bedroom Furniture etc. The more specific you are at the start
the better, so rather than creating a campaign for every
category let’s select a specific category. In this case, let’s say
we are considering building a campaign for “Office
Furniture”.

You can go more specific if you like too, for example, “office
chairs” or “meeting chairs” or “Office Desks”. This really
needs to be a decision which is conducted by a combination
of a business decision as well as data which we have compiled
from our keyword research earlier on.

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Let’s say we decided we are going to market we are going to
focus on office chairs. Thinking laterally there could be many
different types of office chairs & its related accessories, so it
makes sense to create a campaign for office chairs, whilst
subdividing them into types of chairs, using Ad groups. In
other words, we are catering for
1) Office Chairs
2) Meeting Chairs
3) Office Chair Accessories

Therefore the structure would look something like this…

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Shortly soon, we will talk about putting our Keywords within
each of the Ad groups.

Remember, you can always change this later, In fact, it is very

rare to setup a Google Ads campaign and for it to never
change. If that happens, something is not quite right!

So here are the steps we need to take:

Go to Ads.google.com

Click the “Start Now” button which will then ask if you wish
to log in, or if you wish to Create an Account. Here you need
to follow the prompts of basic questions related to your
business in order to create a Google Ads account.

Creating your first campaign

You will then be promoted with a screen asking you, “What’s

your main advertising goal?” The screen will look similar to
the following:

IMPORTANT: IN MY OPINION, I NEVER SELECT ANY OF

THESE OPTIONS. AS BY DOING SO, YOU USUALLY GET

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VERY LIMITED CONTROL AS TO WHAT YOU CAN DO
WITH YOUR GOOGLE ADS CAMPAIGN, AND ARE MORE
RELIANT ON GOOGLE TO MAKE MANY DECISIONS FOR
YOU.

Instead, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will
see the following:

Click on “Switch to Expert Mode”

Now this is where the real fun begins. As of now you will start
creating your Google Ads campaign, and know exactly what
you are doing each step of the way. The first screen you
usually get prompted with is as follows:

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Now remember Google changes its options and interface
from time to time, so don’t be alarmed if your screen looks
slightly different.

I’m not going into details about these options as there is way
too much to cover. Although some are self-explanatory, here’s
a quick summary of what each one of these are:

● Sales – Drive sales online, in app, by phone or in

store.
● Leads – Get leads and other considerations by
encouraging customers to take action.
● Website Traffic – Get the right people to visit your
website.
● Product and brand consideration – Encourage
people to explore your products or services.
● Brand awareness and reach – Reach a broad
audience and build awareness.
● App promotion – Get more installs, interactions and
pre-registrations for your app.
● Local store visits and promotions – Drive visits to
local shops, including restaurants and dealerships.
● Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance –
Choose a campaign type first, without a
recommendation based on your objective.
● Create an account without a campaign – Used
commonly to help setup an account and billing,
where the account can be built afterwards.

Now here’s the question:

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“How does selecting an option make any difference?”
The simple answer is depending on what option you select
here, Google will be able to better guide you in terms of
further options which be relevant to you to help you achieve
your goals. So if in the event you get this wrong, don’t panic,
it is ok, it just means you will need to decide further options
for yourself, instead of being guided by Google!

Depending on which option you select, just below this screen,

you will be presented with sub-options which correspond to
what you have chosen. So for example, if you select SALES,
then Google Ads will say, OK, as you are looking for Sales,
the campaign Type which may be suitable that may help you
to achieve your objectives are:
● Search
● Display
● Discovery
● Performance Max
● Shopping
● Video

However, if on the other hand you selected BRAND

AWARENESS AND REACH
● Display
● Video

For the sake of this demonstration, let’s say we selected

CREATE A CAMPAIGN WITHOUT A GOAL’S
GUIDANCE. We will then be presented with all the sub

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options available as it is then up to us to ensure we select the
appropriate campaign type.

Now this is where it gets interesting. We can have multiple

campaigns and multiple different types of campaigns for your
products/services. For example, when selling items on an e-
commerce store, we may have a Search Campaign, but we
may also decide to have a Shopping campaign too. And so on.

So let’s keep it simple, as ultimately this book is not about

making you the best Google Ads Guru in the world but is
more so to give you the ability to understand the Google Ads
framework, methodology and Moreso, gaining a solid
knowledge to be able to communicate at a competition level
with those who may be running your Google Ads. With that
being said, let’s select “SEARCH”, as this will allow you to
create text-based ads at the top of the Google screen,
whenever people look for your products and services.

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Scroll down a little and Google will now ask you for some
more details. This time it’s asking to “Select the results that
you want to get from this campaign”. As it could be that you
want to take people to your website (So that they can buy or
enquires, or you may wish to receive just phone calls. Or
maybe you have an App and you want people to be able to
download it. You may leave everything empty if you wish. By
selecting an option, it is just helping Google make more
relevant recommendations to you. The screen will look
somewhat like the following:

Let’s select “Website visits”. You will then be asked to type

in the address of your website. i.e.,
https://myhomefurniture.co.uk

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Had you selected “Phone Calls” you would have been asked
to enter the phone number you want people to call you on.
Likewise had you selected “App downloads” you would
have been asked about the platform of your app (Android or
IOS) as well as the App name.

So now let’s scroll down to the last section of this page, which
is “Start tracking your website conversion”

Ultimately, we want to be able to measure everything, from

how many visits we are getting onto the website through
Google Ads, how many sales (purchases) were made by
people who clicked on one of our Ads, how many leads we
have received and so on. What Google is asking you to do
here, is to define what we wish to track and how. However,
for the sake of making things easy, we will cover tracking in
another section.

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So for now, simply click on the CONTINUE button. This is
where the fun really begins as now, we have started building
our campaign. So in the next section, we will go through the
settings which you can apply to the first campaign you are
building.

Campaign settings

The campaign settings allow you to uniquely configure

settings for each campaign you create, depending on what
you wish to achieve. The campaign settings contain various
sections, so let’s go through each of these in turn.

General settings

• Campaign Name

Give each campaign a suitable name. A name which when

you look at it, you know instantly what the campaign is for.
The default campaign name for a search campaign is “Search-
1”. Never use the default names, as it is not best practice, and
they are not intuitive. It is up to you to decide how you wish
to format your naming convention. I usually use a
combination of factors from campaign type, products or
services, and location.

So, here’s a suggestion of a campaign name structure you

might use:

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<Campaign type>-<Product or Category name>-<Location
Name>

For example, I might use:

Search-Office-Chairs-London. In this way just by looking at
the campaign name, I know the campaign is a Search
campaign, I am promoting office chairs within the London
area.

You can go as advanced with this as you like, but I feel the
above is a good starting point. The main point I am making
here is to develop a suitable and meaningful naming
conversion for your campaigns.

• Networks

Networks tells Google, that as well as in this case, displaying

your Ads on the Google page, where else might you wish to
show your ads. You have 2 options:
● Include Google search partners
● Include Google Display Network

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By default, both would be ticked.
Google search partners are those who have partnered with
Google. These are non-Google Websites. Unfortunately,
Google does not disclose who its partners are, however, if you
conduct a quick search on ‘search partners’ you may be able
to come up with a list. However, some of the most commonly
known ones include YouTube, Amazon.com, as well as The
New Your Times and a host of others. Tick or untick these
options respectively.

[My Top Tip]: When starting a new campaign, we want the

highest quality results, and clicks to our sites, as we are
paying for each click. So for a few campaigns, I would
recommend you Untick the “Google Search Partners” box so
that you know that all your clicks are coming from the Google
search engine page and not other websites that may have
simply embedded the Google search box onto their websites.

• Display Network
The Display network allows advertisers to display an image
ad or video ad on non-Google websites for example blogs,
mobile apps, and some other more popular websites. You can
decide if you wish this campaign to be included within the
Google Display network.

Similar to search partners, you can decide whether or not you

wish to allow your campaign to advertise on Googles’ Display
Network.

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[My Top Tip]: Never have a search campaign and ‘Display
Network’ targeted within the same campaign. Measuring
performance and optimising such campaigns will get
extremely difficult and ineffective. If you do wish to target
Display Network, create a separate campaign for it so that
they can be reported on, optimised, and analysed
independently as their performances will vary significantly.

• Show more options

The Show more option is usually a little subtle and can easily
be missed. However, there are more advanced settings which
you can apply. These include (which we will not go into in
this book):
● Start and end dates of campaigns
● Campaign URL options (Used to help with tracking)
● Dynamic Search Ads setting
● Ad schedule (Allow you to schedule what days and
times of the day you wish your ads to be shown

[My Top Tip]: Only if you are certain you know what days of
the week, and what times of the days are you likely to get
sales or enquiries, should you work on configuring
scheduling options. Otherwise, leave them to serve all time
towards the start of each campaign so that you allow time for
sufficient data to be collected. Once collected you can then
make data-driven decisions.

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 Targeting and Audience Segments
This section allows you to define who you wish to reach like
where they are based and so on. So, let’s discuss each option.

• Locations

The locations option allows you to specify which locations

you want your ads to be displayed within. Again, start off
with a small local area, build up your campaign and start
expanding locations thereafter.

For example, you may wish you add to only be visible to

people within London. In which case, you can specify to
Google to only show your ads to people within London. By
default, you have three options.
● Option 1: All countries and territories.
● Option 2: This will normally be your default country.
For example, United Kingdom.
● Option 3: Enter another location.

Most of the time we would need to select the third option

which says Enter another location. However, you may choose
which option suits you best.

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Select the third option (Enter Another Location) and a
window will open asking you to enter a location to target or
exclude. You will also see an “Advanced search” option too.

Click on Advanced search as you will get more options and

control over the areas you wish to target as well as those areas
used to exclude.

You can target people by location name or even by specifying

a radius of a given post code/zip code or name of a city. So
let's discuss location first.

Target your customers by Location

By default, the location option is selected. Start typing in the
name of the location and you will see Google gives you
suggestions in terms of what it thinks the location names are
relevant to you.

• Location Settings

Try hovering your mouse over any of the locations, then on

the right-hand side, you will see three options:

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 1) Target.
2) Exclude.
3) Nearby.

Select target next to the location which used to target, or you

may select exclude if you wish to exclude that location. You
may also select nearby to target the location would have
specified as well as other nearby locations.

When you select target, you will see that the map at the right-
hand side will start auto updating and highlighting the
targeting areas in blue as well as the locations you have
excluded in red. This helps you to give it a visual
representation of your Google ads targeting. You may target
or exclude as many areas as you wish.

You can also click on the “+” and “–“ symbols to zoom out
and in on the maps.

[My Top Tip]: Start off by targeting a smaller area. Get your
campaigns to work and expand out gradually. This way your
money works harder in those areas allowing you to scale
quicker.

In the screenshot below, you can see that I have targeted

London (highlighted in blue when you view in colour), and
there are 2 locations which I have excluded which are shown
in red).

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Once done, click on the SAVE button.

Location Options

Before we move away from Location Settings, typically of

Google they hide away some of the most important options.
Ironically the options they hide or recommend are the options
which make them more money!

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Click on Location Options. Here, you will be able to specify
the accuracy of the targeting which you have set above. You
will get a screen showing some further options:

By default, the option “Presence or interest: People in,

regularly in or who’ve shown interest in your targeted
locations (recommended)” will be selected. This will, as the
name implies, show ads to people who may not even be in
your area but have shown an interest in your location.

Target
“Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations”
– Here your ad will be shown to those people who are
physically in your area.

“Search interest: People searching for your targeted

locations”

[My Top Tip]: Consider starting your campaign with the

“Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations”
selected as the quality of the clicks will be much higher and
relevant. This is because the audience your ads will be shown
to are mostly going to be from within your local area.

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Exclude
Here you can specify the accuracy of the areas you wish to
Exclude.

Languages

The languages option will allow you to specify your ads to be

served to people who have set their browser to a specific
language as well as the language that is used on the landing
page. For example, if someone has got their browser’s
language set to English your ads would be served to them.
Likewise, if the language is set to Portuguese, you add will
not be served to these people. So, it's more of a business
decision that you have to use as to whether you wish to
specify a language or you wish to leave the language option
unspecified which means regardless of which language has
been set on the browser you add would be served to those
uses.

To set a language simply start typing in the name of the

language. Google then also help you by showing other related
options. Likewise, to take out a language, simply click on the
“x” symbol next to the language you wish to take out.

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[My Top Tip]: Unless your product or service specifically
requires people to only speak in a certain language, consider
not adding any language option at all. As with all countries,
your country of residency or the country you wish to target
may have people from all over the world, who may have set
their browser language to their native language, all though
they may be able to speak and write fluently in your local
language, in my case, English.

Audience Segments
This is where you really need to start thinking about who
your target audiences are. Look at the Avatar exercise we
conducted (in section Building Avatars). Maybe you decided
that one of the industries you wish to target is Estate Agents,
in which case type in Estate Agency and see what options you
get.

This is Super Powerful. As of now we are layering our

keywords with another targeting mechanism, which is our
audiences. Google can now use this information to service
people who have typed in one of your keywords, AND have
fallen within this audience type.

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Select the audiences that you feel are relevant to you by
placing a tick in the box. Your screen should look something
as follows:

144
• Targeting Google Ads with Avatars

In the old days of Google Ads, we would target customers

who searched for specific keywords, but nowadays, it has
become considerably more sophisticated. We still search for
people who use keywords, but we can also do far more – for
instance, we can target people who share the same attributes
as our avatars.

Now you have developed your avatars; you can start

targeting your Google Ads. You do this by adding an
audience to either your campaign or ad group. Note that
Google allows you to create your own audience or choose one
that has been pre-configured by Google, though as you have
already developed your avatar, you will probably opt for the
former, though you may wish to experiment with both. These
are a selection of some of the targeting options Google offers:

· Affinity – provides a holistic picture of your avatar

and can be used in search, display and video. This
targets people who are passionate about their
interests. To get a spreadsheet of affinity audiences,
simple Google “Google Ads Affinity categories”.

· Life event – moving home, graduating, getting

married - by knowing the critical events in our
avatar’s life, we gain huge marketing potential.

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 · In-market audiences are people who are already
researching products they are thinking of buying.
Here is Google’s CSV of the marketing segments.

· Custom – target audiences using keywords, website

URLs, and more.

· Custom intent - auto-created display ads allow you

to send segmented audiences to different landing
pages.

· Detailed demographics – similar to life-event, you

can find audiences that share similar traits.

· Similar audiences – find customers similar to

existing customers through machine learning.

• Observation Mode

Observation settings allow you to see how a specific avatar

behaves when it is an excellent match to specific criteria
without limiting your ads to only showing to that target.
Observation mode doesn’t limit who can see your ad- it
simply lets you monitor behaviour. Importantly it allows you
to use custom bids to target the customer actively.

As an example of how this works, let’s assume we have an

online clothes shop. Sandra, your avatar, is a 22-year-old
woman who is planning to get married early next year. She is
very keen on keeping fit and healthy and takes exercise

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somewhat seriously. She is five feet six inches tall with a BMR
of 23 and is interested in sporting apparel.

You have a new line of youthful-looking tennis wear you

would like to promote. You don’t want to restrict your
audience to tennis wear, but you want to know more about
your avatar. If ads for tennis wear perform differently from
other ads, you can adjust your bids either higher or lower to
fine-tune your campaign to that audience. You might use the
additional information to create a new ad group. The fact is,
with observation mode, you have much more flexibility to
match your marketing to your perfect avatar.

Once you have adequate data and can see which audiences
you are getting conversions from you can switch your
observation to Targeting mode.

• Finally
Avatars, targeting and observation mode add extra
dimensions to digital marketing. These are potent tools, so it’s
worth taking some time to understand them. Their only
downside is that it can take some effort to really understand
them and use them optimally. Any errors you might make
implementing these developments could waste money and
cause you to miss opportunities.

Budget and Bidding

In this section we can specify how much we wish to spend on
a daily amount, as well as which bidding algorithm you

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would like Google Ads to use. So let’s go through both of
these in turn.

• Budget

Depending on what your monthly budget is, simply divide it

by 30, which will give you an estimate of your daily spend.
There are more advanced ways in which you can use to set
your Google Ads budget but we will not cover these here.

So if you have a monthly budget of £1,000, then your daily

budget will need to be set to ~£33. Type this amount into the
box which shows your currency symbol. If you wish to setup
multiple campaigns, then you need to divide this budget
amongst your campaigns.

Ensure you have the correct currency set from the list box
option.

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Also note, whatever budget you have specified, if it is not
spent, Google will not try to force the spend. It will remain as
unspent and will be reset the following day.

A word of caution: Google reserves the right to spend up to

twice your daily budget on specific days where Google deems
it is more likely to drive conversions, although it will ensure
the average amount you spend during the month, remains as
whatever you had specified it to be.

[My Top Tip]: Start off on a small budget, but ensure it is big
enough to start attracting a reasonable number of clicks and
conversions quickly. In this way, you will spend less time
worrying about what works and what does not and will be
able to make fast decisions on the optimisations you need to
carry out in order to allow the account to start getting your
campaign to perform well.

• Bidding

Bidding in Google Ads allows you to tell Google, what type

of algorithm you want Google to use to help you achieve your
objectives when deciding how much it needs to bid, to get a
click on a given keyword.

There are various bidding strategies you can use with Google.
Each campaign can have its own bidding strategy. Next, we
will go through the most popular bidding strategies, to give
you an idea of what each one does.

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You will be asked to select which you wish to focus on.
Unsurprisingly, the default will be ‘Clicks’ (We know Google
makes a shedload of money from Clicks, whether they
convert into sales for you or not!)

In order to use the cleverer bidding strategies, you must have

conversion tracking installed, although you should have this
installed regardless of which strategies you wish to use.

When you click on the option Clicks from the list box, you
will see some options. To reveal all the options, you may need
to click on Other optimisation options. Your screens should
look something as follows:

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So, in summary, here are some of the popular bidding
options:

Clicks
This tells Google, that you wish to get as many clicks as
possible, within your given budget. There are very few
reasons why anyone would want to use this. However, some
reasons may include:
● When an account or campaign has been newly setup,
and you wish to get some data, use optimise a
campaign. Once you have enough data, and ideally
conversions, you could consider changing this bid
strategy to one of the smarter bid strategies listed
below.
● Brand campaigns, so you may wish your ads to come
up as much as possible when anyone types in any of
your brand keywords.

Impression share

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Impression share allows you to tell Google, to adjust your bid,
according to where you would like your Ad to appear on the
Google page. Options available are:
● Anywhere on the results page.
● Top of results page. In this case, your ad may appear
anywhere within the top 4 Ad slots of the google
results page. Remember there are also 3 ad slots
available at the bottom of the page too.
● Absolute top of results page. With this strategy, you
are telling Google you would like your ad to appear
at the very top of the 4 ad slots available on the google
results page.

Regardless of which option you have chosen above, you will

get two further options.

1) Percentage (%) impression share to target. This

allows you to specify what percentage of the tie you
wish Google to use the bidding strategy you have
selected.
2) Maximum CPC bid limit. Here you can specify to
Google that it can bid as much as it likes, as long as it
does not exceed a specific Cost-per-click.

My Top Tip: Always specify a Maximum CPC bid limit

otherwise, you are allowing Google to bid as much as it wants
for a specific keyword, which could easily burn your budget
very quickly.

Maximise conversions

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This is by far one of my favourite bidding strategies. Here you
can specify to Google that you want the Google algorithm to
bring you as many conversions as possible. This could be
people filling in contact forms, appointment forms, booking
valuations, or clicking on links to call or email you.

Only use this option if

a) You have a conversion tracking setup.
b) You have at least 15 conversions within the
last 30-day window. This will mean google
has got some data to base its decisions on.

Additionally, you can specify a Target Cost Per Action (Target

CPA) (This option is only available once you have adequate
data). For example, it could be that you sell a product for £500
and make £200 profit from each one. So, you could even
specify that I want a maximum target CPA to be let’s say £100.
i.e. for every £100 you spend, you want to win one sale!

[My Top Tip]: You can setup multiple conversion actions, for
example, track purchases as well as how many people filled
in a form. This allows you to tightly manage what you
consider a conversion.

Maximise Conversion Value

This is different to the Maximise Conversions bid strategy in
that in this case we are telling Google we wish to get as much
revenue as possible. Google will then use its algorithm to
determine how it needs to conduct its bidding.

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It is not as simple as the most expensive products get the
highest bid. As it could be that a lower priced product sells
more and will therefore generate more revenue. Google will
therefore favour that one a product which may be more
expensive but will not generate much revenue.

To use Maximise conversion value bid strategy, it is essential

that you have revenue data tracked alongside your
conversions.

Again, with Maximise Conversion Value, you also have the

ability to specify what target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
you wish to aim for i.e. 500%!

Manual CPC
With Manual CPC (Manual Cost-Per-Click), it is a non-
automated, non-smart bid strategy, You decide exactly what
you wish to pay per click, per keyword, manually. Although
this gives you a lot of control, you should only use this as an
advanced user as Google’s algorithm will not help you to
adjust bids, based on who is more likely to convert or not.

I usually use Manual CPC bid strategies at the start of a

campaign whilst I am assessing the performance of a
campaign, or whilst conducting experiments.

There is however a small sub option available called

“Enhanced CPC” which you can optionally tick. I personally
have never found this to work well. This is Google’s way or
saying, allow us to get more conversions from your manual

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CPC bidding, by raising CPC bids for clicks that are more
likely convert into a lead or sale.

So for now, let’s select Maximise Clicks bid strategy.

Setting up the ad groups

Now, a quick recap, The Ad groups is where we have

logically broken down the campaign into its own themes. In
this way, we can make sure the Ads that people see when they
search for the products or services are very relevant and
specific to the corresponding keywords. Refer to diagram
below:

Here you can see we plan on creating 3 Ad groups, in the

campaign “Office Chairs”:
1) Office Chairs (Although this is the same name as the
main campaign, this ad group will contain keywords
specifically if people search keywords relating to only
‘Office chairs’.
2) Meeting Chairs – Here we can make sure all the
keywords in this ad group are related to meeting

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 chairs only. Consequently, the Ads we create, we can
make sur they are all related to Meeting room chairs
specifically. Examples of keywords we might use
here may be:
a. Leather meeting chairs
b. Meeting chairs with wheels
c. Etc.
3) Office Chair Accessories – In this ad group, as with
meeting chairs, we can ensure all keywords are
related to “office chair accessories”!

The way we build the ad groups is you do not need to build

them out all in one-go. Build just the first one, finish the first
complete setup of the campaign, then come back and start
adding more ad groups as you wish.

• Ad group type

By default, the first option you get is Standard. This is the one
we will use. However, if you click the listbox the other option
you get is “Dynamic”. This is a little more advanced in that
Google will use the text on your website and will
automatically create headlines which it feels are relevant. So,
for now, let’s just move onto the next section.

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• Ad group Name

This is where we give the name for our Ad group. The name
Google gives you by default will be “Ad group 1”. Never use
the default names. Always use a meaningful naming
convention. So, in this case, let’s start with creating an ad
group for “meeting chairs”. So, let’s delete the default name
and type in, you got it, “Meeting Chairs”.

• Keywords

The first 2 sections here are there to help Google automatically

suggest keywords for you. For example, you may type your
website URL and click on “Get keywords”. Google will then
go to that URL and put a whole load of keywords into the

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“Enter or paste keywords” box. Likewise, you can type in the
name of a product or service and again hit “Get keywords”.
Again, google will suggest keywords for you.

Although you may find this attractive, I tend to stay clear of

this as I find most of the keywords Google suggest are not of
great quality in terms of their relevance, or “intent to buy”. So
I prefer to research and type my own keywords.

[My Top Tip]: If you do get Google to get your keywords for
you, just ensure you go through them very carefully and take
out those you feel are not suitable, else you could end up
spending a whole load of money on poor quality keywords.

Keywords are words or phrases that are used to match your

ads with the terms people are searching for.

Now this is the section you actually enter your keywords into.

We will cover researching keywords like a pro in the

Augment section. For now, we just need to make sure we
have a few of the obvious and basic keywords ready.

So have a careful think, using what you have learned about

keyword intent in the Categorising Keywords section. So for
now, let’s use keywords which we feel people would only be
searching these if they have an intent to buy. You must pit
each keyword in a new line. I suggest adding around 3-5
keywords to start with. As later on, once you have researched
these keywords further you may like to go in and edit them.

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Or if you have already researched them, just feel free to type
them in now. Let’s use the following keywords:

● blue stackable chairs

● cost of meeting room chairs
● wooden meeting room chairs

Note: In Google Ads, the keywords you specify and not case-
sensitive, although I like and prefer to use lower-case for
consistency and my form of best practices.

This is where the fun begins. Not only do we have keywords

we also have keyword “Match Types”.

What are Match Types?

Match Types is additional information we provide to Google,
which allows Google to determine how closely the keyword
you have specified, needs to match with whatever the user
has typed in (or more technically the users search query). To
do this, we need to understand 4 match types Google
supports (There was a 5th, but Google has recently depleted it.
It was called Broad Match Modifiers – But I’ll explain what it
did anyway.) These are:

1. Broad Match
2. Broad Match Modifiers (depleted as of July 2021)
3. Phrase Match
4. Exact Match
5. Negative Match

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So, let’s discuss these one by one to give you a summary of
what each one is, and how it works.

● Broad Match
Broad Match keywords allow your ad to be shown for the
widest range of keyword searches, that are related to a
keyword you have specified. Now let’s put that into simpler
English. Your Ad can be shown, as long as all the keywords
are part of the search, regardless of word order. However,
close variations of the keywords and synonyms may are
allowed.

Isn’t it funny how Broad Match is the default and is where

Google will make most of its income from?

Examples of broad match keywords

Keyword Symbol Format you Your Ad may be
would use in triggered for these
Google Ads keywords

tennis None tennis shoes ● mens tennis

shoes shoes
● tennis
trainers
● tennis
running
shoes
● socks for
running
● Boys tennis
boots

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One major advantage of using broad match is it allows you to
discover new keywords that you could utilise within your
Google Ads campaign, for keywords you may not had
considered. On the downside, you could end up getting clicks
for a lot of irrelevant or low-quality searches, so you really
need to be very consistent when analysing your search terms
and negative keyword.

● Broad Batch Modifiers

As stated earlier, Broad Match Modifier was depleted in July
2021. My reason for including this here is it shocks me to see
how many Google Ads campaigns are still using this and
have not yet made changes to their accounts. You really need
to be replacing these with a broad match or phrase match.

Broad match modifiers are where you can specify a number

of keywords, preceded with a plus symbol (+). This is then
telling Google Ads, that your Ad may be triggered, as long as
all the keywords which you have specified, are contained
within whatever a user has typed in. Your ad will be triggered
regardless of the order in which the keywords appear, as well
as whether there are additional keywords which the user has
typed in. Google will also trigger your ad for close variations

Personally, I use to absolutely love this match type and was

pretty gutted when Google decided to scrap it.

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 Examples of broad match modifier keywords
Keyword Symbol(s) Format you Your Ad may be
would use in triggered for these
Google Ads keywords

tennis + +tennis +shoes ● mens tennis

shoes shoes
● tennis
running
shoes
● how much
are red
tennis shoes

The main advantage is broad match modifiers was it gave you

greater control to ensure the keywords you have specified,
will be part of what the user has typed in, but in addition, you
may discover other combinations of keywords that you can
either use or make into negatives if they are not relevant to
you.

● Phrase Match
With phrase match, you need to put your keywords within
double quotes. Google will then only trigger your ad if a user
has typed in your keywords, in the same order that you
specified. Once again, Google will allow for close variations.

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 Examples of phrase match keywords
Keyword Symbol(s) Format you Your Ad may be
would use in triggered for these
Google Ads keywords

tennis shoes “ “ “tennis shoes” ● mens tennis

shoes
● tennis
shoes
● how much
are red
tennis
shoes

The advantage of phrase match is you get much greater

control as your ad will only appear if users have typed in your
keywords in the order you specified, but with the additional
benefit of allowing keywords to be specified both before and
after too.

Due to the increased quality, it also, therefore, helps you to

better manage your budget as you know your average cost-
per-click will go towards keywords that are more relevant to
your business, thus avoiding too much wasted spend.

Phrase match is becoming my favourite match type as it has

tight control over the keywords and phrases you use but
allows you to see what additional search terms your phrase
match might trigger. You can then decide if it is relevant, or if
you need to add it in as a negative keyword.

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 ● Exact Match keywords
Exact match is exactly that. Google will attempt to show your
ads when a user types in exactly what you have specified.
However, lately, Google has amended its algorithm to make
‘exact match’ to ‘not so much exact match’ which is very
annoying. What I mean by this is Google will firstly allow
close variations, and secondly, it will allow your ad to be
triggered for keywords which Google deems to have the same
intent or meaning, as what you have specified! Having said
that, using exact match is the closest you will get to triggering
your ads for only keywords which you have specified. The
keyword a user types in must be in the same order, as well as
not having any leading or trailing keywords too.

Examples of exact match keywords

Keyword Symbol(s) Format you Your Ad may be

would use in triggered for
Google Ads these keywords

tennis [ ] [tennis shoes] ● tennis

shoes shoes
● tennis
shoe
● tennis
trainers

Apart from now having to keep a closer eye on the search

terms which trigger your ads, and ensuring you implement
negative keywords where necessary, exact match will be the

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highest quality keywords to trigger your ads and will give
you the greatest control over the cost per clicks.

Negative Keywords
A common mistake I find when we take on accounts within
our agency, is people pay a lot of attention to the keywords
they wish to include and have their ads shown for, but very
little emphasis on the keywords they wish to avoid their ads
being shown for. It is equally important, if not more, to tell
Google which keywords you do not want your ads to be
shown for. This is called ‘Negative Keywords”.

Considering what you have learnt in the keyword match

types section you can see your ad may be triggered for a
product or service you do not cater for. Or even, your ad may
be triggered for keywords where people are only researching
and have no intent to buy. We then need to add these
keywords as Negative Keywords.

Negative keywords can be added at Campaign Level, or Ad

Group level. Campaign level means you can avoid any
searches that contain your negative keyword within that
campaign, and if specified at ad group level, the negative
keyword will only apply to that specific ad group.

It is therefore imperative you keep a regular check on the

search terms that trigger your ads to be shown for, and add
them in as negative keyword if need be.

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So, let’s continue building out the ad group
By now your keyword section should look something as
follows.

However, taking into account what we have learnt about

match types you may decide to add more keywords into it.
Note: You may have a mixture of match types within an ad
group, although we will not discuss this within this book, as
I feel they are more along the lines of implementing advanced
strategies. Consequently, it could therefore be your keywords
box looks along the following lines:

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At this stage, we can go on to create more Ad groups,
although I would advise against it. I would suggest you finish
off building your complete Google Ads account, and then
going back and building the account out.

So now let’s click on the “Save and Continue” button.

Setting up your Ads

Your Ads is the first thing people will see on the Google page,
which will ultimately determine whether they click on it to
visit your website, or your competitors.

It is therefore crucial to ensure you send out the correct

message which accurately promotes your products or
services.

Having well thought-out ads, which accurately describe your

products and services, means you are likely to attract the right
audience, who are actively looking for your products or
services. Similarly, having poorly designed Ads may lead to
a large number of people clicking on the ads, but achieving
very few sales or leads, which will ultimately lead to an
unnecessary increase in costs.

On a final point, before we go into writing your ads, it is

important to understand that not only are we trying to attract
people to click on our ads, but we equally wish to disqualify
people who may not be the right audience for us. What I mean

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by that is, let’s say the products you sell have a starting price
of £500. By mentioning this in the ad copy, i.e., “Prices start
from £500”, those people who may have only had a budget of
£100, are now less likely to click on your ad. As a result, you
have not had to pay Google for a click, which would never
have converted.

Your screen will look something as follows when you first go

into it to setup your ads.

Let’s start from the top and work our way down. This screen
will allow you to design an Ad. Technically the ad is known
as a “Responsive Search Ad” (or RSAs).
Responsive Search Ads in Google are replacing the traditional
“Expanded Text Ads” (or ETA ads).
ETA allowed you to specify exactly what text you wanted to
show on the Google page and Google will display just those
headlines and descriptions which you have specified. ETA
ads had 3 Headlines and 2 Description lines. However, these
are being depleted starting June 2022.

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RSAs however allow you to specify up to 15 Headlines and 4
Description lines. Based on what the user has searched for,
Google will determine which is the best combination of
headlines and descriptions to show to the user on the Google
page.

So now let’s jump onto each of the main sections of the ad

creation page.

• Ad Strength

The Ad strength is an important indicator as to how well

Google thinks your ads have been written. It goes from:
● Poor
● Average
● Good
● Excellent

Needless to say, you need to aim for Excellent, but anything

between Good and Excellent, is Excellent 😊

Google’s definition of Ad Strength is:

“Ad strength is an indication of the relevance and
diversity of your ad combinations. Having more

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 relevant and unique content can help you get the
right ad in front of your customers and improve your
ad’s performance.”

As and when you fill in your headlines and description lines,

the ad strength should change.

On the right-hand side of the page, you will find a section

where Google attempts to help and guide you as to what you
should do, to increase your ad strength. Be sure to click on
“view ideas” to help you wish this.

Essentially Google is looking for a variety of headlines and

descriptions, which are different, but highly relevant. So, try
to add a combination of headlines to include:
● Headlines which say what your product is (ensure to
include your main keywords)
● Your Unique Selling Points (USPs)
● Any Offers, discounts (Such as Unbeatable Prices,
Price Match Guarantee)
● Call-To-Actions (Such as Order Online, Book Now)
● Trust Phrases (Such as Official Website, 5 x Rated, 30
Day Refund Guarantee)

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• Preview

On the right-hand side of the page, you will see a preview.

This is updated continuously to show you how your ad may
look like on the Google page. You will see it has a Mobile icon
and Desktop icon too. Click on these to see how your ad may
look like on each of these devices.

• Final URL

Enter the landing page you would like your users taken to,
who click on your Ad. Remember your home page is not
necessarily a good page to take people to. Ensure the page
people get taken to is the most relevant page according to
what they may have searched for.

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• Display Path

Google allow you to specify 2 path names, which Google will

show as part of your Ad text. This is an opportunity for you
to specify some highly relevant keywords. What you type
here will not affect what page your users end up on, as that’s
determined in the Final URL field, so these are more vanity
fields to aid click-though. So, in this case, I may enter
“meeting-room” in Path 1, and “Chairs” in Path 2.

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• Headlines

You may enter up to 15 headlines, each one must be a

maximum of 30 characters. Once again, click on “View Ideas”
for inspiration as to what you could type in as Google may
make recommendations. And remember to vary the
headlines, so that you can allow Google to make better
decisions as to which headline it should display to the user. I
would recommend a minimum of 5 headlines, although the
more the better.

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• Descriptions

You may enter up to 4 description lines, each one being up to

9 characters each. Once again, use a variety of different
headlines and keep an eye on the Ad Strength.

Once done, hit the “Done” button and click Save and
Continue button.

What makes a Good Ad Copy?

To have a good Ad Copy, in other words, the text you use in
your Ads, it is good to use a combination of types of headlines
and types descriptions which consist of some or more of the
following:

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Call To Action phrases. What would you like people to do
when they read your Ad? For example, “Call Now”, “Get A
Quote”, “Get In Touch”, “Learn More”.

Your main Keyword. Ensure to include your main keyword

or phrase within your headlines & descriptions.

Unique Selling Points. What are your USPs which make you
stand out from your competitors? Ensure to include these. For
example, “Same Day Service”, “Next Day Delivery”, etc.

Promotions/Special Offers. Are there any promotions or

special offers you can include to entice your readers to click
on your Ads? For example, “50% Off”, “Buy One Get One
Free”.
Trust-related phrases. Include phrases which may help
people to build trust with you, for example, “5 X rating”,
“Family Business”, and “Official Website”.

Phrases which address your audience’s pain points. This is

where we tap into what problems they may be facing. For
example, “Bills too high?” “Not getting enough sales”?
Essentially it is a pain point your customer may be able to
relate to.

Sense of urgency. You want your customers to act now,

right? So why must they act fast? Include phrases such as
“Sale Ends Today”, “Only 24 Items Remaining”, and
“Limited Availability”.

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Location Phrases. It also helps to include your geographical
locations, as people will be comforted that you provide your
service within that location.

Conclusion for writing professional Ad Copy

When coming up with strong headline ideas, it’s worth
thinking about what benefits your product or service delivers
to the audience.

Benefits are future-focused and revolve around what the

outcome is. For example, if you are a lawn services firm, you
may offer a grass cutting service. That is a feature. What your
audience want is a benefit: to be able to look at their beautiful
lawn, or let their children play on the lawn or sit out in their
garden when the weather is good. Crucially, each of these
benefits has emotion attached to it.

The reason why this is important is that by bringing an

emotional element into your headlines, it will connect with
the reader in a different from other ads they may be reading.

A page of Google search results can look very confusing to a

reader who is trying to navigate lots of different options. It
can be very hard to choose between search results, both ads
and organic.

However, by bringing more benefit and emotion-led

language into your ad copy, it is possible to stand out on the
page. If you reader feels understood, they will feel greater
trust and belief that you can deliver.

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For example, if you were an accountancy firm and you
wanted alternative headlines and ad copy to look enticing to
your potential customer, it pays to speak to how they are
thinking.

If they’re looking for an accountancy firm on Google, it’s

probably because they need their taxes done. And most
people who need their taxes done, need them done quickly.

So instead of:

Tax compliance service (which is descriptive and technically

explains what you do.

You can say:

Get your return done this week (which is what the reader
actually wants).

This approach brings in benefits, urgency and speaks directly

to the pain they are feeling.

Figure out what do they want right now. The more you speak
to that need in your ad copy, the more likely they are to click.

Confirm Payment Info

We now come onto the final, and last part of officially having
setup the first campaign, although we do need to go back and
expand on it.

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This is where we add the billing details.

Here you simply need to read all the prompts and add your
billing details into it.

A word of caution Ensure you get your “Billing Country” and

“Time zone” correct, as this cannot be changed at a later date.

If you have a promotional code, you may click on the pencil

icon and enter it here.

Depending on which country you are in, the method of

payment may vary. However, the standard is:
● Add Credit or Debit Card
● PayPal
● Direct Debit

Once you have entered your billing details, simply click on

the Submit button.

Google may take up to 3 working days to approve your billing

details, although it is usually a lot sooner.

Once done, you will be presented with a Congratulation

screen and can then click Explore Campaigns to move onto
the next step.

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 Refining your Google Ads campaign

Now that you have built your first campaign, this is not where
it stops. You need to go back and refine the campaign, to
ensure it is well built, and is built for success and profitability
from day-one! Remember, we built the first campaign so that
we can go through the full cycle of setting up the campaign,
building a basic campaign then entering the billing details.

So here are the things you need to do to build your campaign

out.

There are several parts of the Google Ads account you will
want to refine. These are:
● Ad Extensions
● Campaigns
● Ad groups
● Keywords
● Ads

Refining Ad Extensions

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Ad extensions allow you to attach more business-related
information on your ads, as well as providing your potential
customer with more information, as the ads are then naturally
bigger, they attract a higher clickthrough rate too!

It is therefore crucial you take your time on adding in as many

relevant Ad extensions as possible. Whilst doing so, ensure
you have carefully filled all fields such as:
● Landing page
● Optional Descriptions
● Images where required

[My Top Tip]: Take a look at what extensions your

competitors might be using. Be careful not to click on their ads
as it’s not right for you to incur them costs unnecessarily.
Once you have researched these, the idea is not to copy them,
but model what you like and improve upon it.

Extensions can be added at various levels including:

● Account level
● Campaign level
● Ad group level

The main ones which will discuss here are as follows:

● Sitelink Extensions
● Call Extensions
● Callout Extensions
● Location Extensions

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Sitelink Extensions
Sitelinks are the most common extensions used within Google
Ads. Sitelink extensions allow you to add additional links
onto your ad. The links would be to other pages of your
website, which you may consider relevant to the campaign
you are creating.

Look at this example below:

This Ad uses two sitelink extensions. “Prices” and “Contact

us”. As you can see the amount of space the Ad takes up is
now much bigger. It also gives people the opportunity to go
to other relevant parts of your website.

To add a site link extension,

1) Click on the campaign or ad group you would like to
add it in for (or you can click on All Campaigns then
Overview) if you would like it to be at account level,
meaning all campaigns will use it)
2) Click Ads & Extensions
3) Click Extensions. You will be taken to a screen similar
to the one below

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 4) Here you can either click on the link “Sitelink” or
click the blue button and select Sitelink. Thereafter,
you will need to fill in the site links you would like
added

My recommendations for site links are:

1) Have at least 6 sitelinks
2) Try to really think, for people who are looking for
your products and services, what might they feel is
very relevant to them (i.e., Contact us, size guide,
other relevant product categories, about us, etc). In
the case of the furniture shop, sitelinks might be:
a. Contact us
b. Request a quote
c. Office Tables
d. Office Accessories
e. Size guide
3) When adding sitelink, ensure you also type in a
description, in the description field, which describes
what the link is, and maybe how it may benefit them

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Call Extensions
Many businesses win more customers when people call them,
instead of filling in a form on your website. Consequently,
such companies would much rather prefer their potential to
call them via phone. As such, these companies can use the
‘Call Extension’.

When you use a call extension, your phone number will

appear on the Google page, as a clickable link. So, for those
people who are using mobile phones to search, a user can
simply click on your phone number, which will in turn call a
pre-specified number. This is great as you have now
generated a lead, without the user even visiting your website!

To implement a call extension:

1) Click on the campaign or ad group you would like to
add it in for (or you can click on All Campaigns then
Overview) if you would like it to be at account level,
meaning all campaigns will use it)
2) Click Ads & Extensions
3) Click on Call Extension

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You will see a subtle link called “Advanced option”. Once
again, Google has a habit of hiding the options which will
save you money, but coincidentally, will make them more!

Most businesses are not open 24 hours, 7 days a week. By

clicking on advanced options, bit only can you select which
device you prefer to show your phone number on, but more
importantly, which days of the week you would like it
displayed, as well as what times of the day. There is little
point in advertising your phone number during out of hours
workday and time.

Callout Extensions
Firstly, avoid making the mistake of confusing call extensions
with callout extensions. They are very different. Callout
extensions are used to highlight some of your main selling

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points, These are displayed as non-clickable links. So,
examples where you might use these are to emphasise things
like:
● Delivery timescales i.e. Next Day Delivery
● Guarantee (i.e., 30 days Guarantee)
● Free Consultation

To implement a callout extension:

1) Click on the campaign or ad group you would like to
add it in for (or you can click on All Campaigns then
Overview) if you would like it to be at account level,
meaning all campaigns will use it)
2) Click Ads & Extensions
3) Click on Callout Extension

Location Extensions
Location extensions are a must for businesses who provide
local services. You need to firstly have an account on Google
Business Profile which you can do by visiting
business.google.com. You can then connect this to your
Google Ads account. Then using Location extensions, you can
promote your Google Business Profile, as well as company
address, phone number and map marker.

To implement a Location extension:

1) Click on the campaign or ad group you would like to
add it in for (or you can click on All Campaigns then

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 Overview) if you would like it to be at account level,
meaning all campaigns will use it)
2) Click Ads & Extensions
3) Click on Location Extension

There you will find several options to help you set these up,

Refining Campaigns
See what other campaigns you might like to build, which will
support the budget you have to work with, as well as business
your requirements/priorities.

It could be that for example, if you are selling meeting chairs,

you might like to setup a campaign for complimentary
products such as office tables, or office accessories, and so on.

Having different campaigns also allows you to better manage

your budgets as you can focus your budgets over your
priority campaigns. It also allows you to specify different
targeting, bid strategies and so much more.

Whilst on the topic of campaigns, not only would you want

to think which campaigns you can build for your products or
services, but also what types of campaigns. Remember,
Google allows you to build campaigns for many platforms
such as:
● Display Campaigns
● Video campaigns
● Discovery Campaigns

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 ● …and so much more

By doing so, you are potentially tapping into new audiences

to help promote your products and services.

Refining Ad Groups & Keywords

I have intentionally put these into 1 title, as they work very
much hand-in-hand.

Review what other related products or services you might

need, including variations of the products. For example,
within the campaign we discussed earlier, (Search-Office-
Chairs-London), we had you an Ad group which we had
created called “meeting chairs”.

Now, you might say, well, it’s great having a generic Meeting
Chairs Ad group, but maybe you also want to have some
more specific ones too. In that way, the “ads” you create for
them, can be more tailored respectively. For example, how
about creating the following new Ad groups:

● Office meeting chairs

● Wooden meeting room chairs
● Leather meeting room chairs
● Upholstery meeting room chairs
● … I think you get the drift by now

Now let’s say you wish to create an Ad group for leather

meeting room chairs, what this means is that:

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 a) All the keywords within that Ad group can be around
the word ‘leather’ (for example, leather meeting room
chairs, leather office chairs, swivel leather meeting
room chairs etc.
b) The Ads you create for this Ad group are now much
more focused, towards leather meeting room chairs.

Here’s something useful to know. If you already have an Ad

group and wish to create a similar Ad group, rather than
creating it from scratch, you can simply copy and paste one
that you already have by:

1) Placing a tick in the Ad group you wish to copy

2) Click ‘Edit’
3) Click ‘Paste’

In this way, you have almost cloned the Ad group, including

the keywords and Ads, now all you need to do is to amend
the keywords, Ad group name and Ads that belong to it.

[My Top Tip]: As we wish to push all the traffic/visitors who

are looking for leather meeting room chairs to this Ad group,
it may be worth considering making ‘leather meeting room
chairs’ into a Negative keyword within the genetic ‘meeting
room chairs’ Ad group. In that way, this Ad group is now
likely to attract all the traffic for these keywords, instead of
some of it going to other Ad groups.

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Refining Keywords
When we created the campaign, we added our initial set of
keywords to help us get started. In the previous section, we
also discussed adding more Ad groups and adding keywords
into them. Now might be a good time to expand further and
review the keywords we have in our existing Ad groups. This
is the time to use your Keyword research exercise we
discussed in the Keyword Research Like a pro section, where
I also suggested downloading my free keyword research
template.

This is also known as keyword expansion. The process of

looking at your keywords to see what other combinations of
keywords we might like to add. Whilst at it, always having at
the back of your mind the 3 categories of keywords we
discussed. As a reminder, these would be:

● Research intent keywords

● Buying intent keywords
● Negative keywords
…with the additional consideration of ‘Match types’.

To Add Keywords, you simply go into your Campaign, then

Ad group, and click on the Blue “+” icon.

You will notice a box opens where you can add your
keywords into it.

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Based on your existing keywords, Google will now also give
you suggestions as to which other keywords you can add. The
section will look similar to the following:

You can choose to simply click the “+” symbol next to any
keyword you add. Please note that when Google adds these
keywords into your keyword box, the default match type is
‘Broad Match’. It is then up to you to decide if you wish to
keep it as broad match, or you wish to change it to another
match type such as Phrase Match or Exact Match.

[My Top Tip]: You can make keywords which you have
added into your keyword box, into a Negative keyword, by
simply placing a Minus sign next to a keyword. So, for
example, if you do not want your ads to show if someone
types the word ‘Blue’ you can simply add in:

-blue

This will then add the word blue, as a negative keyword, into
that Ad group

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You may also get keyword ideas by typing your website
address into the “Enter a related website”, or you can type
something into the “Enter your product or service” box.

Refining Your Ads

Your Ads, as a reminder, is what your customers will see
when they search for products or services on Google. Having
a well written Ad could mean driving high quality traffic to
your website. A poorly written ad could result in losing
potential clicks, as well as encouraging clicks from people
who are not likely to materialise onto a conversion, whether
that be a lead or sale. It is therefore crucial that you spend time
crafting your Ads, not just to attract potential customers, but
also to deter some audiences not to click on your ad.

At the time of writing this book, we have 2 main types of Ads:

● Expanded Text Ads
● Responsive Search Ads

Expanded Search Ads are soon being phased out starting 30

June 2022, where you will no longer be able to create new
Expanded Text Ads, although you may continue to use the
ones you already have. It will only be matter of time before
Google completely takes away Expanded Text Ads.

For now, ensure you have related 3 Ads in each Ad group,

whereas at least one of the Ads is a Responsive Search Ad. At
the same time ensure all ads are related to the Ad group they
belong to. Vary the Ads, to ensure you use different types of

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Headlines & Descriptions, as this is the only real way to see
which Ads are working and those that are not.

Last but not least, ensure the Ad Strength of each ad is at least

“Good”, as discussed earlier.

Refining Your Budget

Check your budget. Google allows you to set your budget at
campaign level. So, each campaign can have their own
budget. As a result, you have total control of how much
Google can spend on any specific campaign.

However, Google also allows you to have a “Shared budget”.

This is where you can specify an amount, let’s say £100 per
day, and tell Google, which campaigns are allowed to share
this budget. To do this, firstly setup your shared budget by
clicking on:
● Tools and Settings
● Shared Budget

From here you simply:

1) Give the budget a name, for example, “Chairs
budget”.
2) Select which campaigns you want the budget to be
shared amongst. In the screenshot below, as we only
have 1 campaign, we can only assign it to that
campaign, otherwise you can select as many
campaigns as you like.
3) Finally, specify the amount you wish to allocate per
day amongst the chosen campaign.

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Why use a shared budget? Sometimes you might find you
have created several very related campaigns for a particular
product or service and have a specific budget you can allocate
to that product or service. So, to avoid unnecessary granular
calculations, it is sometimes easier just to use a shared budget
instead which could make management a whole lot easier. Or
even sometimes you may wish to test campaigns out when
they are first created but have limited budget. So again, this
can help in the short-term whilst you are getting to know the
campaigns.

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Next Steps After Refining?
So now you have built a campaign (or a few) and you want to
know what you can do immediately. As harsh as it may
sound, the answer is nothing. Well, at least for 2 to 3 days,
depending on the size and complexity of the campaign. Don’t
panic. Rome wasn’t built overnight.

Leave it alone for a few days, as in the next section, I will show
you exactly what you need to do to ensure your campaign(s)
are built for success, right from the start!

Jump onto the next section and let me go through this with
you.

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17) Step 6 - Augment

In previous chapters, I showed you how to research, create &

launch Google Ads campaigns. That is really just the start.

In this section, I show you how you can enhance your

campaign for success. We call this the Augment stage, also
commonly known as “optimisation”. Here, we take out the
dead-weed. We keep and strengthen on the parts of the
campaigns which work well, which in turn helps to scale your
Google Ads account, cut costs, and improve conversions by
allowing for more leads, sales, or whatever your goals and
objectives are.

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The optimisation you carry out will ultimately determine the
profitability and success of your Google Ads account.

Optimising Google Ads campaign is a skill, which takes years

to develop. However, in this book, we discuss some basic
optimisations you can carry out as a starting point.

Why do we need to optimise?

You can go out and build the best campaign in the world. You
can research all year long, conduct thorough keyword
research, create awesome Ads, hire the best website
developers to build your website landing pages. But
ultimately, it is your end users who will determine how and
if they engage with your Ads, which keywords they use to
come onto your website and so much more. Each time you
make changes to your Google Ads, you can bet your bottom
dollar, your competitors are doing the same. There are
billions of combinations of user-behaviours, which makes it
impossible to have a ‘perfect’ Google Ads account.

You, therefore, need to stay ahead of the game.

Understanding what users are typing into search engines to
find you, which ads they click on which generate you profit
as well as which Ads they click on which drive no
conversions.

More so recently it has become more complex with the

introduction of Google’s machine learning where we now
have Smart bidding algorithms, which is where Google does

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a lot of the guesswork for you, by using the intelligence it has,
although not sharing the intelligence with us.

As a result, we use a data-driven approach to optimising. We

let the numbers do the talking. Based on the numbers, we
make changes to the account to improve its performance,
improve profitability, more sales, and that’s what
optimisation is and why we need it.

How often should you be optimising?

There is no real fixed answer to this, as it really does depend
on the size of the account, and what you are spending. For
example, an account which is spending $1,000 per month,
would require far less work and attention compared to an
account that might be spending $100,000 per month.

However, what I would say, is when optimising, ensure you

have enough days data to work with. Looking only at the last
24 hours’ data for a small account could potentially be
misleading, as a drop in conversions for example, could have
been caused by external factors, even as simple as the
weather, or school holidays. It is therefore fair to say that a
reasonable number of days of data would be at least 7 to 14
days, again, it all depends on the size of your Google Ads
account.

In the next section, I will go into more detail about the types
of optimisations I conduct, but for now, I usually break down
my optimisation tasks by week, month & quarterly.

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Weekly optimisation tasks

Here I am checking general things such as my keyword,

negative keyword, which ads are performing and those that
are not, what’s costing me a lot of money but not driving any
sales, can I see any emerging patterns of something going
well, as well as any potential alarm bells that I need to be
aware of.

Monthly optimisation tasks

I usually carry this out during the first week of each month.
This is where I stand back and look at more of a macro level.
What have we really achieved last month? What went well?
What did not go so well? I then look at strategies I can develop
moving forward, experiments I can perform (for example
testing different bidding strategies, or landing pages etc). As
a result, I can steer the way forward by looking at a reasonable
number of days' data.

Quarterly optimisation tasks

For quarterly optimisation tasks, not only do we look at the

Google Ads account but need to understand more about the
business itself. We need to check that to ensure what did
during the last quarter, was in-line with business objectives.
Likewise, moving forward, what strategies do we need to
implement to ensure they are in-line with the business
objectives. These can be:

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 ● Financial, i.e. Revenue generated, ROI, other Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs)
● Products or Services to promote which could be
seasonal. i.e., for furniture, maybe the next lot of
promotions will be around outdoor furniture for
summer.
● Number of new customers acquired as well as setting
targets for the next quarter.

We also need to review where are we currently advertising,

and what other advertising platforms can we advertise on,
this could be anything from:
● Video marketing (.e. YouTube)
● Display
● Retargeting
● … and so on

What optimisation tasks should we be

carrying out?
There are so many ways in which you can improve your
account by optimising it, in order to run a profitable and
successful Google Ads account. I have listed a few different
optimisation tasks which we do regularly when optimising
Google Ads accounts within our agency. I will not go into
each and every option, but more so give you a good guide on
the most impactful options for optimising your Google Ads
account to help grow your business.

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Prioritise Your Optimisation

First and foremost, prioritise your optimisation tasks based

on the factors that have the greatest impact on your business,
whether that be revenue generated, costs, number of
conversions etc.

I am naturally therefore drawn to the campaigns that have the

highest spend levels but have low number of conversions or
low ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

Decide internally what your core focus or weekly priorities

are going to be for your business.

Campaign Optimisation

Again, my initial focus goes to the higher spending

campaigns, and I usually glance at all campaigns to see
whether I can see any alarm bells, i.e., a campaign has spent a
lot of money but has not resulted in conversions or revenue.

Types of things you can look at a Campaign level are:

● Bid strategies.
o Is the bid strategy you are using efficient and
the most appropriate one. For example, you
may have been using Manual CPC.
However, is it time to switch to a smart bid
strategy such as Maximize Conversion as an
example.
o Have we set a Target Cost-Per-Action and is
the value we set, still the correct one.

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 o Have we set a Maximum Cost-Per-Click?
Maybe our CPCs are too high, so it is always
a good idea to have a value.
● Location.
o Are we targeting the correct locations?
o Have we excluded locations which we do not
wish to cater for.
o Have we set the right ‘Detailed location
options’ to ensure we are only targeting
people who are within the areas we are
targeting.
● Device.
o Hopefully, it may not surprise you to know
over 60% of traffic to most sites comes from
mobile phones. Looking at your Device
settings you can see a breakdown of
conversions for Mobile Computer and
Tablet. So, here’s the question… Which
device is costing you a lot of money in terms
of clicks, but not generating you any
conversions? These would be the devices that
you can Bid Down on which is a way of
telling Google to spend less on these devices.
Similarly, you can choose to Bid Up on the
profitable devices.
● Ad Schedule.
o This is one that is usually under-estimated.
Think about what day of the week your
customers usually buy. Similarly, what time
of the day are they more likely to buy. You

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 can use the Google Ads Reports to get this
information which we will cover in the next
section. Then you simply adjust the Ad
Schedule to tell Google, which days of the
week you would like your Ads to appear as
well as what time of the day. What’s the point
in paying for clicks on certain days or hours
of the day which are not profitable?

Ad Group Optimisation

Click into a campaign. Which campaign? You decide. You

create your list of priorities in terms of which campaign you
wish to click on first so that you can review the Ad groups
within it.

As a first point of call, I always base my priority based on

those that are spending a lot of money, but either:
● Lack conversions
● Conversion Rate is low
● Cost Per Action is high

I do this as these are clearly the campaigns that require the

most amount of attention.

There are so many factors that can influence why an Ad group

might be performing poorly, which include Keywords and
Ads, which we will cover in the next section.
So, from an Ad group perspective, more importantly, I check
to see if there are missed opportunities. I ask questions such
as:

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 ● Have I covered all themes which are relevant to the
campaign? In other words, are there other groups I
need to add?
● Are there Ad groups which may be too similar, so
may actually benefit from being consolidated into
one Ad group, for ease of maintenance?
● Which Ad group do I need to click into first to
examine it more closely?
● Review to see if all Keywords within an Ad group are
correctly themed and are relevant to one another.

Keyword Optimisation
I usually find that this is where I end up spending most of my
time. Analysing Keywords. There is so much you can do here,
but some of the most basics include:

● Quality Score
o Look at your Quality Score for keywords. I
usually first apply a filter to show me
keywords which have received more than
“x” number of clicks. In this way, I know I’m
only looking at keywords which have been
costly or are in demand. I can then focus my
time and attention on these. I then sort by
lowest quality score. This is where the fun
really starts, to see why the quality score,

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 maybe so low. There could be numerous
reasons from:
• Low budget
• Low Click-Through-Rate (CTR). See
what you can to help increase your
CTR. Maybe amend your Ad copy in
your Headlines and ensure your Ad
Strength is good.
• The Keywords may not be highly
relevant to the Ad group and Ads.
This could be a sign that your Ad
groups are not organised well too.
● Search Terms
o Remember, keywords are what you have
told Google you want your Ads shown on the
Google pages for, but Search Terms is what
the user actually used to find your Ads.
Although you have specified Keywords,
depending on the match type, and other
factors such as close variations of the
keywords, synonyms etc, you can see this
information by clicking on the ‘Search terms’
tab. Checking your search terms should
therefore be done as often as possible,
depending on the size of your account.

So, what do you do by looking at search

terms?
Look for search terms which have keywords in them, that are
not relevant to your business. In which case you can Add

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these as “Negative Keywords” For example, see the following
table:

Keyword Match Types Possible Search

Terms

“office chairs” Phrase ● Leather office

chairs
● Office chair
designer
● Office chair
repairs
● Cost of office
chairs

Looking at the table above, we can see some search terms

which were triggered by this keyword which may not be
relevant, i.e., “designer” – As this is possibly someone who is
looking for a designer, as well as “repairs” – Maybe this is a
service you do not provide. In this case, you can add
“designer” and “repairs” as a Negative keyword, which
means moving forward, your ad will not show for search
terms which contain these words:

● Match Types
o We discussed what match types are in setting up Ad
the groups section. Depending on how you use your
Match Types, it will have a huge impact on your
account’s performance. It is therefore absolutely
imperative you understand how to optimise match

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 types. So, what optimisation can we do for match
types? As always there are numerous ways to do any
task in Google. I have therefore listed two of the most
common ways I use to optimise Match Types.
• Separating
· So that you can better analyse performance of
match types, it sometimes helps to separate
them into their own Ad Groups. For example,
you might wish to put Exact Match keywords
into one ad group and Phrase into another. In
this case, it is important that you ensure you
have the negative keyword equivalent in the
Phrase Match, i.e., ensure that for the
keywords you have in the Phrase Match, you
have added their Exact Match equivalent as
negative keywords. Furthermore, if you
separate keywords into Campaigns, you
have better control over budgets too, i.e., you
may wish to only spend a small percentage of
your budget on Broad Match compared to
Exact Match.
• Costs and Conversions / you’re your KPIs
· Analyse which match types may be costing
you a lot of money but not driving you any
conversions! In which case, you need to
decide whether you keep those match types,
or do you minimise your spend on them.

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Device Optimisation

What device are your ads being shown on? When I talk about
devices, I’m referring to Mobile, Desktop Computer or
Tablets. When it comes to optimisation, you need to look at
the statistics to see which devices are your conversions
coming from? In which case, Google Ads allows you to adjust
your bids, so that you bid more on these. Likewise, which
device may be costing you a lot of money but are not
generating you any conversions. In this case, you need to do
something called a negative bid adjustment. For example, if
you find that on Tablets, you are wasting your money, you
can say to Google, bid down on this device by 20%, or
whatever you wish.

Location Optimisation
Think about the areas you wish to target. It’s good to be a big
fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. This
means that you will have better control of your budget too as
it is being more focused to the area that you wish to serve.

To help with this you can also look at the report available by
taking on the report's option at the top of the Google page and
looking at the predefined location reports. Such reports will
show you where most of your clicks are coming from but
more importantly where your conversions may be coming
from. You can then decide to adjust your location settings so
that they are showing ads to people in areas which are driving
you more conversions.

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Day / Hour Optimisation

Depending on which industry you are in or which products

or services you sell, potential buyers will be looking at your
ads or inquiring about your products or services during
different days of the week as well as different times of the day.

An example of this is if you have a furniture website. you may

find that during the daytime your potential buyers are at
work and are therefore not able to make a purchase. this could
simply be because they may wish to consult their partner first
in which case, they are more likely to buy or inquire during
the evenings.

In both cases above, you have the ability to optimise your ad

scheduling so that you add only appear during certain days
of the week as well as certain hours of the day. Similarly, it is
possible to adjust your ad scheduling so that your ads do not
appear at all during certain days of the week. For example,
you may be closed on a Sunday and may not be able to take
telephone calls. In this case, it makes sense to adjust your ad
scheduling so that your ads do not appear on Sundays which
means that you are saving money and avoiding wasted clicks.

On a final note, if we were to get more advanced, we might

like to take into account that certain people may research on
a specific date of the week but make the actual purchase on
another day of the week. For example, people may wish to
research on a Sunday but make a purchase on a Monday. My
point being when adjusting your ad scheduling it's important

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that you test, test and test to see what the impact of your bid
adjustments may have resulted in.

Bid Strategy Optimisation

In the Budget and Bidding section, we discussed the various
bidding strategies that are available within Google ads. A
common mistake is people set a bidding strategy and forget
to review it. It is absolutely imperative that you keep on top
of your big strategy to ensure it is the correct one. For
example, when you first launch a campaign, you may have
decided to use the Manual CPC strategy. It is now time to take
a look to see how many conversions you have and how old
how many clicks you had on your website. Ideally, in order
to switch to a smart bidding strategy such as maximise
conversions you need at least 15 conversions within the last
30 days. This is a bit of a debatable subject as many people
including Google themselves now suggest that it is possible
to use a smart bidding strategy even if you have fewer
conversions in the last 30 days as the algorithm is clever
enough to work out the biding it needs to use for your
keywords.

The great news is Google ads allow you to conduct something

called “Experiments”. Experiments can be used where you
may wish you try a bid strategy but may not wish to fully
commit to it yet as you do not know how it will perform. In
this case, you can set up an experiment telling Google that
although you are currently using a specific bid strategy for
example manual CPC, you wish to try a different bid strategy
such as maximise conversions. Furthermore, you can specify

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a percentage, in other words, you can say to Google that you
wish to keep 60% of your traffic towards the current bid
strategy i.e. manual CPC, but only 40% towards the new
strategy which you wish to test i.e. maximise conversions.
after running the experiment for a few days, I would suggest
at least two weeks, you will easily and quickly be able to see
how each bid strategy performed and can then make a
decision as to whether you already to now change to the new
bid strategy or you wish to keep the existing one that you
have.

Budget Optimisation
In addition to optimising various factors by reading your
Google ads account, you may also wish to review your budget
in terms of firstly, are we on track with our weekly or monthly
spend? The common problem that I see in many accounts
whereby budgets run over as they have not been reviewed in
a timely fashion. So, depending on the size of your account
you need to decide how often you need to review your budget
to make sure that you are not overspending and at the same
time make sure that you are not significantly under spending
too.

I also suggest taking a look at campaigns which may be

delivering great results but may be limited by budget. In
which case increase in the budget within these campaigns
could lead to more conversions as a quick win. Please
remember that when increasing budgets, I suggest only
increasing in the region of around 10% to 15% at a time and
letting the campaign run for at least seven days before making

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another adjustment. Making huge adjustments in one go, may
need your account to go back into learning mode again.
Campaigns go into Learning Mode when Google has to learn
again, how best to bid on your keywords. This is normally
triggered by what Google may consider, a reasonable number
of changes within a short period of time.

Following on from the above in a similar fashion if you find

you have campaigns which are underperforming, and you
have conducted all the other optimizations it may be time to
reduce the budget under your campaigns.

Impression Share
Impression share is a great way to see what percentage of the
time your Ads are actually showing up on Google. Googles
definition is:

What is impression share in Google ads?

“Impression share (IS) is the percentage of
impressions that your ads receive compared to the
total number of impressions that your ads could get.
Impression share = impressions / total eligible
impressions.”

There are various factors that can influence your Impression

share, some of which include
● Budget
● Max CPC
● Quality of your Ads

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 ● Targeting settings

You need to go through these and look at any other factor that
may be influencing your impression share if you feel your
impression share is low.

Review “Recommendations”
On the second navigation panel which is on the left-hand side
OK Google ads. The screen you will see an option called
recommendations. It is worth clicking on this option
periodically as Google will make recommendations as to how
you can improve the performance of your Google ads
account. A word of caution is not to believe everything
Google suggests. I usually only agree with a roundabout 40%
of Google's recommendations. And that's because I
understand my websites and my clients’ websites a lot better
than Google's algorithm. So, for me, it's not only about
looking at the numbers but the quality of various factors such
as the keywords and so on. So, if you have been given a
recommendation which you do not agree with simply click on
it and click on dismiss. As a result of this, you will now be left
with recommendations that you are happy to look further
into and apply to your campaigns if appropriate.

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18) Step 7 - Audit

By conducting a regular audit on your Google ads account,

not only would you find areas of improvement, but also areas
where you can save money and get more conversions. You
would also use this to discover new opportunities which you
may not have yet been aware of or considered. Furthermore,
by auditing your account periodically you also need to make
sure that you are in line with your monthly quarterly or
yearly objectives.

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Contrary to popular myths, Google Ads is not a Plug and Play
system. Automation does not mean you set something up and
it will run forever itself. Remember, Google always wins.
Regardless of whether you get enquiries/sales or not, they are
taking your hard-earned money. So please avoid putting
100% trust into their algorithm, as they will love you for it!

Google ads is one of the most comprehensive and

complicated digital marketing platforms available to date. It
is therefore important that audits are conducted on a regular
basis. We do this by following a structure, to help ensure we
have not missed anything out.

As an agency, each time we take on a brand-new client who

may already have an existing campaign, we always conduct
an audit first. By doing so, it helps us to create a roadmap of
everything that needs to be done, as well as highlighting areas
that require urgent attention.

So now let’s get into the areas I look at when conducting

audits.

Website
As obvious as this sounds the very first thing, I always check
is the website. And this is because the website is ultimately
usually where we send help potential visitors to when they
click on our Ads. Many of the items I check for have been
covered in the Access section of this book. But essentially, it's
things like:
● Is the website even working?

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 ● Is the navigation working?
● Speed of website.
● Do they even have unique landing pages for the
products or services wish to promote? Ideally you
should have unique landing pages for each of your
campaigns.
● Good call directions.

Conversion Tracking

“What gets measured gets done”…

- [Peter Drucker]

Unsurprisingly this is where I find most of the initial

problems within the Google ads audit.

Google Analytics

Firstly, ensure that the Google ads account has been correctly
linked and set up with Google Analytics. Although we have
not covered Google Analytics in great detail, it is the main tool
that will give you in-depth data as to the behaviours of your
website visitors.

Goals

Goals is what you would use in order to track your

conversions. Conversions can be anything from telephone
calls, someone filling in a form on your website, someone
making a purchase on your website, someone subscribing to
a newsletter on your website, emailing you from your website

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and so on. It is up to you to define which conversions you
wish to track. My recommendation is to focus on conversions
which are tangible to your business, for example, if someone
fills in an inquiry form that's a potentially tangible benefit to
your business. If, however somebody visits your page, I
would not classify that as a tangible benefit. I say this because
I'm always shocked at the amount of conversion tracking, I
see where people are classifying an important part of your
website or a page on the website classified as a conversion.

By having goals and conversions set up, not only is it helping

you to understand which of your campaigns, Ad groups,
keywords etc are working, but more importantly, this data let
Google's smart bidding algorithms use to determine how they
should bid on various keywords.

“The quality of your conversion tracking is

paramount. I commonly used the phrase GIGO,
which stands for “Garbage In Garbage Out”; if
you feed Google with garbage information, i.e.,
poor tracking, it's going to give you garbage
results, i.e. costly and less profitable
campaigns.”

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 Structure of your Campaigns and Ad
Groups
Review the structure of your campaigns and add groups and
assess whether they are in line with your business objectives
your products and your services. You also need to assess the
campaigns that are doing very well compared to those that
may require more attention. When looking at your campaign
settings it is also important to drill down into each aspect of
that campaign. For example:
● bid strategies
● location settings
● ad scheduling
● device targeting

Ads and Extensions

Your ads are ultimately what your potential customers will
read and as a result determine whether they wish to click on
them or click on your competitors’ ads. Check each ad group
to ensure you have at least two to three ads. Furthermore,
check to ensure that the ads that you do have are driving your
conversions. At this point in time, it is also a good idea to
ensure the ad copy is good and well written. Not only do you
wish to attract people to click on the ads, but you also wish to
disqualify people from clicking on your ads if your products
or services are not suitable for them. Always keep in account
click-through-rate (CTR) is one of the most important metrics
Google users to determine your quality score.

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Next, we need to ensure that you are using the main
extensions for each of your campaigns and ad groups which
we covered in an earlier section. Buy extensions I mean things
like:

● Sitelinks
● Call extensions
● Callout extensions
● Image extensions
● Location extensions
● Etc.

Search Terms
Go through the search terms to ensure that they are all
relevant to your products and services. For those that are not
add them as negative keywords. Use this as an opportunity to
discover new keywords too. If you do discover new keywords
that you have not thought of, add them as keywords with the
appropriate match type with the appropriate ad group.

Reporting
To help with all the above, Google has a reporting section
which contains some predefined reports.

You can access the predefined reports by clicking on

● Reports
● Predefined reports (Dimensions)
● Then selecting which report you want to see.

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It would not be possible for me to talk through every single
report because there are too many of these. However, I
suggest going through each of these and picking out the
report that you wish to take a look at on a regular basis.

What's great is that you can firstly customise then Save these
reports, and can also download the reports onto your
computer, or schedule these reports to the emailed over to
you periodically e.g., monthly.

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19) Some Final Thoughts

I have pretty much said what I wanted to say in this book. I

seriously can go on and on. It’s been difficult for me to write
this book… very difficult. As I’m more of a practical person,
so reading and writing is not really in my forte. However, I’m
truly passionate about what I do, and want to help as many
people and businesses as possible. With that in mind, I have
a few additional quick nuggets of thoughts and suggestions
for those who may wish to embark on the journey of
implementing Google Ads strategies for their business.

Google Analytics
This has to be an absolute Must for every business. If you do
not have it installed or are not sure, get in touch with a
marketeer and ask them to check.

Managing customer expectations

Don’t sell your customers a dream. Your customer will want
results tomorrow. Even for brand new campaigns. It is your
job to manage their expectations. During my two-decades or
so of managing customers, I’ve learnt, it is best to educate
your customers, set realistic expectations, instead of trying to
simply win their business by telling them what they wish to
hear. Such strategies are short-lived, and you will end up
working every hour of the day, to retain that customer!

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 Recruiting the right staff
For me, in my digital marketing agency, it has always been to
hire people, who have a passion for what they are applying
for, whether it be Google Ads, or building websites. I’m a firm
believer of productivity over the “9 till 5” mentality. The
financial rewards are just a bi-product of the hard work, and
the passion you put into the work you do.

You don’t have to hire the best of the best. If you already have
great staff who are willing to train, hire those who are willing
to learn and haven’t spent the last two-decades working for
people such as “that yellow directory” company, who prey on
short-cuts to monetising from their clients from building sub-
standard campaigns which attract their customers!

Outsource of DIY? (Do It Yourself)?

There is no real answer. If you outsource, are you equipped
with some knowledge about what to look out for when hiring
a freelancer or agency. I’m hoping that by reading this book,
you will be well on your way. As you will stand a much better
chance of getting better results from your marketing agency
or freelancer, simply because they know, you are asking the
right questions and are not starting off on a blank sheet!

If you do however decide you take the DIY approach, that’s

also good. As long as you continually update your
knowledge, what’s working, what isn’t working so well with
Google Ads, strategies, new features and so much more.

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In my personal opinion, do what you know best. Focus on
building and serving your customers. Leave the rest to the
experts who do this day-in, day-out!

Here at my agency, we have a full team. A team that

specialises in understanding customer requirements to build
the campaign right from day one. We have a team who
specialises in optimising Google Ads campaigns day-in-day
out. They even have Optimisation & Eggs for breakfast! We
have expert copy-writers and so much more. If you feel you
are adequately equipped with handling the day to day
running of your Google Ads account as well as
troubleshooting, then be my guest. Else, reach out and let’s
have a chat about how we can help your business grow!

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20) What Next?

First and foremost, I Thank you unconditionally for taking the

time to buy this book and to go through it.

Implement things you have learned, or ask your team

members, your agency, questions based on your learning.

It has taken me years of hard work, losing lots of money, and

working on hundreds of Google Ads accounts to really
understand what makes Google Ads works.

I’m here to help you fast-track your success and avoid the
costly mistakes I have made. If you have any questions about
anything written inside the book, or want help with your
Google Ads / digital marketing, please feel free to reach out
to me using my contact details below, or emailing me
personally on [email protected].

Similarly, maybe you are just starting out on your journey to

business, and may wish to discuss the Do’s and Don’ts when
it comes to marketing. Whatever the case, feel free to reach
out to me as we also have various digital marketing
mentoring and training programs

As promised…

You qualify for a Free Google Ads Audit!

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Not only will the review look at your Google Ads, we will
look at other factors which may help your business to grow,
such as your website, how well your website is performing on
organic Google (SEO) and so much more. You will get a video
personally recorded by myself.

Book your Free Google Ads Audit by visiting

www.ajaydhunna.com/freereview

Remember to mention in the description, “Claiming My Free

PPC Audit as per your book”

I would also like you to join me on my YouTube channel

where I publish weekly videos as well as my Instagram

For this go to:

YouTube: https://youtube.com/ajaydhunna

Instagram: https://instagram.com/ajaydhunnaofficial

If you wish to reach out to be, visit my website and feel free
to get in touch on www.ajaydhunna.com

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You could also visit this link: https://qrco.de/ajaydhunna or
scan this QR code for all these links:

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