Google Ads Checklist

Why should you use this checklist?

Has this ever been you?

2 hours wasted. Again. You’re staring at a screen full of search results about Google Ads. You don’t know whether to download “The Ultimate, Life-Changing Guide to PPC & Google Ads” or “The All in One Ultimate Guide to Google Ads.”

What’s the difference? You just need a step-by-step guide to get started.

Should you set up a Google account? Should you sign up for Google AdWords? What actually is PPC? Is that different from CPC? What about conversion tracking? Google Analytics? It seems like every day you’re losing money because of all the confusion and hassle you get every time you try to figure this out. You don’t even know whether you really need to run Google Ads, let alone how to set up ad groups, figure out match types, or controlling for negative keywords.

We can’t get you back lost time reading useless blog posts, but we have something that will sort all of this out for you! This checklist will get you on the right track to making money from your Google Ads campaigns in no time.

What’s in this Google Ads checklist?

The very first steps to running your Google Ad campaigns are explained right here. This checklist is designed to make sure you have a perfect setup by explaining the following steps:

• Figuring out if you need Google Ads Manager
• Creating a ready to use Google Ads account
• Tracking your conversions – actually making money from your Google Ads!

How should you use this Google Ads checklist?

Use this checklist if this is your first time running Google Ads or you’re setting up new campaigns for a client.

1. The first step is to determine whether you want to run Google Ads.
2. Run through the steps on the checklist
3. Re-use this checklist if you are setting this up for the first time. If you’re never going to set up Google Ads again, don’t worry about repeating this process, just keep working on optimizing your PPC campaigns and make Google search work for you!

Beyond this checklist…

This is just the first step in understanding everything there is to know about PPC and Google Ads. If you start running ads without doing anything else, your conversion rates and quality score probably won’t look too good. There will still be a lot of optimization to be done to increase those metrics, from your landing page to your ad copy.

You’ll also want to dive deeper into the details of how Google Ads actually works. It will also be very useful to know how an ad group works, and how to use ad extensions to increase your CTR (or click-through rate,) and ultimately increase conversion rates. The structure of a PPC campaign can be confusing, and it can get difficult to fully optimize if you don’t set up an ad group correctly in the first place or your campaign settings are not quite right.

Another helpful aspect is understanding keyword match types (to balance broad match and exact match) so you can make sure you are getting the biggest return on ad spend (ROAS) for your daily budget.

To figure out this complicated web of Google Ads and the PPC world in general, check out the section of the ClickMinded digital marketing template library dedicated solely to paid advertising campaigns.