How To Prepare For Using Google Ads

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Are you ready to use Google Ads ? That’s a question you need to answer before setting up your first Google Ads account. If you’re not ready, you may need to pause things for a few days, do some preparations and come back later.

Google Ads, the mainstay of every digital marketing agency and advertiser on the planet. There are a number of questions you need to answer before starting to use Google Ads.

What Will You Sell?

On the web, there are basically two options:

Either sell your own products,
or someone else’s.

We say products but in fact you could sell anything from an iPhone, to a piece of furniture to an e-book, financial consulting or a newsletter. Here we will just use “product” as a generic name, meaning any item or service.

Knowing what you want to sell leads you to the next question:

Do You Have a Website?

Owning a website is a must if you want to sell online. However, if you don’t have a website you can build a very basic one of your own very quickly and easily using Google Sites. Learn more about Google Sites from this short Youtube video.

If you don’t have a website and are an affiliate instead – meaning that you sell someone else’s products for commission, the Google Ads rules are slightly different. If you’re an affiliate that wishes to drive traffic to their parent company’s website you should read the “What should I know as an affiliate advertiser?” article from the Google Ads help pages.

Does Your Site Sell?

Do you think your website is appealing enough to close the deal? Adwords will drive more traffic to your website, but if your site isn’t up to scratch you will not be able to convert those visits to your website into sales. Adwords can’t help you sell unless you send prospective customers to the right webpage – the one that keeps the promise in the ad.

Our advice is that you make sure your site sells. Your website should be efficient in converting prospects into customers. Because, from the moment you’ve set your ad up and running, the visitors cost you money. Besides, what’s the point in driving prospective customers to your website if they can’t find what they’re looking for?

This is probably the right moment for us to introduce the term “landing page” – this is the webpage where you send the people that click on your ad. The landing page does not have to be your home page. On the contrary, it’s best if you send your prospects to the specific part of your website that relates directly to your ad.

The landing page can be part of a website, or just a stand-alone page.

We cover landing pages in far more detail in our Advanced Techniques article “How To Build Landing Pages That Work“.

Can You Pay for It?

There isn’t a minimum spending commitment with Google Ads, there is a one time activation fee of €5 for opening your account and the minimum cost per click is €0.01 or €0.20 for every 1000 internet users that sees your ad. Google Ads accepts major international credit cards, debit cards, direct debit, and bank transfer payments.You choose the currency you want to use before setting up your account (and are unable to change this option later).

You have two payment options – either postpay or prepay. As a note of caution, you choose either postpay or prepay at the very beginning of setting up your Google Ads account and are unable to change this setting later. However, you can change the credit card or account etc. at a later date if you wish.

Postpay – You only pay after building up advertising costs and are billed every 30 days.
Prepay – You add funds to your account, and your advertising costs are deducted from that balance. When you run out of funds, your ads stop until you make another payment.

You have the liberty to adjust your advertising budget to what you feel comfortable spending. Adwords allows you to set a daily budget for each of your advertising campaigns, so you have total control on your spend.

What Are Your Advertising Goals?

Before setting up your Google Ads account it’s best to figure out what goals you have for this advertising campaign.

Ask yourself the following questions to help determine your advertising goals:

What does your company (or division) do? Do you have different product lines? What are they?
Who’s your primary audience (target market) for your products and services? Do you need to reach different audiences with separate ads?
What are you trying to sell or promote? What do you want people to do (buy, visit, download, subscribe)?
What results would you like to see? What would you consider a good return on your investment?

Once you have established your goals you will find it much easier to set up your first ad campaign and later on you will be able to use Google Ads reporting to determine if you’ve reached those goals.

Of note: Before setting up your account make sure that the product you wish to advertise complies with Google’s advertising policies.

This and all the Redfly Google Ads Tutorials are available on Youtube.
Further Reading: We recommend reading How To Understand Google Ads next, or select from one of our growing number of tutorials below.