Google Ads: The Complete Guide

Conversions are the bread and butter of Google Ads. If you’re not tracking them, you don’t have a chance of knowing how your campaigns are performing and how valuable they are to your business. Learn the different types of conversions available to track, how to track them on your website, and how to use conversion reporting to optimize campaigns. 

Learn about the hierarchy of a Google Ads account and what you should consider when breaking out campaigns and ad groups. We also have a handy infographic that shows all the settings and features that can be used at the account, campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad levels. 

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover every account, campaign, and ad group setting in Google Ads, including the settings Google doesn’t want you to know about! We’ll tell you best practices for settings and weigh the pros and cons of all the options available to advertisers. From location targeting options to network settings and content exclusions, you’ll be empowered to optimize all of your Google Ads settings to improve performance.

In this guide we’ll dive deep into all the keyword match types (close variants and all), adding keywords to your ad groups, and keyword management techniques. Plus, we’ll make you an expert on the complex ad auction and explain how Google prioritizes similar keywords in the same account. 

Follow along as we dive deep into advanced targeting methods in Google Ads. Learn about the difference between targeting and observing audiences along with how to find new customers with contextual or audience-based targeting.

This is the ultimate bid strategy guide for performance-driven marketers. We’ll go through every option available to advertisers and dive deep into the pros and cons of every strategy, when to use them, how to measure success with different strategies, and how to optimize settings based on your bid strategy.

After reading the previous sections, you are finally ready to create some ads! In this section, we’ll walk through all the ad types available for search, display, and video campaigns in Google ads. We’ll tell you how and where to set them up, best practices, responsive formats, image sizes, and character limits. 

Next, we’ll cover Google Ads’ extensions, the icing on the cake of your fully optimized account! We’ll talk about all of the extensions available, from sitelinks to call extensions, and tell you how to set them up, how to know if they’re right for your campaign, and when they’ll appear in the SERPs. 

Without proper tracking in place, it’s impossible to accurately measure the performance of your campaigns. This section covers UTM parameters including what they are, what you can track with them, and various options for implementation in Google Ads. Plus, our downloadable guide to ValueTrack parameters covers the values they return and the campaign types they’re compatible with. 

In the previous sections, you’ve learned how to set your campaigns up for success, but the key to a fully optimized Google Ads account is experimentation. In this guide, we’ll break down strategies and best practices for Google Ads campaign experiments. Learn how to set up data-driven A/B testing in your account to find strategies that move the needle.