2022 Google Ads Checklist: Understand PPC and Make Great Ads

There is, of course, more nuance to PPC advertising than that. You control where your ads show up around the web, what they look like, and the amount you would like to spend per month. You can read our full breakdown in March's monthly tip 'SEO vs PPC: How They Work to Increase Qualified Leads.'  

JTech recommends using Google’s ad service for your pay-per-click advertisements. Overall, Google Ads is the better option because: 

Pay-per-click advertisements place your advertisement into the first, second, or third spot on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Your SERP results positively affect conversions—leading to a 50% higher conversion rate over organic traffic.

Google’s PPC advertisement platform allows you to reach a global or local audience with its regional targeting features. You can limit where your ads display by zip code, state, country, and various stages in between. 

Google users make nearly 2 trillion searches per year. So, no matter where you’re advertising, you’ll have strong and consistent traffic. 

Google is constantly improving its ad service tools. Google Ads alone made up 85% of their parent company, Alphabet’s, revenue in 2021. That means that Alphabet made upwards of $61.2 billion from their ad service alone. 

For this reason, Google’s ad team regularly reinvests in their PPC ad service tools—A.K.A. Google Ads will dramatically improve as time goes on. 

More than any other ad service program, Google Ads provides a wealth of user activity data to business owners. Why? Google wants you to succeed and become a returning customer with its ad service program. 

Google ad campaigns provide you with information about where your customers go on your site, how many times they take the actions you want them to, and the actions they take once they get there. You still need to tell Google’s tracking code where to look, but tracking your desired result will give you incredibly useful data.

Okay! Now you know why you should run Google Ads for your next PPC campaign. It’s time to learn how.

Creating an effective PPC campaign for your business requires a combination of social science and data analysis. The most important, and time-intensive, part of your PPC campaign is developing who your customers are and what your customers will be looking for. Consequently, most of the items on our Google Ads Checklist revolve around understanding your customers. 

To create a successful PPC ad, follow these steps:

The audience you target with your ad copy is everything. Are you trying to appeal to new retirees? Young professionals? Depending on your answer, you will need to pull different information to set up your Google Ads campaign.

Our team of digital marketers is well versed in the art of understanding audiences by demographics and intention, and that expertise drives our PPC and keyword decisions. 

We’re still in the information-gathering phase of our PPC campaign. Now, you’ll want to gather keywords that closely align with your PPC campaign’s goal. There are different kinds of keywords, you can target intentions like:

Depending on your product and your brand, you’ll want to target a series of keywords that closely align with your offerings and goals. The JTech team uses specialized tools to help us find this information faster and more efficiently, but you can research this information yourself—to an extent—by making educated guesses and searching Google.

Now, gather the keywords you would like to target into a list so they’re ready to be input into your Google Ads campaign.

Every website is assigned something Google calls a ‘Quality Score’ that indicate the user experience your site offers to customers. Quality scores are influenced by three factors:

The better your quality score, the better your ad rank and the more frequently your ad will be displayed. 

If this campaign is your first, you will mainly be in control of the second two aspects—click-through rates are determined by historical ad campaign data. You can up your web page's quality by increasing your on-page and technical SEO optimization. A properly optimized page will naturally be more relevant to your ads than a page that's poorly optimized. 

If you’ve decided to run a display ad campaign, gather or create the images you would like to use in your advertisements. The more images you can gather for your PPC campaigns, the better.

Now, it’s time to build your campaigns! Create your Google Ads account and start building out your advertisements using the information you’ve gathered. Make sure they stay within Google’s ad policy when creating your ad copy! Google Ads will do a lot to help you create your first ad but keep a notebook handy in case you get lost.

Like images, the more options you can give Google's ad service, the better. That's where hiring a team of professionals comes in handy—good ad copy takes a lot of time to write!

Google ad extensions control where your ads lead to or what they prompt your potential customers to do. This can mean links to product pages, your home page, a phone number, or another conversion goal your team has set. 

Choose an ad extension that makes sense for your business.

Once your PPC campaign is set up and running, you’ll need to constantly monitor it for:

You’ll want to regularly refine the keywords you target and the language you use to maximize the performance of your ads. For this reason, our team offers several pay-per-click management plans to help you create, manage, and optimize your Google ad campaigns.

If you would like to start a PPC campaign of your own, but don’t have the time to follow this checklist, please reach out! We would love to help.