How To Launch Your First AdWords Ad Starting At $5/Day

Since the dawn of online advertising, one platform has been a clear number one choice – Google AdWords. With billions of search results delivered every day and hundreds of millions of users, you can rest assured your advertisement will reach your audience perfectly.

With new competitors entering the market of online advertising all the time, and existing competitors such as Facebook and Bing strengthening their foothold in the business, Google has lost some foothold.

However, with most of their revenue coming from their advertising business, you can be sure the multi-billion dollar search giant will fight for every inch of the way. And they seem to be holding their ground extremely well, as they still continue to grow their advertising numbers steadily.

This beginner’s introduction to advertising on AdWords is an effective and enlightening read that won’t take you the whole day to understand and the whole night to implement.

The Basics

An ad served by Google AdWords is one of those so called ‘sponsored search results’ at the top of each page, sometimes even on the sidebar and bottom for the more popular keywords. Here’s an example of what they look like in action:

When you decide that you need to have an advertisement on Google, you’ll need to keep in mind a few important factors.

First of all, you’ll need to have your desired keywords planned out and ready to go.

Secondly, you’ll need to keep in mind that you have to direct the visitors somewhere after they click your advertisement.

We here at ClickFunnels offer a 14-day free trial by redirecting our customers to a separate landing page, allowing them to sign up for their trial without any extra hassle.

The third and final factor to consider is your target audience. You need to have a clear picture in your mind (and preferably written down) about who you want to target, and not just by age or gender.

Geographical locations and spoken languages are also important as distinguishing between potential customers and random visitors is not always easy.

Don’t make this any harder on yourself than it has to be, which it isn’t, like at all.

If you do the planning well upfront and have everything you need ready to go, when you start creating your first advertising campaign it’ll be a breeze.

Before We Start…

First and foremost, as a Google product, AdWords requires you to have, or at least to create, a Google Account to use it.

You can either head over to your familiar Google login screen or handle it from within AdWords later on. I just thought I’d make sure you realized that Google wants you to have a Google Account in order to use a Google product.

Clever, eh?

Creating Your AdWords Account – Step 1

Head over to AdWords and click ‘Start now’.

After clicking the blue button you’ll be redirected to the first step of a four step process, which includes filling in some information about your business, details of your first campaign, billing information and reviewing the advertisement.

If you’re like me and already have a Google Apps for Work account or a personal Google Account, the email address is entered automatically into the first field and you only need to sign up later.

For those of you who have used AdWords before, Google will automatically log you into the account and redirect you to your AdWords dashboard, but as this is a beginner ‘How To’ we’ll focus on creating that very first advertisement on AdWords.

To finish step one and continue to step two you’ll just need to sign in or sign up for an AdWords/Google account depending on your starting situation, and you will be able to access step two when you’ve successfully created an AdWords account.

AdWords Campaign Settings – Step 2

In this step you’ll be building your very first campaign within AdWords. Now that you’ve created your new account, you’ll be able to start your campaign by selecting ‘Campaign’ and then selecting ‘Search Network Only’ .

For today, we’ll only be creating a campaign on the ‘Search Network’, and in the future as you become more experienced and familiarise yourself around AdWords, you can try launching ads on the ‘Google Display Network’ too.

Firstly you’ll need to set a name for your campaign, followed by choosing the type of ads that you want to use.

At this stage, keep it simple and select ‘Standard’.

You can see the way Google explains the reason to select the ‘Standard’ option below:

Next you’ll be selecting your networks and devices. It should look something like this below:

Be sure to have ‘Include Search Partners’ unticked. The reason we have that unticked is resources like Search Engine Land and Moz both highlight when on a small budget it’s wise to turn them off.

For now, we’ll also leave the ‘Devices’ area the same. Google goes into explaining what ‘all eligible devices by default’ means.

How it works: By default, new campaigns target all types of devices, which include desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. However, when you create your ads, you can indicate that specific ads or ad extensions are optimized to show on mobile phones or tablets. You can also adjust your bids for different device types on the “Settings” tab.

Next we’ll be selecting the location targeting for your campaign. This is one step you’ll have to do on your own. If you’re a local brick and mortar business, you’ll need to select the area you’re in:

As always, you can get more advanced in each area of your targeting and ad building, but let’s keep it simple.

Next select the language you’d like your ads to appear in. This one doesn’t need much explanation.

As we head towards the end of first campaign you launch, we’ll be setting our budget to $5/day to get you started on the right foot.

To really get some more information on the bidding and budgeting strategies you can find specific help on actual daily spend , monthly changing limits and what happens when you change your budget.

Once you’ve confirmed your budget, hit ‘Save and Continue’.

Congratulations, you’ve just selected your first campaign settings.

Creating Ad Groups – Step 3

Now hang in there, we’re getting to the real meat of launching your Ad.

Now we need to create our ‘Ad Groups’.

At the top of the page you’ll see an area where you need to add your landing page. If you’re a ClickFunnels customer, I’d recommend picking yourself up a custom domain for your funnel and using that domain. Google is quite strict on their policies and which landing pages they allow so be sure to read over their policies so you don’t get yourself banned!

After entering the landing page you’ll be driving traffic to so you can generate leads, you need to get into the most important area of your campaign and that is your Ad group.

Creating a solid Ad group is vital to a campaign’s success when driving PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic on Google’s Search network.

Before we do a quick run through on Ad groups, what is an Ad group?

WordStream explains,

“Basically an Ad Group is the container for your keywords in your search marketing campaigns.”

So your next question is…why do we need them?

Most search engines look to your Ad Group organization to determine:

• Which keywords your ads will show in response to.
• What your ad will say when it runs.
• Where the visitor will be taken when they click on your ad.

You’re deciding:

• Who to advertise to.
• What to say to get their attention.
• And how you’ll make your final pitch when you set up an Ad Group.

So let’s use an online information product like learning to play tennis.

Google gives you some initial tips, so based on their tips we might start with keywords like:

• learn to play tennis
• tennis tips
• learn to play tennis fast
• how to play tennis

I highly recommend reading this tutorial to make sure you’re choosing effective keywords so you have a killer Ad group ready to go.

Designing Your Ads – Step 4

Now we need to actually create our text ad and preview how it will appear in the search results.

Google puts a lot of effort into making your new Google Ad effortless and easy to follow.

They even include links and resources like tips for creating successful ads.

You can see above I’ve filled out some information for our new tennis website’s advertisement.

Keep it simple and follow Google’s guidance. Don’t be afraid to read their documentation as they hold your hand through the first process (I know it can be quite daunting!).

Once you’re happy with your first text ad, hit ‘Save’.

Then hit the ‘Review Campaign’ button once the window closes.

Finalizing Your Ads & Submitting Them – Step 5

Awesome! We’re pretty much complete.

Before you get too excited you’ll need to add the maximum bid for your budget. I’d start at about $1, however once you add in your bid, Google will populate your daily estimate on the left hand side which you can then go back and change that amount if necessary.

As you can see in my example, we’re looking at about $0.33 to $0.42 with 81-100 impressions.

Now that we have all the bidding information entered, you can hit ‘Save and Finish’ at the end of the page.

Congratulations, you have now launched your very first AdWords Ad!

You’ll be taken to your dashboard which will look something like this:

If you can see the little green dot, that means your advert is now enabled.

You Did It!

And there you have it, a perfectly optimized and quickly setup promotional campaign that only costs $5 per day and enables you to receive dozens of incoming leads for the keywords you set.

Naturally Google AdWords is not an easy tool to use when going for the highest of conversion rates and finest of tunings, but there is a reason why search engine marketers are a well-compensated bunch when considering their expertize.

They can make your company spend less on each customer acquisition all the while your brand gets more and more visibility.

Who wouldn’t want that?

This ‘How To’ only scratched the very surface of AdWords advertising and has a lot of bubble wrap around it.

However in future articles, we’ll be addressing some of the technical strategies and tricks you can use to really scale and grow your AdWords campaign and maintain its profitability.

If you have any comments or question about AdWords, or if you want to share your own experiences and advice with the rest of our readers, please do so in the comment section below! We are always more than happy to answer questions and take part in the conversation.

Be sure to go back and have a read of our other posts in this ‘Beginner’s Series’ on Facebook Advertising and YouTube Advertising.

We also love seeing and hearing results, so if you’ve managed to setup a campaign or, better yet, made some results thanks to this ‘How To’, please don’t be afraid to share and comment on this post, because by doing that you’ll help others like yourself who just needed a little guidance in finding the right way to advertising online using paid traffic.