First of all I don’t recommend it. Its very difficult to setup and even after spending thousands of dollars I have yet to see any ROI – return on investment. It does all kinds of deceptive and misleading things. Still if you are compelled to use it, here are some tips to avoid shooting yourself in the foot:
- Do not use broad search or it will display your ad on completely irrelevant queries. Always use phrase match or exact match.
- If you are advertising a paid service (most likely) add free as a negative keyword
- Turn off display network or it will keep showing your ad on irrelevant pages
- If targetting a location make sure to unselect Presence or Interest. Only select Presence and even then it might not target the location and instead target all countries and territories
- Do not start with maximize conversions on a fresh campaign. Use Maximize clicks (even manual CPC is fine). Once you have 30+ conversions only then switch to maximize conversions so it knows how it can maximize. When you turn on maximize conversions on a fresh campaign with no conversion data it has no idea what clicks will lead to a conversion.
Understand the difference between search ads and display ads. From https://instapage.com/blog/search-ads-vs-display-ads:
- The average Google Ads CPC is $2.41 for search network ads, and only $0.59 for display network ads
- The average conversion rate across all industries is 4.40% for search campaigns, while the average for display campaigns is only 0.57%
- search ads are a form of “pull” advertising while display ads are “push” advertising
Let me know in comments what you think.