How To Set Up Google Adwords Campaigns In 2023 With 10 Easy Steps [Infographic] + Step By Step Guide

How To Set Up Google AdWords Campaigns In 2023 With 10 Easy Steps [Infographic] + Step-By-Step Guide

If you run a business, you understand that it lives and dies by it’s ability to attract new customers. One tried and tested way of attracting new customers is through Google AdWords. Unlike an SEO campaign which can be slow to gain traction, an AdWords campaign can bring results pretty much instantly.

But there is many things to learn to make sure your AdWords campaign is attracting relevant traffic and not just tossing your entire budget down the drain. In this article we have put together the steps we take when setting up a new Google AdWords campaign and we have summarized it in an infographic, but on top of that we have also included a more detailed step by step guide using the example of a lawyer based in Manchester, New Hampshire. We hope that you enjoy this article and that it teaches you how to set up Google AdWords campaigns in 10 easy steps!

 

If you have never created an AdWords campaign before, then the first thing you are going to want to do is go over to adwords.google.com and sign up for an account.

Once you have signed up for your account you will be greeted by the following screen prompting you to create your first campaign.

You are going to want to skip this part so that you can do your keyword research and give yourself the best possible chance of creating a great campaign. For the keyword research you will use google’s keyword planner tool. At the top of the screen click on “tools” and then click on keyword planner. This tool is really great as it allows you to find out how many people search for the keywords that you think of yourself as well as suggesting other keywords that are highly searched.

In the keyword planner tool you will want to choose “search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.”

At this stage when I’m creating a new campaign, I try and think of keywords that I would Google myself when searching for the service or product on offer, so bearing in mind that this campaign is for a general law firm in Manchester, New Hampshire, here are some of the keywords that I would probably google when searching for legal services in Manchester.

Attorney Manchester

Manchester attorney

Manchester lawyer

Lawyer Manchester

Family lawyer Manchester

Elder law attorney Manchester

Personal injury lawyer Manchester

Personal injury attorney Manchester

Wills lawyer Manchester

Business lawyer Manchester

Tax lawyer Manchester

Construction lawyer Manchester

Criminal lawyer Manchester

Criminal law attorney Manchester

Family law attorney Manchester

Immigration law attorney Manchester

Patent attorney Manchester

Real estate lawyer Manchester

Real estate attorney Manchester.

Trust lawyer Manchester

Estate attorney Manchester

If your firm specializes in one area of the law then you would only search for keywords related to that area, so for example if you were a real estate lawyer then the keywords would all be real estate related like “real estate attorney” “real estate lawyer” etc. The reason the keywords I have chosen are so broad is because my fictitious law firm practice in all areas of the law and want to attract clients from all of these areas.

I will paste my keywords into the “your product or service” field and choose the geographical area I am targeting (Manchester, NH) . Then click “get ideas

When you click on get ideas you will be greeted with ad group idea’s, I usually switch to “keyword ideas” as it gives me an idea of how many people search for the individual keywords I came up with myself, as well as suggesting other keywords.

Now I can see how many monthly searches there are in Manchester for my own keywords.

And the tool will also suggest similar keywords that I may not have thought of to use in my campaign. The reason you want to do this is simple, You might come up with your own list of keywords, but if no-one is searching for them then you will never drive traffic to your website, so it’s best to know from the beginning, the highest searched keywords so that you can get your law firm in front of more prospective clients on google.

You can download the entire list of suggested keywords by clicking on download and choose excel csv.

On the excel spreadsheet that downloads there are some columns that I view as important and some that I like to get rid of. The columns I like to keep are “keywords” “average monthly search” “competition” and “suggested bids”.

At this point I will delete the other columns so that my spreadsheet looks like this:

Then I will sort the spreadsheet, by highlighting the average monthly search volume column and sorting it from largest to smallest, so that I can see the highest searched keywords. You can see what the excel sheet looks like at this stage by clicking on “Keyword Planner after sorting largest to smallest” (Downloads my excel file). Not every word in this excel spreadsheet is good for a law firm to use so now I sift through the list and delete anything that isn’t relevant. It’s possible that there are more time effective ways of doing this, but this is how I like to do it as I feel that it leaves no stone unturned. At this stage I simply look through the entire list, eyeball it and highlight any keywords that are relevant so that I can use them in my campaign. This will leave me with an excel sheet looking like this:

I’ll then go through and delete the rows that I haven’t selected for my campaign so that I am left with the keywords for my campaign. You can view my excel sheet by clicking on this link Keyword Planner after sorting so that it is only relevant keywords now (downloads my excel)

Now what an amateur would probably do at this stage is just throw all of these keywords into one campaign with one adgroup, but you want to create adgroups with relevant keywords so that you can get a higher quality score and pay less per click. (You can learn more ways to lower your cost per click here) In other words keywords related to family law would have their own adgroup, as would keywords related to personal injury and so on and so forth. Again there is probably a more time effective way of doing this but I like to organise them into my adgroups on the excel spread sheet, so I physically drag the keywords into relevant groups. After sorting I have now got some specific adgroups with really great long tail keywords. Here are the adgroups I’ve created in this campaign:

Manchester Lawyers

Manchester Attorneys

Manchester Law Firms

Personal injury attorneys

Personal injury lawyers

Immigration lawyers

Divorce lawyers

Family lawyers

Divorce attorney

Estate planning attorney

Employment law

Manchester Legal services

Real estate lawyer

Real estate attorney

And you can download my list by clicking on this link – Keyword Planner after sorting into ad groups (Downloads my excel file)

The reason you split your keywords into relevant ad groups is so that the ads you create for each ad group are more relevant to what the person searches for, which will increase your chance of getting a click for that keyword. To give you an example, if someone googles “personal injury attorney Manchester” they are much more likely to click on an ad that contains the words “personal injury attorney Manchester”, rather than an ad that talks about a family law attorney in Manchester. Having relevant ad groups will also improve your quality score meaning that you can show up higher on the page and pay less per click than your competitors will.

Now that I have completed my keyword research I will go ahead and create my campaign. To do this click on “campaigns at the top of the screen and you will be greeted by this screen.

Click on create your first campaign and then you will see this screen.

The type of campaign you want to create is “search network only” and you should select “all features” rather than standard. Name your campaign and start setting up the campaign by first of all choosing the location you want to target with your ads.

For bid strategy choose “I’ll manually set bids for my clicks” and enter your default bid, your daily budget should be your monthly budget divided by 30.4, so if I wanted to spend $1,000 a month on AdWords, my daily budget would be $32.89 ($1,000 divided by 30.4) from here skip the other options and scroll down and click “save and continue.”

The next screen will prompt you to create your first ad group and you will use the keywords and ad groups you created earlier to build your campaign. In this case I am going to start with Manchester Attorney’s. This guide will help you come up with idea’s to write great ad’s that resonate with your prospective clients, in this case I’m going to keep it simple yet relevant to the ad group. It’s important that the ad is relevant to the keywords in the ad group as this will increase your chance of getting clicks. It’s important to choose a relevant landing page for the ad’s so for example if your ad is about personal injuries then direct the visitor to a page on your website that talks about personal injuries and so on and so forth. If you want to learn more about landing pages and why they are so crucial to PPC campaigns then click here

At this stage is where the amateurs are separated from the pro’s because all of the keywords I have added at this stage are “broad match keywords” and broad match keywords in a search campaign are a recipe for eating up your budget. This article explains keyword match types in more detail, but as a general rule, I never use broad match keywords. They will eat your budget alive with irrelevant clicks. To quickly change the match type of all the keywords, go to the ad group, select all keywords, click “edit” then click on change match types, change broad match keywords to phrase match keywords and hit make changes.

I like to use at least 2 ads per adgroup, in some cases I will add 3 or even 4 ads per adgroup. This way I can test ad copy for clicks and optimise my campaign by learning which ad copy attracts more clicks. To add more ad’s click on ads and then click on the red button “+ad”

Go ahead and add all of the other ad groups that you have created in your earlier keyword research and write relevant ad copy for the ads in each ad group. Then go to your campaign settings and set the ads to “rotate evenly over 90 days and then optimise” or else choose “rotate indefinitely”

Make sure that when you have created all of your ad groups, that all keywords are either phrase match, exact match or broad modifiers. You will now want to go ahead and create some ad extensions so that your ads will really stand out.

At the very least you should add

Sitelink extensions – sitelink extensions explained

Callout extensions – Callout extensions explained

Call extensions – Call extensions explained

Location extensions – Location extensions explained

You can learn more about extensions in this guide

Something else that the pros will do from the offset is add negative keywords to the campaign from the beginning so that your ad doesn’t show up for keywords that won’t bring you any new business, you can click here to download our General Negative Keywords (excel download) and this article details how to add negative keywords to your campaign and why you should add them.

And that’s pretty much it to begin with! If you set your AdWords campaign up in this manner you should get off to really great start and you can be sure that your PPC campaign will be a success! If you want to know how to optimize your campaign going forward, check out our infographic detailing 50 ways to optimize your AdWords campaign.

If you are a lawyer who found this post and want to know how you can improve your AdWords campaign once it’s been set up, then be sure to check out this awesome step by step checklist to generating more leads for your law firm.