Have you decided to implement Google AdWords advertising for your business? Or perhaps you received a free $100 voucher in the mail from Google and figured you’d give it a whirl? Here’s what you need to know about creating a Google AdWords campaign and ad. This post only looks at the steps you take to create a Google AdWords campaign and writing of your ad, and includes no strategy behind bidding or keyword phrase selection.

Creating a Google AdWords Campaign

From your Google AdWords dashboard, start on your Campaigns tab.

From that view, click on the red +Campaign button. Choose Search Network (assuming you want your ads to show in Google search results only).

Now you’ll begin moving through the 4 step process of creating your new ad within your new campaign.

Select your Campaign Settings

Start by giving your new campaign a name in the field provided. The campaign name is for your purposes only.

Next, choose the type of campaign you want to run. Descriptions for each are located to the right of the campaign type.

Google’s AdWords interface does a great job of providing more explanation when you hover over the question marks. The box on the right below is a pop-up that showed on the screen when I hovered over the question mark at the end of the top line.

If someone else working on your AdWords account has run a campaign before and you liked that campaign’s parameters, you can load it from the Existing Campaigns drop down provided. This saves the time of rebuilding all your settings from scratch for each new campaign you need to create..

Note that you can also edit any of those pre-populated campaign settings as you move through the rest of the campaign and ad build process.

On the bottom of this page, you can set your initial bid structure and geography. Both of these settings are easily changed once the ad is built and underway, too, so don’t worry if you are unsure initially.

Here you have the option to add in some free extras like sitelinks and the ability for a Googler to call you from your ad (when on mobile). The Google AdWords tool will suggest a few site links for you, but you can also add your own using the grey Add Site Link button.

You can also go back and add sitelinks to an existing AdWords campaign.

Here’s what a Google ad that uses sitelinks looks like in Google search results. The sitelinks are the 4 blue links beneath the description of the ad.

Create Ad Group

To Create an Ad Group, start by entering the website page address that will be linked to this ad. This would be the page you want a website visitor to land on when clicking your AdWords ad in search.

Name your Ad Group. This is a name only you will see and is used to quickly, easily identify this ad group from the list within your dashboard.

Next, add the keyword phrases you want associated with this ad in the box on the left side. Choosing keyword phrases is one of the most important parts of the ad creation process because these keyword phrases are what will be associated with your ad. Meaning, your ad will show up in Google search results when these words or phrases are typed (e.g. If I Googled “Italian restaurants near me”, I’d expect to see ads for specific Italian restaurants in my area).

On the right, Google will suggest potential keywords based on the contents of your page URL. You can choose any or all of these, or add your own.

Simply list out your desired keyword phrases, either one phrase per line, or separate phrases using a comma.

You can adjust the default bid amount you set at the campaign level, at this ad group level.

When you are ready, click the blue Continue with Ads button at the bottom of the page.

Create Ads

This is where you need to get your creative juices flowing! After you create your ad group, you write the copy for your ad. Start by adding the link to the website page you want people to land on when they click on your ad. Next, begin to write your ad’s copy in the fields provided. You’ll notice ad previews and samples on the right hand side.

The top line is your headline and will show in blue. The 2nd and 3rd lines are the ad’s description and shown in black. And the display link is shown in green. The display link does not have to be the exact link of the page your ad goes to.

As you type, you’ll notice a blue progress bar beneath each field. You are limited in character count here.

Once you have your ad’s headline and description as you like it, click to move forward to the Review Campaign step.

Once you submit your ad to Google, it does have to be approved before it will run. If you aren’t quite ready to run your campaign, you can toggle the switch to “Paused” until you want it to run.

Just like with any other advertising or marketing you do, Google AdWords will require testing and tweaking to maximize its benefits for your business.